The next President of the United States will face unprecedented challenges, among which is the looming threat of rapid climate destabilization. Given what is known about the pace of climate change, the President will have little or no margin for error and must act quickly, decisively, and wisely. Such was the conclusion of a small group convened at Wingspread in June of 2006 to discuss leadership and sustainability. Our conveners, Ray Anderson, Jonathan Lash, and Bill Becker intended to restart the dialogue begun in the 1990’s with the President’s Council on Sustainable Development. One of the outcomes of the meeting was the formation of an effort to define the first steps that must be taken by the new administration in 2009 to create and implement a climate action plan adequate to the emergency ahead. We chose to focus on the first hundred days to shed light on the critical importance of the first steps in a new direction. One model for action is that provided by the first one hundred days of the Roosevelt administration in 1933.

Fred Lassen caught me in the middle of a particularly busy day to ask whether I’d be willing to give the baccalaureate address this year. I agreed but five minutes later I wondered what it was that I’d agreed to do. These occasions call for a preacher which I am not, although some of my best relatives have been and one still is . . . But I am a talker increasingly reliant on powerpoint . . . what to do without a powerpoint? (Imagine if Moses had had powerpoint to present the Ten Commandments!) . . . a few weeks later Andy Barnett who has arranged the music asked me for a title. Not being particularly musical I recall being told one time or another that music had something to do with rhythm and since I’d been reading a book on gratitude . . . I responded by saying off the cuff  “well my title is the “Rhythm of Gratitude” not knowing what that would entail. 

I’m hoping for serendipity. You are witness to my first . . . and probably my last . . . sermon. And it goes something like this.

Dean Hack, distinguished faculty of the School of Design, honored guests, and most important, you the members of the class of 2007. It is a great privilege to stand before you on your graduation day.

As a Penn alumnus I feel a deep sense of affection for this institution and for this place. My own interest in design was kindled here long ago by Ian McHarg who as much as anyone was the founder of modern landscape design and the larger field of ecological design. His book Design with Nature remains a classic statement of the art of intelligent inhabitation. From its founding, the city of Philadelphia has been home to a great deal of innovative urban design and experimentation now carried on here in the School of Design. You are a part of a great history and have inherited a legacy of which you may be justly proud. But the work of designers is now entering its critical and most important phase.

I once asked each of the students in my introductory environmental studies class to assume that they were the attorney representing Homo sapiens before a congress of all beings as once described by Joanna Macy and Jonathan Seed. The charge against us would read something like this: “Over many thousands of years humans have proved themselves incapable of living as citizens and members of the community of life and in recent centuries have become so numerous and so hazardous to other members of the community and the biosphere that they should be banished from the Earth for ever”. All the critters, reptiles, fish, birds, mammals, insects, and small things that make everything else work, are represented in the jury box equipped with sentience and voice. The presiding judge is an owl, said to be the wisest of all; the prosecuting attorney is a fox, said to be the most cunning. The question for my students is simply what defense might be made on our behalf? What supporting evidence could be presented? Who among the animals and plants would speak for us?

For several decades Richard Posner, judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, has been a prolific and often brilliant writer on law, literature, and politics. He is perhaps best known as an advocate for the use of economic standards as both a legal tool and a yardstick by which to measure judicial decisions. In clear prose and well-reasoned analysis, Judge Posner has advocated wealth creation as a reliable standard for legal reasoning along with a pragmatic view of political realities that defers substantially to prevailing practices and behaviors. Applied to politics, Posner’s pragmatism comes close to views once proposed by the economist Joseph Schumpeter, not otherwise known as a reformer. Posner’s position has been so forcefully and consistently stated for so long that it is surprising to read his book Catastrophe (Posner 2004) in which he concludes that the odds of the occurrence of one or more catastrophes are growing quickly. Among these, he includes the prospect of rapid climate change and admits that it “is to a significant degree a byproduct of the success of capitalism in enormously increasing the amount of world economic activity . . .and is a great and growing threat to anyone’s idea of human welfare” (2004). On this subject conservatives, he believes, are “in a state of denial.” The problem has come about, in part, because of the “scientific illiteracy of most nonscientists . . . [particularly] the people who count in making and implementing policy.”

In June of 1858 Abraham Lincoln began his address at Springfield, Illinois by saying “If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do and how, to do it.” He spoke on the issue of slavery that day with a directness that other politicians were loath to practice. At Springfield he asserted that “A house divided against itself cannot stand . . . this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.” His immediate targets were the evasions and complications of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 and the Supreme Court ruling handed down in the Dred Scott decision as well as those whom he accused of conspiring to spread slavery to states where it did not already exist. In his speech Lincoln accused Senator Stephen Douglas, President Franklin Pierce, Supreme Court Justice Roger Taney and President James Buchanan of a conspiracy to spread slavery supported by circumstantial evidence such that it was “impossible to not believe that Stephen and Franklin and Roger and James all understood one another from the beginning, and all worked upon a common plan or draft drawn up before the first lick was struck.” His opponent in the upcoming Senatorial election, Stephen Douglas, he described as a “caged and toothless” lion.

In the United States and many parts of the world, people with enough money can build whatever they choose. Zoning laws and various land-use restrictions are more often than not simply paper barriers, permeable by those with enough cash to buy connections. So deals are cut, and casinos spring up in places like mangrove wetlands along the Mississippi coast
[--]gambling with nature, which owns the house, so to speak.