Writer Barbara Kingsolver Urges Graduates to End Dependence on Fossil Fuel

On a rainy Mother's Day morning on which umbrellas were more obvious than mortarboards, writer Barbara Kingsolver urged Duke University graduates to reject the current paradigm of success and to turn to a more sustainable, community-oriented lifestyle.

"Imagine it: we raised you on a lie," Kingsolver told the graduates. "Everything you plug in, turn on or drive, the out-of-season foods you eat, the music in your ears. We gave you this world and promised you could keep it running on: a fossil substance. Dinosaur slime, and it's running out."

Duke awarded more than 4,000 undergraduate, graduate and professional degrees during a chilly, drizzly Sunday morning ceremony in Wallace Wade Stadium. It was the university's 156th commencement.

Duke President Richard H. Brodhead awarded five honorary degrees: in addition to Kingsolver, degrees were awarded to author Wendell Berry, public health leader Helene Gayle, broadcast executive James Goodmon and judge Patricia Wald.

Brodhead introduced Kingsolver, whose daughter Camille is a student at Duke. Kingsolver's most recent book, written with her daughter and husband, Steven L. Hopp, is "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life." It chronicles the family's commitment to eat only food produced by themselves and their neighbors in southwestern Virginia.

Kingsolver told the graduates to embrace their recent experience of living in a shared, communal space, and to reject the "big, lonely house" that is the usual measure of American success.

"That will be central question of your adult life: to escape the wild rumpus of carbon-fuel dependency, in the nick of time. You'll make rules that were previously unthinkable, imposing limits on what we can use and possess. You will radically reconsider the power relationship between humans and our habitat," she said.

"The arc of history is longer than human vision. It bends. We abolished slavery, we granted universal suffrage. We have done hard things before. And every time it took a terrible fight between people who could not imagine changing the rules, and those who said, ‘We already did. We have made the world new.' The hardest part will be to convince yourself of the possibilities, and hang on. If you run out of hope at the end of the day, rise in the morning and put it on again with your shoes."

Prior to Kingsolver's address, student speakers Matt Zafirovski and Kyle Knight, who have been friends since they were freshman roommates, took turns delivering a humorous, back-and-forth speech. They joked about life on campus -- - like the day Knight, who grew up in a tiny town in Maine and didn't own a cellphone, received his Duke iPod.

"I tried not to laugh at the time; I just plugged it into his computer and programmed iTunes," Zafirovski said. "I wondered whether Kyle was playing a joke on me. Sometimes I still do."

Taking a more serious turn, the pair urged their fellow graduates to "be aware and be present."

"We are an ambitious and driven group, and we should be proud of our audacious goals. But our success will also be defined by how well we maintain a healthy perspective on our work, by how well we build relationships through support and generosity, and by how well we remain present and aware as we grow and change."

In addition to forming a lasting friendship, Zafirovski and Knight assisted the women's basketball team by playing in the team's practice scrimmages. They both also assisted Durham high school students with college applications through the Duke Black Law Students Association.

In introducing the student speakers, Duke Provost Peter Lange praised the two young men, saying each had "seized different experiences" during their time at Duke, but that both had made the most of time in the classroom and in the world. After spending a semester studying abroad in Nepal, Knight returned to that country on a grant from the Duke Global Health Institute to study the social stigma surrounding disabilities. Zafirovski spent a summer in Chicago learning about the city's inner-city schools through Duke's Hart Leadership Program.