Describing Thoreau and his classic work Walden, David Orr, professor at Oberlin says,

". . .Walden is an antidote to the idea that education is a passive indoor activity occurring between the ages of 6 and 21." Professor Orr’s beautiful essay on, "Place and Pedagogy," says "Walden wrote Thoreau . . .His ge nius was to allow himself to be shaped by his place, to allow it to speak with his voice." Student environmentalism at its best is the voice of the environment speaking through the conscience, knowledge, and action of young, idealistic minds. It has the possibility of education being more than a passive indoor activity.

"Environment" was a big thing in the university in the ‘60’s. But looking back, maybe it was really activism — political action by students -- that was the big thing and environment was a good focus for rallying around - one of many . Most of all, there was Viet Nam . there was also atomic testing, women’s liberation, Kent State, but primarily Viet Nam, The environment as an agenda for political action was waking up -- after a long slumber. Everyone heard Rachel C arson’s eloquent cry that birds may sing no more, that our great grandchildren may face a Silent Spring because we had manipulated the chemical bond once too many times. The National Environmental Policy Act was passed in 1970. It created the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The ‘60’s students included environment in their protests. The Viet Nam War, and the sending to war of 18 year olds, who in some states were not yet allowed to drive a car or drink alcohol had stirred up a new emotion in the younger gener ation about a world gone awry -- and one of the things that was wrong with the world was the reach of technology . Success and development, considered synonymous with wealth, plenty of food and all other necessities, many of these gained through techno logical control of nature, and thoughtless neglect and exploitation of the environment, had been our triumph. But now technology everywhere raised a different specter: technology at war, spraying agent orange to defoliate the forests of Viet Nam so the Viet Cong couldn’t hide. .— This was a grotesque version of the same technology that saved OUR crops by killing the so-called pests that destroyed the crops; technology was spewing out bubbles from washing machines so lakes were covered with froth, and algae, a sight that was scary. It was technology that had cloaked us in bodily comfort, spared us hunger, cold, and our grandparents’ 9-mile walk in the snow to the schoolhouse, and in the process had also separated us from our pla ce on Earth. And the students protested, they sang for peace, for love, they imagined all the people living in harmony -- although at times, their imagination was created by a technology-created lysergic acid dimethylamide cloud.

So, student activism woke up and the Earth was one of its action items. Let there be peace on Earth, we said as students, and let it begin with me. There was passion, a belief that we could change the world.. we HAD to change the world. There were t wo types of activism being born — one was pure passion, with no attempt to focus on knowing details of what we were trying to protect or protest against.. we just knew it was wrong, and we had to protest! The other was based on gaining more knowledg e — a technological approach to solving environmental problems.

Let us go back again to 1862 and Thoreau - "Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature lying all around, with such beauty and such affection for her children, as the leopard, and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society , to that collective which is exclusively an interaction of man on man - a sort of breeding in and in." Thoreau was a kind of environmental activist, a student of nature who left us a lasting testimony.

When as a nation, we started action to address our environmental ills in the ‘70’s, for the most part, we lost the passion of activism, or rather the passionate group became outsiders as the others weaned ourselves from Nature and turned pri marily to technology \ to solve the issues. The insider students became lawyers, environmental engineers, and worked within the system to realize their ideals of protecting the environment.

Environmental "management and protection" became the cry - this style suited our techno-minds. We applied a technological approach to the problems of the environment. To have government policies in a technologically advanced country with a rational utilitarian perspective, we tried to remain objective and scientific, we counted, and we tried to control. We counted the number of trees dying, the number of species extinct, the number of tons of SO₂ out into the air when we burnt coal. Is this the right - or the only level of knowledge that action needed? Is controlling what had up until then been externalities to our considerations, the right way towards preservation of nature and a better environment? In all that cou nting, we lost the passion. In 1986, philosopher Neil Everden printed out two things; (1) First, that while the incentive to preservation was personal and emotional, the arrival of ecology (as a science) and of resource management made it possible to be that contradictory being, a dispassionate environmentalist

(2) Second, In learning to use numbers to talk about the world, the environmentalist forgets that his initial revolt was partly precipitated by people using numbers to talk about the world.

Does this mean that we don’t need numbers? No - but it does mean that we need to recognize that while numbers are a part of a highly technological society, we need to put them in their place, and find a way to connect and participate with the Ear th if we are to restore sanity.

Student activism is perhaps one of the best paths for this. Enthusiasm and caring are what brings a group of students together on campus to work together on something outside the curriculum. A student group can range wide in its activities to capture all the complexity of emotions, experience, enthusiasm, education that we need to bring to being a true environmentalist. By definition, the student is also ready to listen, study, understand the issue. The student can do this in various ways.

You can read Walden, clean up the campus, listen to an academic lecture that gives you numbers on global warming, walk in the woods, listen to the streams. You can write songs about rain forests and perhaps experience why it is that the phrase for &qu ot;it is a fine evening," in the language of the Koyukon Indians, is the phrase that the hermit thrushes sing at dusk in the forests. Anthony Weston, a philosopher, says "the Earth sings through us." A student group can be the song of the Earth, whistling as you work. You can explore how a sense of place and time plays into caring for the Earth and for ourselves.

There was technology-based action by the ‘60s students who grew up. This was perhaps an essential phase in our converting environmental ideals into political agenda as we understood the first wave of problems induced by over-reliance on technolog y. But we also became largely a "collective which is exclusively an interaction of man on man" and there were only a few of the ‘80s children who had the passion of the student activism of the ‘60s. So environmental activism — w ith the unique mix of idealism and action that student activism can bring — went largely to sleep on campuses. For the children of the original second group of student activists environment became a thing that one knew through hikes, and backyard wilderness. The passion was largely missing.

