Earth in Mind
Professor James Farrell, Professor of History
Director of American Studies
Phi Beta Kappa induction
April 22, 2004
Congratulations to all of you! You're now officially smart
people. You're American scholars, and, at least according the people
who wrote recommendations for you, you're not just geeks or dorks or
bookworms. You're examples of how to be thoughtful and engaged. As I
look around, too, I notice that not very many of you have ever taken a
course from me, and I acknowledge that as another vital sign of your
wisdom and perspicacity.
You know a lot that you didn't know four years ago. You all know
something about history and human behavior and society. You've
finished the religion requirement, and you've mastered (or at least
endured) science and mathematics. You know something about art and
literature; you've been introduced to some social sciences and a
couple of physical activities. You mastered the intricacies of a
major (and sometimes two or three). You know a lot, but do you know
enough?
A lot of this depends on the answer to a question that Wendell
Berry poses as the title of one of his books: What Are People For?
What are people for? What are you for?
The book of Genesis gives us one answer to that question. God
creates the Earth, She bestows it as a gift, She looks at it, and She
sees that it is very good. This is, as Dan Maguire once said, the
most radical statement in the Bible. The Creation is good, and if we
screw it up, it's not God's fault, it's ours.
Another radical statement appears in this same story. Among the
animals of the Creation are Adam and Eve. God creates Adam and Eve in
her own image, and then She tells them, as the King James Bible says,
to "Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue
it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of
the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth."
The radical statement is not the part about being fruitful and
multiplying; most animals and many people will do that without much
instruction at all. The radical part is what follows: "Replenish the
earth." This sometimes gets missed in all the language of subduing
the earth and having dominion over it. But, in fact, it tells us what
the dominion must be like. People must have a relationship with the
earth that fills it up again, that makes it whole, that makes it
healthy, that makes it holy, that keeps it, as God said, very good.
This simple sentence--"Replenish the earth"--is an invitation to Adam
and Eve, and to you and me, to take part in the ongoing gift of God's
creation, to be co-creators with God.
I now think, contrary to my upbringing, that creation wasn't
finished at the end of the Sixth Day. And I think that God rested on
the Seventh Day, not because the work was done, but because it wasn't.
The Sabbath was not so much for God, who probably wasn't particularly
tired, but for God's co-creators, who needed time to think about how
to respond to the gift of creation by taking responsibility for
replenishing the earth.
So have we taught you how to accept this responsibility for
replenishing the earth? To some extent, yes. Environmental Studies
programs are growing quickly at colleges like St. Olaf, and today's
students are much more ecologically conscious than we were at their
age. You know something about the dangers of global warming, and
ozone thinning, and toxic waste, and deforestation, and endangered
species. You might know, as Andrew Shapiro shows in a brilliant
little book called We're Number One, that the United States is:
--first in the world in greenhouse gas emissions, and first in contributing to acid rain
--first in air pollutants per capita
--first in use of freshwater resources
--first in forest depletion
--first in paper consumption per capita
--first in garbage per capita
--first in hazardous waste per capita
--first in nuclear reactors and nuclear testing
--first in gasoline consumption per capita, first in oil imports, and first in oil spills affecting our
shores
--first in TVs per capita
--first in cars per capita, and first in use of cars instead of public transportation.
We're first, in short, in environmental problems, and those problems
don't stop at the borders of the United States. They go all the way
to the borders of the biosphere and beyond.
But unfortunately, this knowledge about the greenhouse effect and
other environmental impacts has little or no effect on the way we live
our lives. In large part, I think, this is because we too often
educate the head but not the heart, and, in part, because mere
knowledge is never enough.
To a great extent, too, the medium of ecological literacy has
contradicted the message. We teach students about ecological literacy
in institutions like St. Olaf which operate, to some extent, according
to the ecological illiteracy of American culture, promoting short-term
efficiency and convenience over long-term environmental benefits. At
St. Olaf, most us have not the slightest idea about the sources of the
resources we use every day. We are part of what Robert Bellah calls
"the problem of invisible complexity," in which the consequences of
our actions are hidden from us by ideas and institutions that keep us
focused on our lives as individuals rather than our lives as members
of communities, both social and ecological. We are good citizens of
what Barbara Kingsolver calls "the nation in love with forgetting."
