My Graduation Speech: Final Draft

Since it’s that time of year, I thought I would do a week of graduation speeches, all of them mine.  The first post in the series can be found here.  The third is here.

I was lucky enough to the valedictorian of my senior high school class.  This post contains the final draft that speech.  It was inspired by the apathy I found in my fellow students.  Many simply did not have any interest in changing or improving the greater world community.  So I tried to craft a speech that challenges the listener instead of simply making them feel good.

Once again we journey back through the sands of time, to 2001. Enjoy.

I am not going to give a nice normal graduation speech. This will not be one of those that make you feel good about the last four years and excite you about the future. Instead I’m going to talk about something that is actually important.

We are crowded. There are over six billion humans on the planet earth. For the last 10 thousand years, since the birth of our civilization, the human population has been increasing dramatically. How dramatically? Ten thousand years ago, there were 100,000 humans on Earth. Since then our population has doubled ten times. Even more alarming, each doubling has only taken half as long as the one before it. Our last doubling took only 36 years. The next could take only 18. There will be 12 billion humans in the world.

But so what? We’re a little crowded. What does it matter? Our world is full of problems: War, crime, corruption, rebellion, famine, plagues, genocide, and economic collapse. These are all tied to our overcrowding. Think for a moment about all of the times these problems occur in the world. Take that number and times it by four. That is what it will be like when we reach 12 billion people.

Even more alarming is that our population explosion is threatening not just us, but the whole world. Every day 200 species go extinct directly due to human action. Their biomass is converted into human food and by extension humans. We are destroying the biodiversity of the earth to fuel our population growth. This leads to holes in the community of life. If we do not changer our path, these holes could cause the community of life to collapse, ending the circle of life.

Our civilization is destroying us and the world we live in. So why do we continue? Why do we keep destroying the world, day in and day out? It is because our civilization is following a vision that we have decided is the one right way to live. And because it is the one right way to live, we have to keep following it even if it kills us.

What is this deadly vision? Put simply, it is that The World was made for Man and Man was made to rule and conquer it. We follow this vision without even thinking about it. When we cut down a forest to make a farm, do we worry about it? No, because the world was made for man. When we kill off native species of fish so our game fish can live, do we worry about it? No, because the world was made for man. We can do what ever we want to the world because it was made for man.

We are conquering the world and attempting to rule it, piece by piece. We decide what should live and what should die. We kill what we can’t eat. We kill what eats what we eat. We kill what doesn’t feed what we eat. Our civilization is trying, as hard as it can, to convert the world’s biomass into humans and human food. But it doesn’t matter. The world was not made for whales. Nor were bald eagles made to rule it. None of it matters because the world was made for man and man was made to rule and conquer it.

If we continue on this current path, we will conquer the world and become its ruler. We will stand victorious over a ruined earth, bloodied and dying at our feet. And we will be proud of it. Because that is what our civilization’s vision tells us it should happen.

All people ever tell me is that they just don’t care. That doesn’t work anymore. We can’t wait for tomorrow. We have to care now. Our civilization is driving the human race to extinction and taking the rest of the world with it. If we do not change something, in the here and now, there will be no future in which to do it.

We must act to change our civilization’s vision. Our current vision leads only to destruction. And programs like recycling and “adopt a rainforest” are not solutions. They only slow the damage done by our civilization. We must change the source, our vision.

To find our new vision, we must look outside our civilization, to those humans who live without destroying the world. And if we examine them closely, we will notice they all share the same vision. Ask the Bushman of Africa, or the Navajo of North America, or the Aborigines of Australia. All, in their own way, articulate what must be our new vision and this is it: The world is a sacred place and a sacred process. And we are part of it.

We must give up our claims to rulership over the world. We are not gods. We can not decide what shall live and what should die. We can not claim the world as our own. We must step down from the pedestal that we, in our pride, put ourselves on. We must take our place among the community of life and once again live as a part of it. And as part of the community of life, we will no longer be the danger we are today. We will be able to live as harmlessly as a shark or a tiger.

But to make this a reality, this idea can not end here. It can not die today. Each of you must take this dream away with you and give it to someone else. We can change the vision away from destruction and toward an eternity as a member of the community of life. We can save the world, but we must do it now.

I hope you found that interesting.   Friday will be the final stage, where I will present what I would say today, older and maybe a bit wiser.  Hopefully you’ll come back for then.