Barbara Kingsolver’s 2008 Commencement Address at Duke University (Full Transcript)

It helped them understand their pickle. My favorites are the canny old codgers: Garcia Marquez, Neruda, Doris Lessing. Honestly, it is harrowing for me to try to teach 20-year-old students, who earnestly want to improve their writing, when the best I can think to tell them is: Quit smoking, and observe posted speed limits. This will increase your odds of getting old enough to become wise.

And you know what, if I quit right there, you probably have heard my best offer. And I am going to tell you, if you want to leave now, I am with you on that. Go for it. But if you have decided that you are already as wet as you’re going to get, then say with me here, because I have been charged with postponing your diploma for 15 more minutes, and I am going to do my best with two caveats. First, if I hear thunder, I am cutting to the chase. OK.

And secondly, that the wisdom of each generation is necessarily new. This tends to dawn on us in revelatory embarrassing moments, brought to us by our children. For example, I have two children. The younger does not go to Duke for only one reason. It’s because she is eleven. She might be ready next year. We’ll see. Every morning, she and I walk down the little lane from our farm to the road where she catches the school bus. And it’s the best part of my day. We have great conversations.

But a few weeks ago as we stood waiting in the dawn’s early light, Lily, I noticed, was kind of just looking me over quietly, and finally said: “Mom, just so you know, the only reason I’m letting you wear that outfit is because of your age.” The alleged outfit will not be discussed further here. Whatever you’re imagining will perfectly suffice, if especially if you’re picturing “Project Runway” works with — “Working with Livestock.” Now, I believe parents should uphold respect for adult authority, so I did what I had to do. I hid behind the barn when the bus came.

And then I walked back up the lane in my fly regalia, contemplating this new equation: “Because of your age.” It’s okay now to deck out and turn up as the village idiot. Hooray! I am old enough. How does this happen? Over a certain age, do you become invisible? There is evidence for this in movies and television. But mainly, I think, it’s that you’re not expected to know the rules. Everyone knows you’re operating on software that has not recently been upgraded.

The world shifts under our feet. The rules change. Not the Bill of Rights, or the rules of tenting, but the big unspoken truths of a generation. Exhaled by culture, taken in like oxygen, we hold these truths to be self-evident: You get what you pay for. Success is everything. Work is what you do for money, and that’s what counts. How could it be otherwise?

And the converse of that last rule, of course, is that if you’re not paid to do a thing, it can’t be very important. If a child writes a poem and proudly reads it, adults may wink and ask, “Think there’s a lot of money in that?” You may also hear this when you declare a major in English. Being a good neighbor, raising children: the road to success is not paved with the likes of these. Some workplaces actually quantify your likelihood of being distracted by family or volunteerism. It’s called your coefficient of Drag. The ideal number is zero. This is the Rule of Perfect Efficiency.

Now, the rule of “Success” has traditionally meant having boatloads of money. But we are not really supposed to put it in a boat. A house would be the customary thing. Ideally it should be large, with a lot of bathrooms and so forth, but no more than four people. If two friends come over during approved visiting hours, the two kids have to leave. The bathroom-to-resident ratio must remain at all times greater than one. I’m not making this up, I’m just observing, it’s more or less my profession.

As Yogi Berra told us, you can observe a lot just by watching. I see our dream-houses standing alone, the idealized life taking place in a kind of bubble. So of course, you need another bubble, with rubber tires, to convey yourself to places you must visit, such as an office. If you’re successful, it will be a large, empty-ish kind of office that you don’t have to share. If you need anything, you can get it delivered. Play your cards right and you will never have to come face to face with another person. This is the Rule of Escalating Isolation.

And so we find ourselves in the chapter of history I would entitle: Isolation and Efficiency, and How They Came Around to Bite Us in the Backside. Because that’s how it looks to me. We’re a world at war, ravaged by disagreements, a bizarrely globalized people in which the extravagant excesses of one culture wash up as famine or flood on the shores of another. Even the architecture of our planet is collapsing under the weight of our efficient productivity. Our climate, our oceans, migratory paths, things we believed were independent of human affairs.

