Silver Challenges Graduates to Save "The Four Elements"
Pamela Silver, professor of biology in the School of Science at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College, delivered the college's 2007 commencement address, titled “The Four Elements: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water,” to 459 graduates and hundreds of family, friends, faculty and staff. Penn State Behrend conferred 500 degrees at its spring 2007 ceremony and a total of 700 degrees for the 2006-07 academic year.
Penn State Behrend Commencement Address
Pamela Silver, professor of biology
Saturday, May 19, 2007
Most lives have 3 stages—youth, adult and elder—and, in spite of what the commercials tell us, each stage is important and beautiful.
Those of you graduating today are mostly youths. Your responsibilities have been toward yourselves. You have been nurtured and loved by your parents. You have absorbed the values and behaviors needed to be a part of our culture. You have been given access to the knowledge and tools that you will need as adults. You have worried about who you are and what role you have to play in the adult world. You were our future.
Now, you are entering the world of your parents. Your responsibilities will be toward your children and other members of our society. You will be expected to use the knowledge and tools you have acquired to nurture and love your children. You will be called upon to make great personal sacrifices, ethical choices, and weighty decisions about how to keep our society alive and vigorous, and you will have to work hard to ensure a future for your children. You might be worried about “finding yourself,” but you will be very busy just being who you are and making ends meet. You are now part of our present.
Many of you here are, or soon will be, elders. Your responsibilities are to remember, to advise, and to provide a moral and ethical compass for the youths and adults of our society. You are our collective memory. You remember the 40s, 50s, 60s, and 70s as part of the “real” world and not as history. You have successfully raised your children. You have perspective and the wisdom that comes with a lifetime of moral struggle. You have the strength and courage to speak hard truths. You understand that everyone who is born must someday die, and that what matters is how you live the life you are given. You know who you were and who you became. You are our past.
I am now an elder of this society. My speech is dedicated to two youths whose joy in life, courage and determination touched me deeply as I made the transition from mother to elder. They are Gregory, who could not be here, and Birgitta, who could.
I want you to take a moment to think of four or five things that you could not live without. I’ll start: oxygen, water, food, shelter, an energy source...so we end up with Earth—a place to put our feet, our source of nutrients, our only home; air—the source of the oxygen we breathe and the carbon dioxide that plants use to make organic molecules that we eat; water—the solvent needed for all of our body’s biochemical reactions; and fire—the ultimate source of warmth and energy for most processes on Earth comes from the Sun.
The problem is that all of these things—Earth, air, fire, and water—are undervalued in our society. We do not hesitate to sacrifice them for the things we want. We use and degrade drinking water to grow green lawns in the desert. We contaminate our air with soot, toxic chemicals and waste gases so that we can watch NASCAR and inhale carcinogens with our cigarettes. We pollute the Earth with pesticides so that we can play golf on perfect grass. We convert functioning ecosystems into roads, parking lots and buildings. We pollute the air with greenhouse gases instead of using energy from the Sun.
Why? We act this way because the things we NEED seem readily available. We take them for granted. They appear to be “free” and in endless supply, and therefore, they have no obvious economic value. On the other hand, the things we WANT—apparently perpetual youth and beauty, wide-screen televisions, vacations, computers, cigarettes, cosmetics, fancy cars, and DVDs—are expensive. We pay dearly for them and they give us status, and therefore, they have economic value. We want them to cost as little as possible, so we take ethical short-cuts to get them. We fail to account for all of the costs of producing goods and disposing of waste; we trade short-term benefits for long-term costs; we trade our future for our present.
I am an aquatic ecologist who studies biofilms, the microscopically thin world of tiny organisms living on the surfaces of plants, rocks and mud at the bottoms of lakes, streams and wetlands. In this world, organisms interact in highly complex ways to affect each other and the biofilm in which they live. Some of the organisms are “ecosystem engineers.” They control who can and cannot live in the biofilm by modifying its structure. Others are “keystone species” and control who can and cannot live there by who they eat or by competitive interactions. Many are tiny chemists and control the amount of oxygen or the availability of important nutrients like nitrogen or carbon. These organisms live and interact in ways that are easily disrupted, but the results of the disruptions are not easily predicted. Sometimes the world recovers, but often it is irreversibly changed so that the original species can no longer survive there, and new species must arrive to build a new world.
We live in a biofilm, and it includes and depends on the smaller biofilms that I study. The organisms in our biofilm also are engaged in a dynamic dance, and the pattern of the dance maintains the air we breathe, the nutrients we need, the water we drink, and our sources of energy. We are ecosystem engineers and keystone species, but we are utterly dependent on the other species in our biofilm for our existence.
In 1950, there were about 3 billion people in the world. Now there are more than 6 billion. By 2050, there probably will be about 9 or 10 billion, the estimated carrying capacity of the Earth for humans eating a vegetarian diet. We are a species that is now a geophysical force on this planet. We changed the global climate through the Greenhouse Effect; we altered the way incoming solar radiation reaches the Earth by creating a hole in the ozone layer; we significantly changed the nitrogen cycle, the carbon cycle and the hydrologic cycle. The Colorado River no longer flows reliably to the sea. Eighty percent of the 50,000 miles of river in China is incapable of supporting fish. Much of the life-giving topsoil and nutrients of the Great Plains are in the Gulf of Mexico where they have created a vast “dead zone.” We destroyed 50 percent of the world’s forests, most of them in the temperate zone where we live, in the last 5,000 years. We raised the global extinction rate to 1,000 times background levels, a rate that far exceeds the rate at the time when dinosaurs went extinct. We need other species to maintain our biofilm and its complex, life-sustaining processes if we are to survive on Earth. And those organisms need the same things we do—Earth, air, fire, and water—readily available, clean and in the right amounts.
Your professors gave you a liberal arts education. We exposed you to ethics, literature, history, language, mathematics, psychology, science, politics, the arts, and economics. We taught you to communicate effectively with each other through the written and spoken word. We provided this kind of education because the solutions to the critical problems you will face as adults lie in diverse disciplines. You know much about your specialty, but you also know enough about many other areas to be able to think critically, analytically and synthetically about the problems we face.
The problems are us, and the solutions are in us and in our diversity. We cannot waste the minds of any segment of our society. Species with high levels of genetic diversity have higher overall fitness than those that do not. Societies with high levels of cultural diversity have greater chances of solving problems than those that do not. We need each of your strengths, each of your specialties, each of your minds, and all of your hands to protect the things that are necessary for the survival and success of your children. You must approach the problems we face by giving the things we need—Earth, air, fire, and water—their true value and by remembering the difference between “I want” and “We need.” Our future and that of your children depends on your individual decision to use and to act on the knowledge and the tools that we gave you. You are no longer youths. You are adults. As an elder, I charge you with the responsibility of saving the world for your children.
Pamela Silver says her teaching philosophy emphasizes ethics, critical thinking, and the joy that comes with knowing how things work. With an academic career that spans more than three decades, she earned her doctorate degree in biology from the University of South Florida in Tampa and a B.A. in biology from Trenton State College in New Jersey. During the 17-year span in between, Silver served as a medical technologist specializing in blood banking, and earned a master’s in botany. Silver was awarded the Penn State Behrend Council of Fellows Faculty Research Award in 2002 and the Council of Fellows Excellence in Teaching Award in 1996.