In her novel Animal Dreams, Kingsolver shows a high-school
biology teacher who tries something different in environmental
education. Codi Noline says of her class: "What did I expect? They
were teenagers. I knew that, but still I screamed at them because the
Black Mountain [Mine] was poisoning their mother's milk and all they
cared about was sex and a passing grade.
"I had rational intentions. I talked about evapotranspiration
and rain forests and oxygen in the biosphere, how everything was
connected. The last virgin timber cleared and milled to make way for
a continent of landfills choking on old newspapers. It was a poetic
lecture. Marta made the mistake of asking me how much of this poetry
was going to be on the test.
"I glowered. `Your life is the test. If you flunk this one, you die.'"
Codi began to put the abstractions into personal terms, telling the
class, for example, about stonewashed jeans:
You know how they make those? They wash them in a big machine
with this special kind of gravel they get out of volcanic mountains.
The prettiest mountains you ever saw in your life. But they're
fragile, like a big pile of sugar. Levi Strauss or whoever goes in
there with bulldozers and chainsaws and cuts down the trees and rips
the mountainside to hell, so that all us lucky Americans can wear
jeans that look like somebody threw them in the garbage before we got
them."
And she continued:
"Think about the gas you put in a car. . . . The real cost.
Not just pumping it out of the ground and refining it and shipping it,
but also cleaning up the oil spills and all the junk that goes into
the air when it gets burned. That's part of what it costs, but you're
not paying it. Gas ought to be twenty dollars a gallon, so you're
getting a real good deal. But soon the bill comes due, and we pay it,
or we eat dirt. The ultimate MasterCharge."
We're doing similar teaching this semester in an American Studies
class on Campus Ecology. The class is the CIS senior project of Elise
Braaten, whose major is "Wild and Precious Life: Educating for an
Ethic of Sustainbility." Elise designed the class in the Fall, and
she's team- teaching it with me now. We've done some weird
stuff in this class. One day, the assigned reading was the J. Crew
catalogue. Another day, students read their own rooms as a microcosm
of ecological flows. We've taken field trips to the cafeteria, the
power plant and the natural lands.
We've written first-person essays on the St. Olaf campus from the
perspective of another organism. You'd be amazed (and amused) to
know how the landscape looks to skunks and squirrels, bacteria and
bugs, grass and evergreens, deer and foxes. In small groups, students
are currently working to learn about the environmental implications of
cars, the curriculum, architecture, energy, food, purchasing
(including paper), water, waste and the landscape, both on the campus
proper and on our prairie and forest restorations. Because we're a
church-related school, we also have a group looking at the ways that
religion shapes campus ecology. And we have another group working on
the American values that bind all these things together. Each group
is writing a conventional research paper, but they're also writing
a proposal for improvements to the college's Sustainability Task
Force (with 1-year, 5-year and 10-year goals).
According to Elise, this allows students to express their
"practical idealism" in the very "real world" of college
life.
A few years ago, in an Environmental History course, a student
started an environmental impact statement by saying, "I believe that,
given today's society, it is impossible for an American to have a
positive impact on the environment." What this student meant is that
the ideas and institutions of this country, our social construction
of common sense, virtually guarantees that a normal, "good" American
will live a life that is neither just nor sustainable. It is not
just, because it is not possible for all people on earth to live this
way. And it is not sustainable, because we are depleting resources at
a rate that cannot last. "Since 1940," notes Alan Durning, "Americans
alone have used up as large a share of the earth's mineral resources
as did everyone before them combined." We are stealing the gift of
creation from our children and grandchildren, because we are not
replenishing the earth.
