An occasional column of faculty opinion

To the Class of 2001: Conservation Includes Culture and Spirit

By Jarold Ramsey

The following essay is excerpted from the 2001 Commencement address to bachelor's and master's degree candidates delivered by Jarold Ramsey, professor emeritus of English.

 

Ramsey

In the 1970s (for reasons I won't go into) Rochester's graduation speakers were all conservative University of Chicago economists. The faculty, having no voice in the selection of speakers then, discreetly rebelled by organizing a lottery based on guessing the exact length of the Commencement address. The lottery "kitty" became quite substantial-several hundred dollars as I recall-and faculty attendance dramatically improved, delighting the president and deans, who of course didn't know the reason why. The fun ended with one especially long and tedious speech. Far from being bored by it, the faculty-seated in those days behind the University dignitaries on the stage of Eastman Theatre-became more and more attentive, looking at their watches, calculating . . . . At last the speech ended, and in that moment of silence between the speaker's last words and the onset of polite applause, a faculty voice rang out, "I've won!"

But seriously, that spontaneous cry of triumph, "I've won!", does express what we rightly celebrate with each commencement. In terms of what has been so honorably concluded, and what is so bravely beginning, we can all claim to be winners in the event-graduates, and all of us who are well-wishers, and indeed society at large, which sorely needs new energy, skills, and idealism.

In my brief fling at offering commencement wisdom, I only want to recommend a certain habit of mind, an attitude, as graduates prepare to take up their careers and their lives. It is a habit of mind that is probably not going to sound very bold or heroic or sexy alongside the usual stirring challenges flung to graduates, but to my mind it is nonetheless critical now, absolutely critical for the future.

I am talking about conservation-defined as the protection and stewardship of shared resources. In the past two decades, we have begun to realize that we are in an environmental crisis without historical precedent. I think we Americans do know this is happening, on some level of collective awareness-certainly the scientific evidence for it is compelling, if we study it-but yet somehow we continue to waste and pollute our environmental inheritance with a recklessness that would seem insane, if it weren't such a habit.

So why is the cause of environmental conservation losing ground on nearly every front? Some of the reasons are of course bound up in our economics and our politics, but I think there is another kind of reason for our inertia-cultural and spiritual rather than social. It is that we tend to be as wasteful and profligate with our cultural resources as we are with those of the biosphere.

There is, I believe, an ecology of mind, memory, and imagination, just as there is an ecology of land, water, air, and biota. Indeed, as the poet Gary Snyder has been saying for years, the two kinds of knowing and remembering are very closely related, and the moral imperatives of one are implicated in those of the other. In this view, true conservation involves the inner realms of the spirit and the imagination as well as the outer realms of the biosphere.

Cultivating and conserving the apparently inexhaustible but often wasted resources of the human spirit may well teach us how to better conserve the all-too-clearly limited and exhaustible resources of the world around, under, and above us. The energy in art, in music, in speculative thinking, in poetry-that energy is real, and sustainable, and it can show us the way. As Snyder writes in his essay "As for Poets," "Poetry is for all men and women. The power within-the more you give, the more you have to give-will still be our source when coal and oil are long gone, and atoms are left to spin in peace."

I hope that in your studies at Rochester, with its magnificent resources, you have experienced firsthand and actively something of the wonder of these inner and outer sources of human energy, and I hope that you will take into the great world an informed understanding of how crucially important the practice of conservation is to both.

In the old saying, we and the Earth are going to need all the help we can give each other. Poets and engineers, economists and musicians, religionists and chemists, executives and politicians -we will all need to be talking and listening to one another about finding terms of sustainability on this beautiful, and limited, "Spaceship Earth."

Permit me a final hope. As you set forth to do amazing and useful things (and I have no doubt that you will) I hope that you will carry from this University, in all that you do, a commitment to teach. For teaching is, after all, the ultimate art of conservation: When we teach others (whether formally in the classroom or informally on the job or the home or anywhere), we are conserving ideas and know-how, and more than that, especially with children, we may well be conserving minds.

So, go forth, well-taught and learned graduates, and keep learning, and offer yourselves as teachers when and where you can. Do so, and we who knew you as students will cry after you, like that exultant professor in the lottery, "We're winning!"

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