“You are brilliant, and the earth is hiring.”

Excerpt from the commencement Address to the Class of 2009, University of Portland, May 3rd, 2009 By Paul Hawken. For the full address, (highly recomended) click HERE.

Working for the earth is not a way to get rich, it is a way to be rich. The first living cell came into being nearly 40 million centuries ago, and its direct descendants are in all of our bloodstreams. Literally you are breathing molecules this very second that were inhaled by Moses, Mother Teresa, and Bono. We are vastly interconnected. Our fates are inseparable. We are here because the dream of every cell is to become two cells. In each of you are one quadrillion cells, 90 percent of which are not human cells. Your body is a community, and without those other microorganisms you would perish in hours. Each human cell has 400 billion molecules conducting millions of processes between trillions of atoms. The total cellular activity in one human body is staggering: one septillion actions at any one moment, a one with twenty-four zeros after it. In a millisecond, our body has undergone ten times more processes than there are stars in the universe exactly what Charles Darwin foretold when he said science would discover that each living creature was a “little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars of heaven.”   (Continue)

2 Responses to ““You are brilliant, and the earth is hiring.””


  1. 1 Julian C

    Pretty amazing speech.

  2. 2 ian

    those are some righteous words

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