We don't do this because we're mean or stupid, although
sometimes we certainly are. We do this because we're not thinking
carefully. We're not thinking holistically. In a culture of
specialization, we've learned to focus our thinking through the
microscope, but we haven't yet mastered the macroscope. We've
learned some of the disciplines of the college, but we haven't
always connected them to the essential disciplines of life. In a
world of intricate interconnections, as Wendell Berry says, "to think
of one thing is not to think at all."
Because we're not thinking systematically, we have created
what David Orr calls "social traps," situations in which people are
drawn into individually rational behavior that is destructive to the
planet. The suburbs, where I live, are such a social trap. Because I
live there, and because I work here, I quite rationally drive to work
each day, without thinking about the ways in which my rational choice
has been channeled by government policy and social beliefs about the
importance of individual choice in American culture.
In part, this is because America's primary educational
institution teaches us that such patterns of consumption are perfectly
normal. Television, which is America's main educational system, has a
peculiar relationship to nature, as Bill McKibben shows in The Age of
Missing Information.
McKibben taped every program of the nation's largest cable system (105
channels, I think) for 24 hours, and he watched all of it to see what
TV teaches us. McKibben also took a 24-hour trip up a mountain near
his home and compared the information of that trip, the information of
nature, to the "missing information" of television.
He concludes that in America, television is like religion, except
we watch it more religiously. This secular religion teaches us mainly
that we are disconnected from the earth, which we usually are when we
are watching TV in our climate-controlled homes and recreational
vehicles. Even nature specials, which contribute a great deal to our
appreciation of the creation, focus on those species which are most
like people, and on the most active aspects of those animals. They
change our expectations of nature. They do not show us lions asleep
most of the day, any more than the sitcoms and soap operas show us
people watching television all the time. "The upshot of nature
education by television," says McKibben, "is a deep fondness for
certain species and a deep lack of understanding of systems, or of the
policies that destroy those systems." It is an extraordinary irony,
notes McKibben, that in the midst of the so-called Information Age,
most people lack the basic information about plants and animals that
was common knowledge a century ago. American kids can identify
hundreds of commercial logos, for example, but very few plants or
animals in the ecological community that is their home.
On TV, the creation is presented to us in anthropocentric terms
that make it difficult to see the whole story. If TV were to make the
Book of Genesis into a mini-series, says McKibben, people would be
created on Day One and Noah's Ark would be filled with zany
folks---not much room for animals, especially the boring ones."
On TV, he notes, people are everything. Most cultures,
historically, have put something else--God or nature or some
combination--at the center. But we've put them at the periphery. A
consumer society doesn't need them to function, and it can't tolerate
the limits they might impose; there's only need for people."
But God didn't create just people; She created the world, and She
gave it to people for their needs and for their care, but not for any
damn thing they might want. And this, says McKibben, is "the most
important question of the late twentieth century: how much is enough?"
This is also the title of Alan Durning's book, How Much is Enough?
Consumer Society and the Future of the World. Television tells us
that there is no such thing as enough, but God and Christianity tell
us differently. Consider, for example, the lilies of the field . . .
So it's Earth Day, and these are some of the thoughts I'm
thinking as I ponder the successes of exceptional students like you.
As a professor, I want to say that we probably haven't talked enough
about how much is enough.
And, since I'm a professor, I want to make an assignment as you
graduate from St. Olaf. Ask your parents to buy you The Consumers
Guide to Effective Environmental Choices for a graduation gift, and
write an environmental impact statement of your life. Study yourself
as a part of resource flows of food, water, energy, materials, and
waste. Notice how you notice nature, and where: average Americans
spend just 2% of their time outside. Make an inventory of all the
electrical appliances you own, and calculate the environmental costs
of their use. Try to figure out the ecosystem that is your home.
Think about what you waste, and where it goes. Think about your
children, who, if they are average Americans, will consume 80 times
more resources than a child in India. Look for the problem of
invisible complexity, the consumer forgetfulness, the social traps.
See if your life is sustainable.
