1. INTRODUCTION

Transitions...

On this day honoring academic achievement and transition, I'd like to talk of another kind of transition we're all living through. It's taking place a vast scale, it was set in motion not by choices any of us here made, but it's one we've inherited, and like it or not, we're in the thick of it.

2. A TRANSITION OF GEOLOGIC PROPORTIONS

The transition I'm referring to is the one that's happening due to the human presence on the Earth. We all are familiar with the signs: poisoned water, polluted air, contaminated food chains, loss of biologically rich landscapes, loss of plant and animal species.

And we're even learning the implications of all this at a planetary scale: climate change, global warming, species going extinct at a rate that hasn't happened since the time the dinosaurs died out around 65 million years ago. That last great extinction brought an end to what geologists call the Mesozoic era, and it ushered in the current era of geologic time: the Cenozoic.

Well, if you define geologic eras in terms of their life forms, as geologists do, then with the current rate at which species are going extinct, we are now bringing to an end this Cenozoic era. We are literally living in a transition of geologic proportions. The last one they tell us was caused by an asteroid slamming into the Earth, this one is being driven by the ways humans are living on the Earth.

The Berkeley Geography department, which is just over 100 years old, has played an important role in raising the alarm on the impact of human action on the earth's systems. Carl Sauer, of this department, writing more than 60 years ago, lay the blame squarely on what he termed "our current commercial economy," the product of the industrial revolution and of a European expansion that was bent on looting the earth's resources for profit. Sauer and others from this department went on to help lay the intellectual foundations for the environmental movement in North America.

Others have probed deeper, trying to get at how we've come to this, how humans got to this point of causing such devastation to the earth and its non-human life forms. Thomas Berry, a theologian, and an ecological philosopher, points to our current mode of consciousness: it's one that sets humans apart from all other life forms, as seperate from the earth's natural systems and processes. It's a way of seeing humans--and frequently only a certain privileged group of humans-- at the center of the universe, on top of the pyramid, and it grants to them all the rights. Other forms of being: plants, animals, ecological communities, biological processes--are seen as having no rights. He writes that all four of the fundamental establishments that control the human realm: governments, corporations, universities and religions, namely the political, the economic, the intellectual and religious establishments, are all committed, either consciously or unconsciously, to a radical discontinuity between the human and the non-human spheres.

It is this disconnect, Berry argues, that has given rise to an industrial civilization whose power is so colossal that it is now altering the chemical and biological composition of the Earth. These changes are so devastating that there is no historical precedent, no historical parallel we can turn to, only a geologic one. We are bringing to an end the 65 million year old Cenozoic Era, and we're in transition to ... What?

Now when I came back to graduate school I knew we were in an environmental mess, but I'd never thought of it on THIS scale.

Nor had I reflected much on the fact that in that last great transition, from the reptilian age to the age of mammals, it was a biological, evolutionary process that gave rise to new life forms, and it was natural selection that gave shape to those forms.

It still is an evolutionary process that will shape the future of life, but this time it will be humans doing the selecting, it will be human choices that determine the future of life on this planet. And we will do it through the institutions we create, and the cultural forms we bring into being.

We're it! The future course of evolution is up to us.
Are we up to it? Do we know what we need to know?
How DO we go about it shaping the course of life on Earth?

Thomas Berry proposes that we accept this as the Great Work of our time, a work that involves nothing less than guiding a transition out of the terminal stages of the Cenozoic, and into a new era that he would have us call the Ecozoic, an era when humans become a benign presence on the Earth.

Interestingly, Berry sees Geography as the academic discipline most in position to offer insight and guidance.

3. ACADEMIC CULTURE

I came back to school, and to Geography in particular, because I wanted to go deeper into the theme of humans and the environment; the nature-culture inter-action.

I returned after a career making documentary films.
But my transition back to academia was something of a cultural shock: film-making is a highly collaborative endeavor; the academic one is highly individualistic. Sure, it's intellectually stimulating, but it's also very isolating. It's not a culture that promotes collaboration or cooperation. Or even a careful attention to a point of view different from your own. Instead it's: stake out your turf and defend it! Even more: go on the offensive: attack the other guy's turf, rip it to shreds, colonize it! And in the process it can drain your creativity, wear you out, and grind you down. For faculty and graduate students alike, you either become hyper-aggresive or you withdraw into your own protected enclave of like-minded thinkers. In time, if you're not careful, this can lead to burnout.

It probably shouldn't have come as such a surprise, after all, the academy as we know it is a western institution created in the 19th century, by an elite, essentially a masculine one at that. It was the product of an era focused on industrial development, expansion of power and control. Those are certainly academic Geography's institutional origins, even this department's. Though the mission certainly changed over the years, the culture was slower to do so. Up until about 20 or 25 years ago there were no women doctoral students; until about 10-15 years ago no women faculty.

But if we are to deal with the great problems we are facing, if we are to engage, as Thomas Berry would have us, in the Great Work, of transition from a destructive human presence to a benign presence, then I would suggest that we need to invent institutions and cultures that promote respect and collaboration, among academics and among students, and between the human and the non-human.

The transition to the Ecozoic Era, I believe, needs to be a collaborative undertaking.

Anything less just further divides us, separates and is ultimately suicidal.

4. CONCLUSION

We really do need each other. For the transitions, and to make life worthwhile.

So to conclude, I'd like to say that it's really special to be here with you: Elisabeth, Jorjan and Kathy; Peter, Jodi and Stuart, Jake and Frankie. It's been an amazing journey we've all been on to get here, to receive our doctoral degrees.

It's also so very good to be sharing this day with all of you, receiving your bachelors' and your masters degrees.

I want to thank every one of you for helping those of us graduating to get here: our Chair, the entire faculty, staff, parents, family, Jackie, and our friends, every one of you.

Finally, there's another set of thank yous I'd like to offer: I want to acknowledge with deepest gratitude the Los Haro community that welcomed me to do my research, as well as this campus and this place-- the redwoods and the pines, the buckeyes and the oaks. I want to give thanks to the grassy slopes, the glades and the pathways that wind their way through them; to Strawberry Creek, and to the sunlight that dances on her waters; to the beautiful Bay that lies to our west, and to the hills to our east; to the fog that rolls in, the rain that cleans our air, and to the great sky above.

We live here on this truly beautiful, fragile planet, and I'm SO grateful to be on it here, now, and with all of you.