It only woke up in the ‘90s when we as a society began to notice that we — our existence and well being -- are in jeopardy because of thoughtless actions towards the environment that hugs and protects us. "Save the planet", the &# 145;80s adults taught the ‘90s children to say. Student environmentalism was re-born on campuses.

So, what may be some of the perspectives to carry with you - perspectives that you continuously review, revise and re-live. Let me point to four of these. The first is direct experience, of place and time; the second is something I call distance visi on,; the third is an ethic of care and the fourth, a perpetual sense of wonder - of looking with the mind of a student - in the best sense of the word, and not losing the question even after the apparent answer has been found.

First, direct experience: is an experience - a sensing - of the place and of the time. Treat even the room, the place you assemble, the spaces on this campus, as a place of possibilities - of the birth of ideas, as a possible place whose environment m ay be made more meaningful and more beautiful by your thoughts and actions. This could be our Walden, and maybe Earth should meet outdoors when possible - understand the neighborhood, the campus, Frick park, Pittsburgh, as the space in which student acti on can become meaningful - where you celebrate and act on the fact that students who care about the Earth came together here.

How about time? In a wonderful book, The Dispossessed, Ursula Le Guin has the hero, Shevek, a scientist say, "The science of ethics is the science of time." I have been pondering on this for years. What does Shevek mean? Each time I reflect on it, I see yet another meaning, another possibility in that sentence. Indeed, earth ethics means trying to understand what Time means. To give special time to think about Time. By being in the background always, Time becomes forgotten by al l of us. And indeed it is time that unravels the story - the real ethical issues of our actions. Implications on the health of the earth become apparent only as Time unfolds. Is this what Shevek meant? It is in Time that the reflection, awareness and knowledge you accumulate as students, unfold into action as you see venues in your work and your life where this awareness can make a difference to the Earth. It is our failure to understand the role of Time that deludes us to think we are in control of our lives when our robots dance to our touch. So, the science of ethics is the science of time - Le Guin’s Shevek actually has a real life counterpart: A little four-year old boy who, in the year 1887 or so, asked his teacher, "What is time?&q uot;, who continued to ask this question and gave what seemed like an answer in 1905. But like all answers, it was only part of the story. So, be conscious of Time, have a respect for Time as an explicit part of your experience.

The second factor of perspective is what I think of as "Distance Vision." It is an idea that exploded into my head one day as I saw three impressionist paintings on a wall in the Museum of Modern Art in New York - as I saw them from a partic ular distance, by accident, as I glanced into the room from the door. I had looked at them before, but never from that vantage point. All of a sudden, it hit me why Pisarro, Senrat and Monet were masters of their art. Standing close to their canvas - a s they had to - they managed to convey to us something best looked at from a distance. It is this perspective that an older person can convey that may be useful to a young student -- it is this perspective that can begin to build if you try to become awa re of the Earth’s questions as students who care. This is one of the processes that begin as you begin reflecting about the Earth in a general, open, student-like way, unfettered by disciplinary boundaries, deadlines, digitizing of information, free to think with head and heart, learning patterns from nature, insider and outsider. This is the beginning of your process of Distant Vision.

So, we come to caring - to the development of an ethic of care. Care is such a common word - like Time - that we often take it for granted, use it unthinkingly. The ethic of care is a line of thinking that came into academic discourse as a philosophe r Carol Gilligan tried to define a missing component in the abstract theories of ethics. Recently, Joan Tronto, a philosopher now at Hunter College, has thought through systematically about the components of care. "Caring," says Joan Tronto an d co-author Berenice Fisher, "is a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue and repair ‘our world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible". According to Tronto and Fisher, ".. that world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave into a complex, life-sustaining web." It is of interest to note what another author Thomas More points out in a book called, "Care of the Soul." He n otes that care and cure came from the same root. Reflect on it - cure is more akin to the technological paradigm by which we live most of the time. Care is the soulful, nurturing counterpart. Continuous care may be able to avoid need for cures.

Let me summarize Care using a picture that my friend Marina and I came up with to visualize how Tronto’s components of care may be focused to produce action. Tronto’s four components of care are: attentiveness, responsibility, competence an d responsiveness. Attentiveness is the listening - to the need, the distress signals; responsibility is taking responsibility for responding, for acting, to attend to the needs. Note the third component - competence - this is one of the primary but ofte n missing elements of caring. I won’t dwell on it here, except to say that competence -- understanding the topic -- is central to caring and therefore to activism; and finally noting if the care is received - the response. Marina and I picture the process of caring as a focusing of these 4 aspects through an ethos of integrity to produce the result of care. As students, or indeed as people, if you care about something, this is a good prescription to keep in mind - and to remember that Care, like everything else, begins at home!

Let me come now to the final point - of the need to keep questions alive - I won’t belabor it, but just remind you that the spirit of student activism lies in being a student as well as in action. So, at the heart of student activism is caring an d being ready to learn. In his book, "Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind", Shunryu Suzuki says, " The goal of practice is always to keep our beginner’s mind … In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities; in the expert&# 146;s mind there are few." It is the beginner’s mind that gives student activism particular value.

Let me leave you with a verse that Charlie Post, a student, sent me because he said that Rilke makes this point better than I can. It curiously combines all the four aspects I just described. Let me leave you with this poem to keep in mind as the bas is for student - or any other — activism:

"Be patient
toward all that is unsolved
in your heart.
Try to love the questions themselves...
Do not now seek the answers Which cannot be given
Because you would not be able to live them
And the point is
To live everything.
Live the questions now.
Perhaps you will then
gradually
Without noticing it
Live along some distant day
Into the answers.
---- Rainer Maria Rilke

Thank you!