Then consider the alternatives. What virtues in our lives would
produce actions that were harmonious in a larger commonwealth of
plants and people? And what sort of communities must we create in
order to encourage the virtuous action that we expect from
individuals? Perhaps we could relearn a religion of relatedness and
sacred ground. Perhaps we could learn from the Amish and other
so-called "backward" peoples, who have shaped cultures that preserve
the virtues of humility, simplicity, moderation, prudence, frugality,
hard work, neighborliness, and family stability. Maybe we could ask
more frequently, as Ron Lee did several years ago, not just what in
the world is a liberal arts education good for, but what good is a
liberal arts education for the world. We might also ask what good we
are for the world, not the world as an abstraction, like a globe,
but the world as a living, breathing set of intricate
interconnections. This is your homework assignment, literally, the
work of making your new home in a particular place, on a planet that
needs both your care and your best thinking. Apply your knowledge and
wisdom to the global problem that appears on your plate everyday, that
pours out of the faucet or the showerhead, that blows out the tailpipe
of your car, or that flows through the electrical cords that connect
your computer to the wall and ultimately to the mining of coal and
uranium.
The title of this talk, "Earth in Mind," comes from a book
by David Orr. In it, he explores the assumptions of American higher
education. He says we're not yet teaching much that equips us to
deal with an oncoming ecological catastrophe. He says that we're
preparing students for a future that's not possible because current
trends of consumption and production, especially the production of
carbon dioixide and pollutants, can't continue. And Orr suggests
several strategies for change. One of the most important is a
redefinition of success.
He notes that a conventional measure of academic success is
successful people. He contends, however, that "the plain fact is that
the planet does not need more successful people. But it does
desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers,
and lovers of every kind. It needs people who live well in their
places. It needs people of moral courage. . . . And these qualities
have little to do with success as our culture defines it."
My challenge to you, as you leave this ecological community at
St. Olaf for another one, is to find ways, as many of your already
have, to include these new definitions of success in your goals.
And then, in the process of achieving them, I hope you'll re-make
success as our culture defines it. The test will be in ten or twenty
years. Remember that "your life is the test. If you flunk this one,
you die."
When you come back to visit the college online, check out the Black
and Gold and Green section of the college webpage, and let us know
what you think.
Professor James Farrell, Professor of History
Director of American Studies
Phi Beta Kappa induction
April 22, 2004
Congratulations to all of you! You're now officially smart
people. You're American scholars, and, at least according the people
who wrote recommendations for you, you're not just geeks or dorks or
bookworms. You're examples of how to be thoughtful and engaged. As I
look around, too, I notice that not very many of you have ever taken a
course from me, and I acknowledge that as another vital sign of your
wisdom and perspicacity.
You know a lot that you didn't know four years ago. You all know
something about history and human behavior and society. You've
finished the religion requirement, and you've mastered (or at least
endured) science and mathematics. You know something about art and
literature; you've been introduced to some social sciences and a
couple of physical activities. You mastered the intricacies of a
major (and sometimes two or three). You know a lot, but do you know
enough?
A lot of this depends on the answer to a question that Wendell
Berry poses as the title of one of his books: What Are People For?
What are people for? What are you for?
The book of Genesis gives us one answer to that question. God
creates the Earth, She bestows it as a gift, She looks at it, and She
sees that it is very good. This is, as Dan Maguire once said, the
most radical statement in the Bible. The Creation is good, and if we
screw it up, it's not God's fault, it's ours.
Another radical statement appears in this same story. Among the
animals of the Creation are Adam and Eve. God creates Adam and Eve in
her own image, and then She tells them, as the King James Bible says,
to "Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue
it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of
the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth."
The radical statement is not the part about being fruitful and
multiplying; most animals and many people will do that without much
instruction at all. The radical part is what follows: "Replenish the
earth." This sometimes gets missed in all the language of subduing
the earth and having dominion over it. But, in fact, it tells us what
the dominion must be like. People must have a relationship with the
earth that fills it up again, that makes it whole, that makes it
healthy, that makes it holy, that keeps it, as God said, very good.
This simple sentence--"Replenish the earth"--is an invitation to Adam
and Eve, and to you and me, to take part in the ongoing gift of God's
creation, to be co-creators with God.
