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0:27
>> NANCY C. TUCHMAN: President Rooney, Provost Grzywacz, guests of honor, Institute of Environmental Sustainability faculty and staff, and most importantly, graduates and your families. This commencement ceremony celebrates the seventh and last graduating class of the Institute of Environmental Sustainability. Next year, your IES will transition to school status and become Loyola University Chicago's School of Environmental Sustainability. I like how that sounds.
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You can be proud of the growth and development of your alma mater. We are graduating 100 students this year, students who stand shoulder to shoulder with us on environmental protection and environmental justice, students who are agents of change for a cleaner, healthier, and more just and sustainable world. They are educated in the interdisciplinary aspects of our environmental issues, the science, policy, ethics, economics, and cultural dimensions of nature, and
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they have demonstrated their entrepreneurial talents developing solutions to environmental problems. What's most inspiring is their drive to devote their lives to caring for and with others. In the spirit of Pope Francis' encyclical Laudato Si', these 100 are among those who are prepared to put their care for our common home into meaningful action. To the Institute of Environmental Sustainability's graduates, I wish you the wisdom to recognize and value above all what is true, just, and
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good, the courage to remain true to your value in the face of challenge and adversity, and a love of life that continues to inspire you to work in the service of creation and humanity. On behalf of the faculty and staff of the Institute of Environmental Sustainability, I congratulate you on your graduation from Loyola and wish you the best of luck with your very promising futures. I would now like to invite our student speaker, Isabelle Abbott, to share a message with the class of 2020.
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>> ISABELLE ABBOTT: I am humbled to have the opportunity to speak today. Of course, I never dreamed that I would give my commencement remarks through a screen in my parents' house, and it is a bit bittersweet not to share this moment with the Class of 2020 in person. But that doesn't mean we can't celebrate the accomplishments of our time here at Loyola University Chicago. The class of 2020 will be remembered by many as the class who graduated during a global pandemic that changed the world.
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However, I want us to be remembered as the class that came out of the pandemic equipped with love, community, a sense of justice, and the sustainability know-how to make the world not only changed, but better. My passion for the environment came from growing up with my immigrant grandmother who came to the United States a year after my mom emigrated here from Azerbaijan. The conversations we have in IES about the reduction of food waste, elimination of single-use plastics, and
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conservation in general were values embodied in my grandmother. Immigrant grandmas are America's best conservationists, in my opinion. My grandma always reminded me that many, many people worked very hard to bring the food that we share at our table. I was taught that many things are reusable if you take good enough care of them. I learned early in my life that how we think of our environment and resources is dictated by our culture and it is our culture that needs to change.
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Whatever your story may be, that passion is what brought you here four years ago to pursue your education at the Institute of Environmental Sustainability and kept you going to graduate today. This passion changed from a wide-eyed love of nature to a realization that we don't have a lot of time to stop climate change, that moment when we became deeply aware of the scale and scope of human impact. In the last 50 years, humans made choices that damaged
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10,000 years of balance with nature, and the choices that we make in the next decade will decide the outcome of the next 10,000 years. Last year, climate scientists gave us a number. Eleven. Eleven years to make a change to avoid a catastrophic climate disaster. We now have ten years. However, since that number was given, the world was halted due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In three months of staying home, we see the changes to our global ambient air and water quality. It is still not enough.
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Together, we have the power to solve this climate crisis. Every single one of us has a role to make a better future. When we learn about the progressive movements in American history, it is easy to see these social transformations as inevitable in retrospect. Of course, it seems like common sense and just a matter of time to abolish slavery, to grant women the right to vote, to extend civil rights to Americans, to black Americans, queer Americans, disabled Americans, and immigrants.
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But as we see today from the Black Lives Matter Movement, this commitment to dismantle existing power structures and create real social change brings strength and passion, collaboration, empathy, and courage of thousands of people. By taking our place in the fight for climate justice, we learn what others before us had to overcome. The time is now for there is a long and growing list of responsibilities that we need to take on, especially us, those who have the privilege of education.
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The degree we receive today is not the end; it is the beginning. It gives us skills and knowledge that will be put to work for the benefit of the communities we seek to serve. We must have the curiosity to learn and the humility to know that we will never truly understand what it is like to walk in someone else's shoes. As we watch the Black Lives Matter Movement grow, and it has become uncomfortably clear to many Americans that our political system was not designed to protect all of
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us, not only are black Americans disproportionately impacted by police brutality, mass incarceration, and the inequitable enforcement of laws by our judicial system, but they are the first to be exposed to other flaws in our system, including environmental degradation. Environmental harm unduly falls on black communities and people of color because of racial discrimination in housing, land use, and the lack of representation in political leadership.
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In the south and west sides of the city of Chicago, environmental racism is on full display. Black children drink water poisoned with lead from outdated infrastructure in their homes and schools. Black children do not get the nutrition they need from living in food deserts. Black children are denied the opportunity to live in healthy, sustainable, and safe communities. One in three black children are suffering from asthma from air pollution and high levels of particulate matter
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in their neighborhoods. Our current laws allow zoning policies that place transportation centers, industrial areas, and point source pollutants in black communities. Even though they make up 30% of our city's population, 60% of those who lost their lives to COVID-19 were black due to this predisposition to asthma and COPD from their ecosystem. They can't breathe. It is an ugly reality that the color of one's skin dictates their ecosystem, their safety, their health, and their future.
