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Life on a Small Planet
The Baccalaureate Address
July/August 2008
by Richard C. Levin ’74PhD
I graduated 40 years ago and three thousand miles away, in 1968, a year
marked by urban riots, two tragic assassinations, an unpopular war in Vietnam,
and defeated revolutions in France and Czechoslovakia. In the wake of this
turmoil and strife, there appeared at the end of that year images so astonishing
that they remain imprinted in memory. They were straightforward photographs,
taken with a Hasselblad camera, neither edited nor manipulated to achieve
emotional effect. Yet they elicited the most powerful emotions. They were
stunningly beautiful, hopeful, and profoundly humbling all at once.
I refer to the first photographic images of the earth taken from the
vicinity of the moon by the crew of the Apollo 8 spacecraft, one of which is
reproduced as an insert to your program.
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We have come a long way in 40 years toward making this fragile planet a better place. |
Here we were in a world torn by conflict between two warring
ideologies, led by nations with nuclear arsenals sufficient to destroy each
other many times over, our security in the hands of leaders on both sides who
preached and practiced the doctrine of mutually assured destruction. Forty
percent of the world’s inhabitants were in poverty, major cities were choked
with air pollution, and the opportunities available to women and people of
color were starkly limited. And yet here was this extraordinary image reminding
us that we all lived on one small, fragile planet—a beautiful, pristine jewel
from the distance of 240,000 miles, as Milton somehow imagined three centuries
earlier when he described “this pendant world, in bigness as a star of smallest
magnitude.”
We have come a long way in 40 years toward making this fragile planet a
better place. The Cold War is over. The fraction of humanity in poverty has
declined from 40 percent to less than 20 percent. Through strict controls on
the emission of sulfur dioxide, nitrous oxides, and particulates, we have
dramatically improved air quality in the cities of Europe and the United
States. And the opportunities for women and people of color, in this country at
least, have increased to an extent barely imaginable 40 years ago. Certainly, no
one in 1968 was imagining that a woman and an African American would be among
the leading contenders for the presidency of the United States.
But most of these results—the collapse of the Soviet Union, the
abatement of pollution, and the advancement of the rights of women and
minorities—were achieved by work within nations rather than through cooperation
among nations. A major exception is the reduction of global poverty, which is
in substantial part a consequence of the steady liberalization of international
trade and investment through global agreements in the Tokyo and Uruguay rounds.
Small as the world appeared in 1968 from 240,000 miles away, today the
world is much smaller. The revolution in communications technology has brought
us closer together. Information, images, and capital flow instantaneously
across national borders, and the flow of people and products is faster and more
voluminous than ever before. Our economies have become much more
interdependent, and, increasingly, the problems that beset us will require
global rather than national solutions. A simple case in point is the current
crisis in credit markets. A generation ago, the U.S. government could have
managed the situation in isolation. Today, to be successful, the Federal
Reserve Bank needs either tacit or explicit cooperation from the European
Central Bank and the Chinese government.
As you go forth from this place that has been your home for four years, you will inherit this shrinking planet. It will be yours to take care of for
the next 40 years and more. You are, fortunately, far better prepared for this
task than my generation was. The Yale College Class of 1968 had only 19
students from outside the United States; they represented 13 countries. Your
class has 106 students from outside the United States, representing 41
countries. As best we can tell, fewer than 100 students in the Class of 1968
benefited from a Yale-sponsored experience overseas or an independent junior
year abroad program. In your class, nearly 700 have had such an experience. You
have also had access to a curriculum far richer in its coverage of the
languages, culture, society, politics, and economics of other nations.
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The 21st century requires the capacity for cross-cultural understanding. |
Yale has offered you this richer curriculum, increased the
representation of international students, and created hundreds of new
opportunities for overseas study, research, and work internships because the
demands of twenty-first-century citizenship compel these initiatives. Like
generations of your Yale College predecessors, you have developed a capacity
for close reading, critical and independent thinking, clear and effective
writing, and quantitative and scientific reasoning. But a complete
twenty-first-century education requires one essential new skill: the capacity
for cross-cultural understanding. To be adequately prepared for life in a
highly interdependent world, you need the ability, which I trust that you have
begun to develop here, to recognize and appreciate that those from other
nations and other cultures see the world differently, hold different
assumptions, and often reach different conclusions even when presented with the
same facts. Only with this capacity for cross-cultural understanding will you
achieve your full potential in the inevitably global careers you will pursue
and in the contribution you will make to the greater society.
