How to Be Hopeful..
Excerpts from Barbara Kingsolver – Commencement Address at Duke University,
Twenty years ago, climate scientists first told Congress that unlimited carbon emissions were building toward a disastrous instability. Congress said, we need to think about that. About ten years later, nations of the world wrote the Kyoto Protocol, a set of legally binding controls on our carbon emissions.
The US said, we still need to think about it. Now we can watch as glaciers disappear, the lights of biodiversity go out, the oceans reverse their ancient orders. A few degrees looked so small on the thermometer. We are so good at measuring things and declaring them under control.
How could our weather turn murderous, pummel our coasts and push new diseases like dengue fever onto our doorsteps? It’s an emergency on a scale we’ve never known. We’ve responded by following the rules we know:
Now our paradigm has met its match. The world will save itself, don’t get me wrong. The term “fossil fuels” is not a metaphor or a simile. In the geological sense, it’s over.
The internal combustion engine is so 20th Century. Now we can either shift away from a carbon-based economy, or find another place to live. Everything you plug in, turn on or drive, the out-of-season foods you eat, the music in your ears.
We gave you this world and promised you could keep it running on: a fossil substance. Dinosaur slime, and it’s running out.
The arc of history is longer than human vision. It bends. We abolished slavery, we granted universal suffrage. We have done hard things before. And every time it took a terrible fight between people who could not imagine changing the rules, and those who said, “We already did.
We have made the world new.” The hardest part will be to convince yourself of the possibilities, and hang on. If you run out of hope at the end of the day, to rise in the morning and put it on again with your shoes.
Hope is the only reason you won’t give in, burn what’s left of the ship and go down with it. The ship of your natural life and your children’s only shot for a future.
By now you must know that this thing is going to take endless repair: rubber bands, crazy glue, tapioca, the square of the hypotenuse. Heartstrings, sunrise: all of these are useful. Also, feathers.
You might have run past all the evidence. Past everyone who is laughing at you.
In the worst of times, you will have to pass it off. Park it and fly by the seat of your pants. With nothing in the bank, you’ll still will have to tiptoe past the dogs of the apocalypse that are sleeping in the shade of your future.
Pay at the window. Pass your hope like a bad check. You might still have just enough time. To make a deposit. Change is easy. It only takes a few seconds to turn around. Face the facts and change the world climate anyway.
Congratulations, graduates in class of 2008.