Autumn Conferring Ceremonies, 25 October 2012
Autumn Conferrings continue today at UCC and run until Wednesday 31 October 2012.
Autumn Conferrings continue today at UCC and run until Wednesday 31 October 2012.
Students from the College of Science, Engineering and Food Science will graduate with:
- School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences
-School of Mathematical Sciences
-School of Computer Science and Information Technology
-School of Food and Nutritional Sciences
-Dept. of Physics
-Dept. of Physics and School of Mathematical Sciences
The Conferring addresses will be delivered by Professor Matthijs Schouten, Professor of Ecology and Philosophy of Nature Restoration, Wageningen University (10.00am and 12.30pm).
Further information is available at: http://www.ucc.ie/en/whatson/Name-169260-en.html or see the live stream courtesy of Audio Visual Media Services and the Computer Centre at UCC: http://www.ucc.ie/en/live/
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Address by Professor Matthijs Schouten, Professor of Ecology and Philosophy of Nature Restoration, Wageningen University
Dr Murphy, Professor Fitzpatrick, Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen,
Two months ago a girl in a small town in the north-east of the Netherlands intended to invite a few facebook-friends to her sweet sixteenth party. She pressed a wrong button and the invitation went out to tens of thousands of people. On her birthday the small town was flooded by a few thousand eager youngsters looking for a party. Riots broke out and police forces from neighbouring cities had to be brought in to restore the peace.
We live in the age of information technology and global communication networks. New ideas, new thoughts – and birthday invitations for that matter – can be disseminated worldwide within seconds. But not only does our age show a dazzling flow of information. Also, the flow of goods and services has reached unparallelled proportions, both in scale and intensity.
The impact of these developments is mesmerizing. As was recently shown, ideas spread by social media have the power to bring down regimes within a few weeks. New developments in the fields of science and technology can be shared with the global community almost instantly. New products can rapidly find global markets.
But there is also a downside. In recent decades, a financial system could develop in the western world that became more and more disentangled from the reality of goods and services and its – inevitable – collapse is now having a global impact. The economic development, particularly of the developed countries, is causing an alarming loss of global biodiversity and is affecting the global climate.
Ladies and gentlemen graduates, you are going out into the world in challenging times. The present crises - financial, economic, ecological and climatic - seem depressing. What they tell us above all, however, is that change is needed urgently. A change towards sustainability, a change in worldview: we humans need to realize that we are part of a greater community of life and we need to find a balance between human development and ecological and planetary requirements.
Esteemed graduates, you can be part of that change.
Now, you may say: but what can I do with regard to the immense problems of our times? How can I change the system? Ladies and gentlemen, as we live in an age of global communication and connectivity, your ideas, your visions, your enterprises can have an impact beyond your wildest dreams.
Let me tell you about a project that I undertook and that developed beyond my wildest dreams. I came to Ireland in 1978 to study bogs. As in other NW-European countries, bogs have virtually disappeared through peat-cutting in the past; Ireland was generally considered to contain the last remaining intact bogs in the Atlantic region. Untill the seventies of the last century relatively little was known about their ecology. Therefore, the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands (from which I graduated) and University College Dublin set up a Ph.D. project focussing on bog vegetation. As I already had done some ecological work in Ireland for my M.Sc. project, I was elected for the peatland project. It was at that time generally assumed, both in Ireland and abroad, that intact bogs were still plentiful on the Emerald Isle. The first years of my research showed, however, that relatively few undamaged sites remained and that most of these were scheduled for development within the next decade.
Alarmed by these findings, I visited the scientific staff of the Natinal Parks and Wildlife Service. They were equally alarmed by the data, but they felt rather powerless as there was at that time hardly any budget for nature conservation and above all because they deemed it very difficult to get support for bog conservation in a country where bogs were tradtionally associated with poverty and backwardness and where the burning of turf generated a significant amount of the national energy demand.
I, therefore, tried to get help from Dutch and international nature conservation organizations. Their response was: it is useless what you are trying to do. You will never get enough public support. Bogs are simply not sexy enough. They are wet, dangerous and full of midges….
I refused to let it go and together with some college friends I set up the Dutch Foundation for the Conservation of Irish Bogs and rather naively we started a campaign. As no one would tell us what to do, we had to come up with our own ideas. We approached Dutch artists, explained the plight of Irish peatlands and asked them to donate works for a fundraising exhibition that we planned to organize. Many of them found the idea so extraordinary that they participated. We hired one of the biggest galleries in Amsterdam for a month and sent out a thousand invitations to all kinds of prominent people for the formal opening of the exhibition (we had been told that no more than 20% of invitees would turn up). More then 800 people appeared at the gallery and in one day most of the art was sold. A prominent Dutch choreographer was so fascinated by this event that she created a ballet, on music by the Cork composer Seán Ó Riada and with costumes in the colour of peatmosses, which was performed at various fundraising events. We came up with the idea to sell symbolic shares in Irish bog reserves. For 25 guilders people could ‘buy’ 20 m2 of a future reserve. We sold many thousands of them.
After five years we had raised sufficient funds to acquire four endangered sites in Ireland. We rented a castle in the Netherlands as a venue, flew over a plane full of Irish dignitaries, including the Minister of State responsible for nature conservation, and asked HRH Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands to formally hand over the four sites as a gift from the Dutch people to the Irish people. We had also flown in journalists from all Irish media, who – of course – found the event so ludicrous that they reported extensively on it. The Minister, rather taken aback by all the media attention, declared that he would start a national bog conservation programme aiming at the conservation of 40,000 ha of peatland within 10 years. He held his promise. One after the other bog reserve was established. Bog conservation became a formal government policy and in 1990 Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands on her state visit to Ireland put on her wellies and took a walk into Roundstone Bog. Bogs had become sexy!
Ladies and gentlemen graduates, when you consider that this could be achieved within ten years in a time when communication networks were more limited and the dissemination of information much slower than presently, just imagine what you can do now! Let yourself not be weighted down by the present mood of crisis. Let the crisis inspire you to find new paths. I am part of the panel that each year chooses the 100 Dutch individuals who in that year have contributed most to sustainability. More than 60% of the people on that list are young graduates who have set up their own businesses, their own consultancies, their own training institutes which all express a new perspective on human development, a development that finds a balance between economy and ecology, between human wellbeing and planatery requirements. Not only have they created viable enterprises, they are also changing our society.
May I end with two quotes by individuals who stand out as giants in the history of science. Quotes that give us an insight not into their scientific minds, but into their human hearts.
Charles Darwin wrote in one of his journals: “One of the most important lessons that the theory of evolution teaches me is that nature has not been created for the benefit of humankind, but that man and all other species are part of one great community of life which shares life as well as death, joy as well as pain.”
Albert Einstein remarked in one of his diaries: “A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
Esteemed graduates, if you go out into the world bearing this in mind, then you will be the change that is most urgently needed at this point in time.
Thank you.
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