This last point is particularly salient for those of you who are
Americans. This nation has suffered through much of its history from isolation
and insularity. Too often, our leaders have been insufficiently aware of the
effects of America’s actions on the rest of the world, and insufficiently
mindful of how America is perceived throughout the world. Your generation will
have an opportunity to remedy this historic deficiency, in an era in which
international cooperation is needed more than ever if we are to continue to
make progress toward a better life for all.
Stepping up to the responsibilities of global citizenship is probably
not the first thing on your mind this weekend, as you reflect upon the passage
of these four years, as you think about the friendships you have made, the
teachers you have encountered, and the good of this place that you will take
along with you. At this moment, your thoughts of the future are probably a mix
of excitement and anxiety as you contemplate the next step in your education,
or your first job, or whether you will get a first job.
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The limitations on the earth’s capacity to sustain us have become starkly apparent. |
But your Yale education has equipped you for more than your next step;
it is yours for a lifetime. And its aim has not been merely to prepare you for
successful careers and personal fulfillment, but to prepare you for lives of
service. Your service might begin with private acts of generosity and kindness.
But it extends to the practice of civic virtue that was identified as the
purpose of a Yale College education in our founding charter of 1701. And civic
virtue, envisioned as distinctly local three centuries ago, must embrace the
global as well as the local in the shrinking world we inhabit today.
The challenges of global citizenship are many: to extend the benefits
of health and prosperity to those without them, to reduce the threats from
terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and to preserve
the capacity of the earth’s resources to sustain its inhabitants in peace,
health, and prosperity.
I want to elaborate a bit on the challenge of sustainability, because I
believe that it is a challenge that will be uniquely pressing for your
generation. The challenge of extending the benefits of health and prosperity to
a wider number, and the challenge of preventing war, have both been with us for
many generations. But it is only in recent years that the limitations on the
earth’s capacity to sustain us have become starkly apparent. And we are running
out of time.
Last year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, consisting of
2,500 leading scientists from around the world, concluded that the evidence for
global warming is now “unequivocal.” These scientists determined with “very
high confidence” that human activity has been the major cause of rising global
temperatures since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the
mid-eighteenth century. According to the panel, in the absence of corrective
measures, global temperatures are most likely to rise between two and four
degrees centigrade by the end of this century. Even a one-degree increase in
temperature will limit fresh water availability and cause coastal flooding in
much of the world; economic, social, and environmental damage and dislocation
will become much more consequential if global temperatures increase by more
than two degrees.
There is a way to avoid catastrophe, and here at Yale you have been
helping to demonstrate this. During your sophomore year, Yale committed to the
ambitious goal of reducing by 43 percent its emission of the greenhouse gases
that cause global warming. You have helped us get one-fifth of the way toward
our goal in just two years, by replacing the incandescent bulbs in your rooms
with compact fluorescents, and by switching off lights and computers more conscientiously.
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We will install micro-windmills on Science Hill this summer. |
Yale will continue to do its part to prevent global warming. We will
continue to retrofit our existing buildings with efficient windows and
effective controls, upgrade our power plant equipment, and use biofuels where
appropriate. We will build all our new buildings to the highest standards of
energy efficiency. And we will even install micro-windmills on Science Hill
this summer. We are determined to prove that we can reduce the university’s
carbon footprint by more than 40 percent, even as we expand, at a cost of less
than one percent of our operating expenses.
You need to do your part as well. As you leave this place, I hope you
will carry with you, as part of your commitment to global citizenship, a
recognition that the burden of ensuring the well being of future generations
falls on you. In your homes, workplaces, and communities, as well as in your
involvement in public life, I hope you will remember to seek an appropriate
balance between present and future. I urge you to live in better harmony with
this small planet’s resources than prior generations have. And I urge you, as
global citizens, to promote the prosperity and improved health of your own
generation in a manner that is sustainable, in the sense that future
generations will have at least as much opportunity to enjoy the fruits of the
environment and the fruits of their own potential as we ourselves enjoy.
Women and men of the Class of 2008: as you leave here, I congratulate
you on your achievements. I share with your proud families and friends the
confidence that you will find expression for the extraordinary talent and
potential that you have exhibited these past four years. This small planet is
yours to make better. In the words of the prophet Isaiah: may you go out in joy
and be led forth in peace. And, if you serve, as I trust you will, as faithful
stewards of this small and fragile planet, may the mountains and hills burst
into song and may all the trees of the field clap their hands.  |
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