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 10 years later, nations of the world wrote the Kyoto Protocol, a set of legally binding controls on our carbon emissions. And the US said, we still need to think about that.

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 ruin our graduation, push new diseases like dengue fever onto our doorsteps? It’s an emergency on a scale we’ve never known. So we’ve responded by following the rules we know: Efficiency, Isolation. We can’t slow down our productivity and consumption, that’s unthinkable.

Can’t we just go home and put a really big lock on the door? No. Not this time. 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.

Imagine it: we raised you on a lie. Everything you plug in, or drive or turn on, the out-of-season foods you eat, the music in your ears. We gave you this and promised you could keep it running on: a fossil. Dinosaur slime, and it’s running out. The geologists only disagree on how much is left, and the climate scientists are now saying they’re sorry but that’s not even the point. We don’t get time to use it all up. To stabilize the floods and firestorms, we’ll have to reduce our carbon emissions by 80%, within a decade.

Heaven help us get our minds around that. We’re still stuck on a strategy of bait-and-switch. Okay, we’ll keep the cars but we’ll run them on ethanol made from corn! But we need petroleum to run the tractors to grow the corn. And so even if you like the idea of robbing the food bank to fill up the tank, there is a math problem. It takes nearly a gallon of fossil fuel to render an equivalent gallon of corn gas. By some accounts, it takes more.

Think of the Jules Verne novel in which our hero is racing Around the World in 80 Days, and he finds himself stranded in the mid-Atlantic on a steamship that has run out of coal. It’s day-79. So Phileas Fogg convinces the Captain to pull up the decks and throw them into the boiler. “On the next day the masts, rafts and spars were burned”. I am quoting from the book, “The crew worked lustily, keeping up the fires. There was a perfect rage for demolition.”

And the Captain remarked, “Fogg, you’ve got something of the Yankee about you.” Oh, novelists. They always manage to get the last word, even when they are dead.

How can we get from here to there, without burning up our ship? That will be the central question of your adult life, no matter what you’ve majored in: to escape the wild rumpus of carbon-fuel dependency, in the nick of time. You’ll make rules that were previously unthinkable, imposing limits on what we can use and possess. You will radically reconsider the power relationship between humans and our habitat.

In the words of my esteemed colleague and friend, Dr. Wendell Berry, the new Emancipation Proclamation will not be for a specific race or species, but for life itself. Imagine it. Nations have already joined together to rein in global consumption. Faith communities have found a new point of agreement with student activists, organizing around the conviction that caring for our planet is a moral responsibility.

Before the last UN Climate Conference in Bali, thousands of U.S. citizens contacted the State Department to press for binding limits on carbon emissions. But our government is still reluctant to do that, for one reason: it might hurt our economy.

You know what, for a lot of history, many nations said exactly the same thing about abolishing slavery. We can’t grant humanity to all people, it would kill our cotton plantations, our sugar crop, our balance of trade. Until the daughters and sons of a new wisdom declared: We don’t care. You have to find another way. Enough of this shame.

Have we lost that kind of courage? Have we let economic growth become our undisputed master again? As we track the unfolding disruption of natural and global stabilities, you will be told to buy into business as usual: You need a job. Trade away your future for an entry level position. Do what we did, preserve a profitable climate for manufacture and consumption, at any cost. Even at the cost of that other climate – the limitless hospitable to life as we knew it. Is anybody thinking this through? In the awful moment when someone demands at gunpoint, “Your money or your life,” that’s not supposed to be a hard question.

A lot of people, in fact, are rethinking the money answer. Looking behind the cash-price of everything, to see what it cost us elsewhere: to mine and manufacture, to transport, to burn, to bury. What did it harm on its way here? Previous generations rarely asked about the hidden costs. We put them on layaway. The bill has come due.

Some European countries already are calculating the “climate cost” on consumer goods and adding it to the price. The future is here. We’re examining the moralities of possession, inventing renewable technologies, recovering sustainable food systems. We’re even warming up to the idea that the wealthy nations might have to help the poorer ones, for the sake of a reconstructed world. We’ve done that before. That was the Marshall Plan. Generosity is not out of the question. It will grind some gears in the machine of Efficiency. But we can retool.