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To be an environmentalist means to be anti-racist. There is a direct relationship between climate justice and racial justice. You cannot fight climate justice and not advocate for the rights of black, indigenous, and people of color. Black Lives Matter. To say All Lives Matter in the face of relentless brutality and environmental injustice against black Americans is a cynical admission that black lives are excluded from all. It was said by Dr. Robert Bullard that no community
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should be seen as compatible with pollution and poison. Though sustainability is the light that guides us in our passions as graduates of the IES, we must add a focus to that light. We must focus on racial justice. At Loyola University Chicago, we have learned to lead a life committed to social justice, and in this radical giving of ourselves to others brings us such unequivocal meaning and joy. We must commit ourselves to love, community, and justice.
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This commitment to others will navigate us through these challenging times and our education at the Institute of Environmental Sustainability gave us the knowledge and core values we need to thrive in this world and change it for better. Thank you. And congratulations to the Class of 2020. I would now like to invite our keynote speaker, J. Drew Lanham, to share a message with the Class of 2020.
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>> J. DREW LANHAM: Welcome, Loyola Institute of Environmental Sustainability Class of 2020, to the revolution. And yes, my friends, it is being televised. Beyond your hard-earned degrees, the days, months, and years of personal and familial sacrifice to earn this esteemed reward, I would like for you to forget for a moment the parchment about to be conferred upon you. Set aside the virtual pomp and circumstance we are sharing today. I want you for a few moments, from wherever
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you're participating in this ceremony, to cast your caps and gowns off, roll your sleeves up, and prepare for some very hard and dirty work ahead. I want you to hold your smiles and pride in abeyance for just a bit as we consider the times. I want you to hold off on your well-deserved socially distanced celebrations for just a few more moments as we think hard on virulence, civil disobedience, and peaceful protest. I want you, for a moment, to hold your breaths, because
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if you're of a certain skin tone in this country, the next one is not guaranteed beyond eight minutes and 46 seconds. If you will, for just a moment, think about why you truly took this course of action to begin again to take on this journey into a world of worry and hurting. I want you to task yourselves with dissatisfaction of the status quo. I would ask that you take a seriously long look in your mirrors to understand your privileges, then boldly
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leverage that privilege into action to make the world better beyond you leaving Loyola than you found coming to it. Yes, this is your commencement, the start of lives beyond higher education, of training, and hopefully a new era of enlightenment, illumination, and activism that will take you beyond theories and books to a life in practice. Let's talk about life as practice for a moment. My professional practice as a cultural and conservation ornithologist and writer leads me to tell the stories
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of how we can do better by birds and how birds can lead us to better understanding of ourselves. My practice is one of conveying how convergences bring worlds into colliding. As we proclaim that Black Lives Matter, we must fully acknowledge the past, the present, and future significance of that immutable fact, but then we must all expand our being beyond whatever skins we're in to become nurturers of this earth, to become stewards and caretakers of this one precious earth,
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understanding that in any work we do beyond degrees conferred, that ultimately we, you, have this life you live now to unite, to be better in ways that my generation failed, to cool things down that we've heated up, to quell the fears, to dam the rising floods. I think about birds. I write about birds. But why do such a thing in such turbulent times? How does one focus on such seemingly esoteric things now? These days, birds are a constant salve that sometimes ease the strains.
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Birds are the distraction that make bitter human realities more bearable. Birds give me hope in something beyond the persistent range wide hate that these days comes in waves. It is hard to convey the damage and deep-wearing impact that day after day of pestilence, profiling, political malpractice, and persecution has on mindset and body-being. We all feel it each day and it demands an energy that takes away from life, liberty, or any hopes of pursuing happiness, more for some of us than others.
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So why do I write about birds? It's because I seek the solace of nature and birds to keep me sane and safe within my own inner sanctum of wildness. I crave birds like water. I long for birds as a lover would the other half. In those times when I cannot bear firsthand witness to inhumane human realities and the avian realities are unreachable, writing must suffice. When I can bring identification from field guide to feeling guide and bring that consciousness to everyone, I've done my job.