I now think, contrary to my upbringing, that creation wasn't
finished at the end of the Sixth Day. And I think that God rested on
the Seventh Day, not because the work was done, but because it wasn't.
The Sabbath was not so much for God, who probably wasn't particularly
tired, but for God's co-creators, who needed time to think about how
to respond to the gift of creation by taking responsibility for
replenishing the earth.
So have we taught you how to accept this responsibility for
replenishing the earth? To some extent, yes. Environmental Studies
programs are growing quickly at colleges like St. Olaf, and today's
students are much more ecologically conscious than we were at their
age. You know something about the dangers of global warming, and
ozone thinning, and toxic waste, and deforestation, and endangered
species. You might know, as Andrew Shapiro shows in a brilliant
little book called We're Number One, that the United States is:
--first in the world in greenhouse gas emissions, and first in contributing to acid rain
--first in air pollutants per capita
--first in use of freshwater resources
--first in forest depletion
--first in paper consumption per capita
--first in garbage per capita
--first in hazardous waste per capita
--first in nuclear reactors and nuclear testing
--first in gasoline consumption per capita, first in oil imports, and first in oil spills affecting our
shores
--first in TVs per capita
--first in cars per capita, and first in use of cars instead of public transportation.
We're first, in short, in environmental problems, and those problems
don't stop at the borders of the United States. They go all the way
to the borders of the biosphere and beyond.
But unfortunately, this knowledge about the greenhouse effect and
other environmental impacts has little or no effect on the way we live
our lives. In large part, I think, this is because we too often
educate the head but not the heart, and, in part, because mere
knowledge is never enough.
To a great extent, too, the medium of ecological literacy has
contradicted the message. We teach students about ecological literacy
in institutions like St. Olaf which operate, to some extent, according
to the ecological illiteracy of American culture, promoting short-term
efficiency and convenience over long-term environmental benefits. At
St. Olaf, most us have not the slightest idea about the sources of the
resources we use every day. We are part of what Robert Bellah calls
"the problem of invisible complexity," in which the consequences of
our actions are hidden from us by ideas and institutions that keep us
focused on our lives as individuals rather than our lives as members
of communities, both social and ecological. We are good citizens of
what Barbara Kingsolver calls "the nation in love with forgetting."
In her novel Animal Dreams, Kingsolver shows a high-school
biology teacher who tries something different in environmental
education. Codi Noline says of her class: "What did I expect? They
were teenagers. I knew that, but still I screamed at them because the
Black Mountain [Mine] was poisoning their mother's milk and all they
cared about was sex and a passing grade.
"I had rational intentions. I talked about evapotranspiration
and rain forests and oxygen in the biosphere, how everything was
connected. The last virgin timber cleared and milled to make way for
a continent of landfills choking on old newspapers. It was a poetic
lecture. Marta made the mistake of asking me how much of this poetry
was going to be on the test.
"I glowered. `Your life is the test. If you flunk this one, you die.'"
Codi began to put the abstractions into personal terms, telling the
class, for example, about stonewashed jeans:
You know how they make those? They wash them in a big machine
with this special kind of gravel they get out of volcanic mountains.
The prettiest mountains you ever saw in your life. But they're
fragile, like a big pile of sugar. Levi Strauss or whoever goes in
there with bulldozers and chainsaws and cuts down the trees and rips
the mountainside to hell, so that all us lucky Americans can wear
jeans that look like somebody threw them in the garbage before we got
them."
And she continued:
"Think about the gas you put in a car. . . . The real cost.
Not just pumping it out of the ground and refining it and shipping it,
but also cleaning up the oil spills and all the junk that goes into
the air when it gets burned. That's part of what it costs, but you're
not paying it. Gas ought to be twenty dollars a gallon, so you're
getting a real good deal. But soon the bill comes due, and we pay it,
or we eat dirt. The ultimate MasterCharge."