We can also rethink the big, lonely house as a metaphor for success. You are in a perfect position to do that. You’ve probably spent very little of your recent life in a free-standing unit with a bathroom-to-resident ratio of greater than one. Am I right? Are there times when it maybe more like 1:200? You’ve been living so close to your friends, you didn’t have to ask about their problems, you had to step over them to get into the room. As you moved from dormitory to apartment to whatever — and by whatever I think I mean Central Campus — you’ve had such a full life, surrounded by people, in all kinds of social and physical structures, none of which belonged entirely to you. You’re told that’s all about to change. That growing up means leaving the herd, starting up the long escalator to isolation. You know what? It doesn’t have to be.

As you leave here, remember what you loved most in this place. Not Orgo 2, I’m guessing, or the crazed squirrels or even the bulk cereal in the Freshman Marketplace. I mean the way you lived, in close and continuous contact. This is an ancient human social construct that was once common in this land. We called it a community. We lived among our villagers, depending on them for what we needed. If we had a problem, we did not discuss it over the phone with someone in Bhubaneswar. We went to a neighbor. We acquired food from farmers. We listened to music in groups, in churches or on front porches. We danced. We participated. Even when there was no money in it. Community is our native state. You play hardest for a hometown crowd. You become your best self. You know joy. This is not a guess, there is evidence.

The scholars who study social well-being can put it on charts and graphs. In the last 30 years our material wealth has increased in this country, but our self-described happiness has steadily declined. Elsewhere, the people who consider themselves very happy are not in the poorest nations, as you might guess, nor are they in the very richest. The winners are Mexico, Ireland, Puerto Rico, the kinds of places we identify with extended family, noisy villages, a lot of dancing. The happiest people are the ones with the most community.

You can take that to the bank. I’m not sure what they’ll do with it down there at BB&T, but you could try. You could walk out of here today with an unconventionally communal sense of how you want your life to be. This could be your key to a new order: you don’t need so much stuff to fill up your life, when you have people in it. You don’t need jet fuel to get your food from a farmer’s market. You could invent a new kind of success that includes children’s poetry, and butterfly migrations, butterfly kisses, the Grand Canyon, eternity. If somebody says “Your money or your life,” you could say: Life. And mean it. You’ll see things collapse in your time, the big houses, the empires of glass. The new green things that sprout up through the wreck — those will be yours.

The arc of history is longer than human vision. It bends. And every time it takes a terrible fight. We abolished slavery, we granted universal suffrage. It took a fight between the people who could not imagine changing the rules, and those who said, “We already did. We have made the world new.” That’s your job now. And 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, you have to love that so earnestly — you, who were born into the Age of Irony. Imagine getting caught with your optimism hanging out. It feels so risky, right? Like showing up at the bus stop as the village idiot. You might be asked to stand behind the barn. You may feel you’re not up to the task.

Let me ask you this. Three years ago, what if someone had dared you to show up to some big public event wearing a big, flappy dress with sleeves down to your knees, and sit in the rain for hours. And on wearing on your head, let’s say, a beanie with a square board on top of the size of the Netflix mailing and a tassel! Look at you. You are beautiful. The magic is your community. The time has come for the square beanie, and you are rocked in the bosom of the people who get what you’re going for. You can be as earnest and ridiculous as you need to be, if you don’t attempt it in isolation. The ridiculously earnest are known to travel in groups. And they are known to change the world. Look at you. That could be you.

I am going to leave you with a short poem, that I call Hope: An Owner’s Manual.

 

Look, you might as well know, this thing

is going to take endless repair: rubber bands,

crazy glue, tapioca, the square of the hypotenuse.

Nineteenth century novels. Heartstrings, sunrise:

all of these are useful. Also, feathers.

 

To keep it humming, sometimes you have to stand

on an incline, where everything looks possible;

on the line you drew yourself. Or in

the grocery line, making faces at a toddler

secretly, over his mother’s shoulder.

 

You might have to pop the clutch and run

past all the evidence. Past everyone who is

laughing or praying for you. Definitely you don’t

want to go directly to jail, but still, here you go,

passing time, passing strange. Don’t pass this up.

 

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 want to take the express.

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.

 

Congratulations, graduates.

 

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