I’d like you all to think for a moment
about what you had for dinner last night
and contemplate this we all know that we
are what we eat but that’s not always a
good thing
so think as closely as you can about
what you had for dinner if you’re like
most Americans you had one of the three
primary food groups you had a hamburger
you had a piece of pizza or you had a
chicken nugget
or maybe you’re health-conscious and you
had a big salad with some lettuce and
tomatoes and maybe some sunflower seeds
because you’re health-conscious what I
would like you to think about is uh if
you can for a moment think about where
that food came from where did the
hamburger meat come from specifically
where did it come from what state did it
come from
if you had a piece of pizza where did
that flour come from where the tomato
sauce come from if you had a chicken
nugget what is a chicken nugget actually
and if your health conscious where did
that lettuce come from and how many
calories did you get from that lettuce a
couple calories right 1015 calories and
it probably was grown in California how
many calories of fossil fuels did it
take to get that lettuce to you so you
could have very few calories in your
meal or if you had a tomato what country
what continent to that tomato come from
if you ate it in March in Delaware where
no tomatoes grow this is what I want you
to think about and then I’d like you to
contemplate for a moment how many
generations of human beings in the
history of human beings have not been
able to tell you where their food came
from specifically like what farm grown
by what farmer in what season and the
answer that question is about three
generations of people about three
generations of human beings have not
been able to tell you where their food
came from and that has led to all kinds
of strange consequences that we are only
beginning to understand so what I would
like to suggest is that a lot of this
predicament that we find ourselves in
and I’m telling you it’s a very serious
predicament with all kinds of very dire
health consequences and environmental
consequences has its roots in the
post-world War two ERA so think about
this for a second before the 1940s most
Americans lived either in
city’s only lived on farms there was no
suburbia to speak of after the war we
came back after this trauma in Europe
and we learned a few things from the
Germans including how you can build an
infrastructure to defend yourself so we
built the interstate highway system now
you may not think of this but the
internet if you drive up and down i-95
on the east coast every now and then
you’ll see a road sign that says the
Eisenhower interstate highway system
with five stars in a circle those are
the five stars for Dwight Eisenhower’s
rank as the commanding officer of the
Allied forces the interstate highway
system was built in what we would now
think of as a measure of homeland
security to protect our country from
invasion to move troops and vehicles
around the country safely it’s forty
seven thousand miles long it connects
all the major cities in the United
States north-south east-west what it
allowed people to do for the first time
in American history was to work in the
city and build a house in what they used
to call the country so millions and
millions of people came back from the
war and they started to use these big
highways to build houses outside the
city and commute back into the city
that’s a story we are familiar with
that’s how suburbia was born what’s less
understood is that we turned four
million small farms into tens of
millions of houses so the joke nowadays
or it has been for 30 or 40 years is
that farms on the East Coast don’t grow
food they grow houses so most of my
students at the University of Delaware
grew up in places like this in a
subdivision that was built sometime in
the last 20 30 or 40 years our land
was totally transformed in this period
from farms and forests into housing and
shopping malls this is something we all
are familiar with we’ve all grown up
with it as if it is a given as if this
is the way the land has always been it
a consequence of this is that we all
became intensely internal interior
people we know this from many
best-selling books about how kids no
longer play in the woods they don’t even
have woods to play in anymore because we
cut them all down to turn them into
housing or into shopping malls what
happened then of course because all
these people in suburbia had to eat is
all the farms moved somewhere else all
the farms migrated I like to think of
like little beads of mercury all
migrating to the Midwest and instead of
4 million small farms growing a great
diversity of food now we have mega farms
growing basically three things corn
wheat and soybeans those are the
ingredients that make you think when you
walk into a supermarket and you see
something like 47,000 different products
for sale and in a supermarket you think
you’re being offered this great
diversity of food what you are actually
being offered is a great variety of
things made out of corn wheat and
soybeans that’s true for the food that
you eat whether it’s corn chips or
whether it’s the meat you eat because
all the meat that you’re eating whether
it’s beef or pork or chicken is it’s all
been fed these grains what’s happened in
addition to all of that of course we
know the health consequences of that
bean you know the national obesity rate
is going up all kinds of related
consequences for that but we’re also