We're doing similar teaching this semester in an American Studies
class on Campus Ecology. The class is the CIS senior project of Elise
Braaten, whose major is "Wild and Precious Life: Educating for an
Ethic of Sustainbility." Elise designed the class in the Fall, and
she's team- teaching it with me now. We've done some weird
stuff in this class. One day, the assigned reading was the J. Crew
catalogue. Another day, students read their own rooms as a microcosm
of ecological flows. We've taken field trips to the cafeteria, the
power plant and the natural lands.
We've written first-person essays on the St. Olaf campus from the
perspective of another organism. You'd be amazed (and amused) to
know how the landscape looks to skunks and squirrels, bacteria and
bugs, grass and evergreens, deer and foxes. In small groups, students
are currently working to learn about the environmental implications of
cars, the curriculum, architecture, energy, food, purchasing
(including paper), water, waste and the landscape, both on the campus
proper and on our prairie and forest restorations. Because we're a
church-related school, we also have a group looking at the ways that
religion shapes campus ecology. And we have another group working on
the American values that bind all these things together. Each group
is writing a conventional research paper, but they're also writing
a proposal for improvements to the college's Sustainability Task
Force (with 1-year, 5-year and 10-year goals).
According to Elise, this allows students to express their
"practical idealism" in the very "real world" of college
life.
A few years ago, in an Environmental History course, a student
started an environmental impact statement by saying, "I believe that,
given today's society, it is impossible for an American to have a
positive impact on the environment." What this student meant is that
the ideas and institutions of this country, our social construction
of common sense, virtually guarantees that a normal, "good" American
will live a life that is neither just nor sustainable. It is not
just, because it is not possible for all people on earth to live this
way. And it is not sustainable, because we are depleting resources at
a rate that cannot last. "Since 1940," notes Alan Durning, "Americans
alone have used up as large a share of the earth's mineral resources
as did everyone before them combined." We are stealing the gift of
creation from our children and grandchildren, because we are not
replenishing the earth.
We don't do this because we're mean or stupid, although
sometimes we certainly are. We do this because we're not thinking
carefully. We're not thinking holistically. In a culture of
specialization, we've learned to focus our thinking through the
microscope, but we haven't yet mastered the macroscope. We've
learned some of the disciplines of the college, but we haven't
always connected them to the essential disciplines of life. In a
world of intricate interconnections, as Wendell Berry says, "to think
of one thing is not to think at all."
Because we're not thinking systematically, we have created
what David Orr calls "social traps," situations in which people are
drawn into individually rational behavior that is destructive to the
planet. The suburbs, where I live, are such a social trap. Because I
live there, and because I work here, I quite rationally drive to work
each day, without thinking about the ways in which my rational choice
has been channeled by government policy and social beliefs about the
importance of individual choice in American culture.
In part, this is because America's primary educational
institution teaches us that such patterns of consumption are perfectly
normal. Television, which is America's main educational system, has a
peculiar relationship to nature, as Bill McKibben shows in The Age of
Missing Information.
McKibben taped every program of the nation's largest cable system (105
channels, I think) for 24 hours, and he watched all of it to see what
TV teaches us. McKibben also took a 24-hour trip up a mountain near
his home and compared the information of that trip, the information of
nature, to the "missing information" of television.
He concludes that in America, television is like religion, except
we watch it more religiously. This secular religion teaches us mainly
that we are disconnected from the earth, which we usually are when we
are watching TV in our climate-controlled homes and recreational
vehicles. Even nature specials, which contribute a great deal to our
appreciation of the creation, focus on those species which are most
like people, and on the most active aspects of those animals. They
change our expectations of nature. They do not show us lions asleep
most of the day, any more than the sitcoms and soap operas show us
people watching television all the time. "The upshot of nature
education by television," says McKibben, "is a deep fondness for
certain species and a deep lack of understanding of systems, or of the
policies that destroy those systems." It is an extraordinary irony,
notes McKibben, that in the midst of the so-called Information Age,
most people lack the basic information about plants and animals that
was common knowledge a century ago. American kids can identify
hundreds of commercial logos, for example, but very few plants or
animals in the ecological community that is their home.
