It's Graduation Day at Humboldt State.  The ceremonies are held by college divisions, beginning in the morning and continuing into late afternoon.  I happened to be walking along the soon to be empty streets of Arcata as the last batch was leaving, heading for cars and apartments and restaurants, caps in hand.  None of them I saw was smiling.

There haven't been too many graduation days in recent years opening to robust economic opportunity.  And there are other factors that have prompted fear as well as hope.  I spent my college graduation day watching Bobby Kennedy's funeral.

Humboldt State is not known for bringing in graduation speakers, as least of general note.  But considering the future these graduates face, I thought today of one they could have easily had, who might have given them some genuinely encouraging words about that future.

Author Kim Stanley Robinson, who lives down the coast at Davis, was actually here just last week.  He spoke before a fairly small crowd on campus and then read at Northtown Books.  He was invited, not by any university group or entity, but by an outside environmental organization.  His talk on the economics of the near future was a variation on one that he gave to a different sort of audience in 2011, which is available for viewing   on YouTube.

This 2011 talk was framed as a thought experiment about an optimal future 200 years from now.  He spoke of the economics of getting there, though he said that the exact economic system--which would have to be post-capitalist--is unclear: he called it X.  But notably his vision of that future was less about a system and more about how life would be in a post-consumerist future, where pleasure would be derived from friends, family and community, sports and other activities, rather than buying things.  His novel Pacific Edge fills in a future like this.  

He ended this 2011 talk this way (more or less, this is my transcription) by addressing the students in the audience, in an authentic message that today's graduates should hear :  "The idea that the 1950s were the height of human culture and that we accidentally torched the world and now all you kids have to live like saints and have a lower standard of living than what we had back in those days--it's all wrong in three or four different ways that I hope my talk has elucidated.  Once you've got enough, once you've got the technology growing, once you're engaged in the process of making a sustainable civilization on this planet, you've got more than enough, you've got it better than it was back in the Cold War."

"It's more clever, it's more sophisticated, it's cleaner, it's more stylish--you have all the happiness without so much of the stupid ambition and the waste of your life doing stuff that you don't really want to do, in getting and spending and staying in a money economy that doesn't mean anything to you--we want meaning in our lives.  And making a sustainable civilization, which is now an emergency task, is all the meaning we need. 

 It's a beautiful meaning, and so in a way climate change, the environmental crisis, the tremendously fraught moment that we find ourselves in right now, is really just an opportunity for us to have meaning throughout our careers.  It's meaningful work, and it extends across all disciplines--it's in the sciences, it's in engineering, it's in the humanities, in the arts--all are going to be concerned with getting us through the next century alive and healthy and headed towards this next system, this X that I've been talking about."