The following is the text of the Convocation Address delivered by Prof. Jeffrey D. Sachs to graduating students on Saturday, Nov. 13, 2010.
Chancellor Gray, President Runte, Vice President Matheson, Professor Rutherford, Deans, Faculty, Friends and Family of this great university, and most importantly today, the 2010 graduates of Carleton University, thank you.
Yesterday I was in Seoul, Korea as world leaders at the G20 summit grappled with the pressing challenges of our time: economic instability, globalization, extreme poverty, and climate change. Today I am at the epicenter of the solution to those problems: a great university that has taken on the challenge of improving the world. Carleton University, please accept my deepest gratitude for welcoming me into your midst, and bestowing upon me the high honor of a doctor of laws honoris causa.
Our problems today reflect a new complexity. The world is full. Nearly seven billion of us have crowded into the planet, and billions more are expected to join you in the coming years. By the time you reach my age the world will have nearly nine billion people.
Now reaching my age might not be your favorite thought on this day of celebration of youthful accomplishment. And there is no need for you to hurry. But life at all ages has wondrous compensations. Mine today is being here with you, the world’s future leaders. Yours is to savor your recent accomplishments and the challenges you will soon accept.
A crowded and interconnected world has its great joys too. Yesterday, the heads of state of 20 leading economies, with 4.2 billion people, sat down for a chat. The UN Secretary General, who uniquely represents all 192 countries of the UN, raised the voice for the 2.8 billion people of 172 countries who were not at the table. The dialogue was highly impressive, as it is has been through the round of G20 meetings in the past three years, including in Toronto this past summer. A crowded world is indeed learning to speak with each other.
Yet for all of the real excitement of a world society gradually taking shape, we can’t help but realize that time is not necessarily our friend. Time, it is said, heals all wounds, but on a crowded planet, time is currently opening up new wounds faster than the old ones are being healed. The G20 is gradually learning to speak in unity for global good, but the world itself is fast running out of control. That’s why we need you, Carleton graduates of 2010. You are the new and even faster runners, who will carry solutions from Marathon to Athens. And as modern marathon runners, well trained and backed by new technology and methods, you won’t collapse at the finish line.
Why are we currently losing the battle with time? As the G20 talks from Summit to Summit, the problems of climate change, deforestation, biodiversity extinction, water stress, environmental pollution, and extreme poverty are in many cases worsening, and sometimes dramatically. 2010 has been a harrowing year of unprecedented floods, powerful storms, failed crops, and soaring world food prices, all exacerbated by inter-annual and long-term climate changes that destabilize the world’s impoverished society’s, and for which they are unprepared. When the rains fail, famine arrives in the drylands, and conflict is not far behind, in Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, and other ecologically distressed regions. Yet our governments persist in fighting the symptoms – by sending armies to Afghanistan and special units to Yemen – rather than fighting the underlying diseases of hunger, poverty, and water stress.
Carleton University, you have already shown that you understand the difference between battling symptoms and getting to the roots of our problems on a crowded and crisis-ridden planet. You have done something historic, putting your mark on global solutions even before you graduated today. When Carleton’s students, led by the group Students to End Extreme Poverty, voted to support the Millennium Villages Project you did more than show your good judgment, maturity, awareness, and heart. To the faculty, your parents and friends, and to the world you declared, “We are here, this generation, at this time, to help solve the problems of a troubled world.”
Graduates, you recognized that the Millennium Villages Project is more than an NGO, more than a development project, more than a scientific venture, though it is all of those. It is also a commitment to a new way of problem solving in the world. It places the principle responsibility for problem solving with the local communities fighting to meet their needs, in this case the local communities throughout Africa, Cambodia, and Haiti that have accepted the challenge of becoming Millennium Villages.
It also says that problem solving must be based on rigorous science. The Millennium Villages is committed to bringing cutting-edge proven technologies to the major challenges of poverty elimination and sustainable development. These technologies include high-yield seeds and sustainable agriculture; broadband internet in the schools; state of the art nutrition programs; community-based malaria control using new diagnostic and therapeutic tools; mobile-phones for health care delivery; off-grid solar power systems enabling rural households to benefit from electricity; and real-time mobile-based information systems so that local managers can understand the challenges of their communities as they arise, not three years after.
Universities, including Carleton, have a unique role to play in science-based problem solving, and given the complexities of the challenges facing the planet, whether poverty, hunger, disease, environment, or cultural diversity, universities will have to lead in knowledge-based cross-disciplinary ventures.
The Millennium Villages Project is therefore a global network of partners, including local communities, universities around the world, and innovative businesses and NGOs, local and global. Carleton has been the first to bring Canadian universities into this global network. For that you have won the world’s enduring esteem.
I consider myself almost a Canadian, if you will permit me to put it that way. I grew up in Detroit, the one place in the United States where one drives south to reach Canada, just across the Ambassador Bridge to Winsor, Ontario. We’d visit Canada for culture at Stratford, natural beauty, excellent dining, great skiing, and First Nation and French heritage. My wife and I honeymooned in Quebec.
Even more important, I always regarded Canada as the conscience of our corner of the world, the progressive neighbor of the US who would nudge the US towards its better instincts, whether in universal health care or attention to the world’s poor. The first development text that I read as a freshman college student was Partners in Development, the path-breaking report of the global commission headed by your late, great, Nobel-Laureate Prime Minister, Lester Pearson. In 1969 he and his commission enshrined the global norm that rich countries like Canada and the United States should give 0.7 percent of the national income as official development assistance. Alas, Canada is now only around one third of the target, and the US only around one-fourth.
In recent decades, Canada like the US has seen its moral compass go wobbly. Canada like the US achieved great wealth, but at some real cost to great values. Our consumerism has too often overtaken our common humanity. That has been a special affliction of my generation, the baby boomers. Perhaps we were raised too much on television, and have been too much swayed by tens of millions of advertisements all telling us the lie that happiness lies in the latest consumer purchase. We’ve recently hit a kind of bankruptcy in America — financially, and often psychologically and ethically — chasing that false idea.
Carleton graduates, you are the kernel of a new era, a generation that wants something better than what is promoted by the latest TV ad. You are turning off the TV sets, turning on your social networks, and going out to explore a world that is eager to partner with you. You’ve made your mark already with the Millennium Villages. Spread the word throughout Canada, make Africa’s villages Canada’s cause. Make a clean environment the true lesson of Canada’s remarkable physical beauty. Make Canada’s multi-cultural heritage the true guidepost for a world that works together.
Last month, the world lost one of its greatest thinkers and most eloquent men, Theodore Sorensen, counselor to President John Kennedy, and wordsmith for the ages, who died at the age of 82. He worked with Kennedy to pen one of the greatest commencement addresses ever given, perhaps the greatest, when John Kennedy spoke about peace at American University in 1963. Let me close today by commending to you, graduates of Carleton University, Sorensen’s soaring spirit and eloquence, so that you can take Sorensen’s words and carry them with you on your life’s mission in the crowded planet of the 21st century. His and John Kennedy’s sentiments are, indeed, the path of peace.
“So let us not be blind to our differences, but let us also direct attention to our common interests and the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s futures. And we are all mortal.”
Congratulations and thanks to you, Carleton Graduating Class of 2010.
Monday, November 15, 2010 in Speeches
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