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And so I write about birds. I write for birds. I write to birds. I write in poem and prose. I word-craft in short form, in social media, and long essay. The difficulty in watching is the ever-degrading context that makes the joy seem insular. We are these days grieving loss and losing ground in the mourning. We watch it all from islands of quarantine surrounded by a world that seems ever to be falling down in pieces around us. But birds are an escape to a reality boiled down to
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beautiful simplicity. Whether pigeon flying through urban concrete canyon or peregrine falcon stooping on Arctic wilderness slope, the imperative to thrive does not change. It shouldn't for us. But just as I write to that simple beauty, I must also wind the daily toxic streams of news that pass through my mental binocular view. I must write to the violence, of racial injustices, and hash-tagged movements. It is the socio-politically fragmented and climate-
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inflamed Anthropocene landscape over which we are all migrating and so cannot be ignored. To write about birds and not about their struggles would be akin to writing about black people as if enslavement and Jim Crow and police brutality and mass incarceration never existed. I'm hoping we have learned better in the past few months. And so I write for birds. I write to birds. It is because birds will not profile or persecute or imprison me. Birds will not call me out of my name nor build prisons
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on the prospects of my son's third-grade test scores. Birds will not deny me clean drinking water or dirty my air or flood them with fast food and liquor instead of good, whole, affordable nutrition. Birds will not widen disparities of health, wealth, and wellbeing that cause my life and other black lives to be shorter, less joyful, and ultimately matter less to the majority. Birds will not red-line or gerrymander or render me politically powerless.
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Birds will not burn crosses in the night or raise battle flags claiming heritage, not hate. And so I will write about, for, and to birds because they are my last best hope for deities here on Earth. Beyond the fated disappointment of humans who will fail, birds never do. I ask nothing of them, and they give me everything. The only possible way for them to fail me is if they cease to be. And so I must work to make sure that such a thing does not happen. Conservation is the end game.
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And so I will watch and revere and write. I will love birds and all they bring to my life. And so I ask you, what will your practices be? What purposes written beyond the new letters attached to your names will your degrees yield? I ask you now for a moment to imagine yourselves as birds. I ask you for the moment to take on feathers and wings, that your voices cease speaking and that your words become songs and calls. It is time now for you to journey forward beyond this
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hatching, beyond this nest. And so here you are, poised on the edges of a great migration outward into a world of storms. You face headwinds of hate and bigotry and bias. Stretched before you is a yawning gulf of environmental laws and policies rolled back, such that the distant shores where you might land are further away for your flocks than they have ever been. The water is less clean. The air less breathable. The soil is poisoned and won't grow crops.
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The wild things find fewer places to dwell and many slide towards a forever imperiled extinction end, yet here you are, restless and eager, though unknowing what the journey across that gulf of challenge will hold. Like some migratory bird, zugunruhe, that wing-flicking, chirping restlessness rules your very lives right now and you cannot resist the urge to take off, to leave the certainty and safety of what has been to fly off into what might be. The tailwind of a better future blows warmly
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at your backs. Can you feel it gently blowing the feathers on your neck? You flap your wings once, twice, now thousands of times. You look beyond yourself and see before you a dark night, but there are stars above to guide you. Those that have come before, Thoreau, Whitman, Douglass, Tubman Leopold Carson, Carver Wilson Chavez Seattle, Carter, they are the ink black stars in the sky over your head. You will fly on, even as exhaustion buffets you and there is no place to land, only open sea.
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Fly on, remembering the promise of better tomorrows you will be responsible for. Fly on. Look to your right shoulder, then to your left. Know that behind you and before you are others flocking, millions flocking in protest, flying to the same destination of peace and justice and equal rights for us all. Fly on, even as predators would stalk you. Seek to discredit who you are by your skin color or gender or non-gender being. Fly on. Fly on, my friends, to greater and to a purpose
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that bends towards equality and towards justice, towards a world that sees nature as a right, a nation that understands the critical importance of clean air and clean water and clean soil, as inalienable rights that are as critical as those of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. As you fly on, Loyola Class of 2020, please know that your challenges will grow larger before they abate. The gulf is indeed a large one. The fragments of goodness where you might land and
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rest ever harder to find in a world where others might build walls to keep you out, but then you must rise higher. Take respite where you will in the draft of flock mates if you must, but fight on because your cause and purpose is greater than the challenge and the hurdles. You are ready for this. We fly on together, you, me, all of those kindred spirits looking forward to a better horizon. We are proudest of you all. To the faculty, to the staff, family and friends
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who have supported you, fly on. Congratulations, Loyola Institute of Environmental Sustainability 2020. Fly on. Celebrate and then get to work. Fly on. Thank you. I would like now to invite Dean Tuchman to give some final remarks to the Class of 2020.
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>> NANCY C. TUCHMAN: We would now like to recognize the 2020 graduates from the Institute of Environmental Sustainability.
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>> SPEAKER: I would now like to present the candidates for the degree of Bachelor of Arts Environmental Policy. [Reading of Graduate Names]
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>> SPEAKER: I would now like to present the candidates for the degree of Bachelor of Arts Environmental Studies. [Reading of Graduate Names]
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>> SPEAKER: I would now like to present the candidates for the degree of Bachelor of Science Environmental Science. [Reading of Graduate Names]
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>> SPEAKER: I would now like to present the candidates for the degree of Bachelor of Science Environmental Science: Conservation and Restoration Ecology. [Reading of Graduate Names]
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>> SPEAKER: I would now like to present the candidates for the degree of Bachelor of Science Environmental Science: Food Systems and Sustainable Agriculture. [Reading of Graduate Names]
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>> SPEAKER: I would now like to present the candidates for the degree of Bachelor of Science Environmental Science: Public Health. [Reading of Graduate Names]
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