On TV, the creation is presented to us in anthropocentric terms
that make it difficult to see the whole story. If TV were to make the
Book of Genesis into a mini-series, says McKibben, people would be
created on Day One and Noah's Ark would be filled with zany
folks---not much room for animals, especially the boring ones."
On TV, he notes, people are everything. Most cultures,
historically, have put something else--God or nature or some
combination--at the center. But we've put them at the periphery. A
consumer society doesn't need them to function, and it can't tolerate
the limits they might impose; there's only need for people."
But God didn't create just people; She created the world, and She
gave it to people for their needs and for their care, but not for any
damn thing they might want. And this, says McKibben, is "the most
important question of the late twentieth century: how much is enough?"
This is also the title of Alan Durning's book, How Much is Enough?
Consumer Society and the Future of the World. Television tells us
that there is no such thing as enough, but God and Christianity tell
us differently. Consider, for example, the lilies of the field . . .
So it's Earth Day, and these are some of the thoughts I'm
thinking as I ponder the successes of exceptional students like you.
As a professor, I want to say that we probably haven't talked enough
about how much is enough.
And, since I'm a professor, I want to make an assignment as you
graduate from St. Olaf. Ask your parents to buy you The Consumers
Guide to Effective Environmental Choices for a graduation gift, and
write an environmental impact statement of your life. Study yourself
as a part of resource flows of food, water, energy, materials, and
waste. Notice how you notice nature, and where: average Americans
spend just 2% of their time outside. Make an inventory of all the
electrical appliances you own, and calculate the environmental costs
of their use. Try to figure out the ecosystem that is your home.
Think about what you waste, and where it goes. Think about your
children, who, if they are average Americans, will consume 80 times
more resources than a child in India. Look for the problem of
invisible complexity, the consumer forgetfulness, the social traps.
See if your life is sustainable.
Then consider the alternatives. What virtues in our lives would
produce actions that were harmonious in a larger commonwealth of
plants and people? And what sort of communities must we create in
order to encourage the virtuous action that we expect from
individuals? Perhaps we could relearn a religion of relatedness and
sacred ground. Perhaps we could learn from the Amish and other
so-called "backward" peoples, who have shaped cultures that preserve
the virtues of humility, simplicity, moderation, prudence, frugality,
hard work, neighborliness, and family stability. Maybe we could ask
more frequently, as Ron Lee did several years ago, not just what in
the world is a liberal arts education good for, but what good is a
liberal arts education for the world. We might also ask what good we
are for the world, not the world as an abstraction, like a globe,
but the world as a living, breathing set of intricate
interconnections. This is your homework assignment, literally, the
work of making your new home in a particular place, on a planet that
needs both your care and your best thinking. Apply your knowledge and
wisdom to the global problem that appears on your plate everyday, that
pours out of the faucet or the showerhead, that blows out the tailpipe
of your car, or that flows through the electrical cords that connect
your computer to the wall and ultimately to the mining of coal and
uranium.
The title of this talk, "Earth in Mind," comes from a book
by David Orr. In it, he explores the assumptions of American higher
education. He says we're not yet teaching much that equips us to
deal with an oncoming ecological catastrophe. He says that we're
preparing students for a future that's not possible because current
trends of consumption and production, especially the production of
carbon dioixide and pollutants, can't continue. And Orr suggests
several strategies for change. One of the most important is a
redefinition of success.
He notes that a conventional measure of academic success is
successful people. He contends, however, that "the plain fact is that
the planet does not need more successful people. But it does
desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers,
and lovers of every kind. It needs people who live well in their
places. It needs people of moral courage. . . . And these qualities
have little to do with success as our culture defines it."
My challenge to you, as you leave this ecological community at
St. Olaf for another one, is to find ways, as many of your already
have, to include these new definitions of success in your goals.
And then, in the process of achieving them, I hope you'll re-make
success as our culture defines it. The test will be in ten or twenty
years. Remember that "your life is the test. If you flunk this one,
you die."
When you come back to visit the college online, check out the Black
and Gold and Green section of the college webpage, and let us know
what you think.