looking at a dramatic centralization of
power into the hands of very few
companies that are selling us these
seeds which now of course are almost all
GMO and we are consolidating power in
the hands of a very few number of
companies so all these roads that we
built have led to a dramatic change in
the way we eat no people in the history
of humanity of eating the way we do most
of our meals now are even quickly and
cheaply and many of them are eaten in a
car it turns out because we like to
drive on all these big beautiful roads
and we don’t have time to sit down for a
nice meal so we got to go through the
drive-thru and get as much food as
quickly as you can and shove it down the
hole that’s how Americans eat we want
our food fast and we want it cheap
that’s we want and that’s what we get so
this system is perfectly designed to
deliver us cheap fast food
this food is not nutritious it is very
high in calories which is why the
American waistline has grown and why its
nutritional value has dropped this is
all because of an industrial food system
that is aggregated as I said because of
the construction of the roads which led
to the disappearance of the farms there
are all kinds of consequences one of
which is that we’ve dramatically reduced
the number of varieties of kinds of
fruit of foods that we are given access
to farmers are now planting 97% less
diverse crops than they used to
just thinking about apples we are now
eating 10% of the varieties of apples
that we used to eat before the war it’s
very convenient this way of eating it’s
very convenient it’s not particularly
flavorful and we know that it has
dramatic negative consequences for our
health
some people are becoming much more aware
of the damage that it’s doing to our
ecosystems as well but when I said we
are what we eat for better for worse it
also has to do with our identity and our
sense of ourselves this food is very
abstract ask a friend of mine is a
farmer she says sometimes she goes into
a high school in a city and she asks
students where potatoes come from and
kids raise their hand and say they think
they grow on trees and why would that be
well because most people if you think
about it maybe secretly admit this to
yourself and maybe you’ve never seen a
potato growing when you think of a
potato you think of it as a salted fried
slice in a vacuum sealed bag I hate to
break it to you but that’s what a real
potato looks like potatoes don’t grow on
trees they grow in the ground they come
out of the dirt and when kids especially
little kids discover this they get all
gross down they say oh I’m never I don’t
I don’t want eat that that’s an abstract
potato the other thing of course it’s
abstract in a much more dispiriting way
are the nine billion animals that
Americans consume every year these
animals are invisible and if you don’t
believe me think about when the last
time was that you saw the animal that
was turned into your hamburger and the
answer if I you’re on the East Coast is
never you’ve never seen that you may
have seen a cow and you may have seen a
hamburger but you haven’t seen what
happens in between
and that’s because we have a dramatic
network of infrastructure of roads and
railroads it’ll ship cattle out to the
Midwest where they get slaughtered they
get processed they get sent back to you
and you get to eat them free pre frozen
at a fast-food restaurant or in the
supermarket but the point is they’re
invisible now they didn’t they weren’t
always invisible
they’ve been invisible recently for the
first time in all of human history the
animals we eat are invisible now you may
or may not like that fact you may or may
not be a vegetarian you may or may not
be an enthusiastic meat-eater but the
invisibility of it is a problem it makes
all kinds of things possible that you
might not normally put up with for
example the treatment of most of these
animals or the land on which they are
raised or the treatment of the people
that are responsible for processing
these animals into the food that you eat
on the Eastern Shore of Maryland where
we we are here just to the east of us
there are five hundred and seventy
million chickens on any given day how
often have you seen them how often have
you been inside a chicken house to see
five hundred and seventy million Birds
never the answer is never because the
companies won’t let you in them so we
have these abstract thing is happening
our food comes from somewhere we have no
connection to it there are all these
consequences now we’re at the beginning
to understand like the dramatic decline
in the number of monarch butterflies now
what does that have to do with our diet
well monarchs essentially eat one kind
of plant it’s called milkweed milkweed
is something that grows on the side of
farms or grow it used to grow all around
North America now because we spray our
crops with so many herbicides to kill
the weeds to support the soybeans we are
killing all the food sources of monarch
butterflies it was not the intention to
kill monarchs but the growing of the
food the way we do has a negative
consequence of killing the food source
for monarchs so now you see I think
monarchs are running at about 4% of
their traditional populations orangutan
so you may not think well what do I eat
that is a problem for a rangas well a
lot of the fast like the desert things
like cookies and things anything made
out of palm oil you’ll notice if you
look at the ingredients of desert foods
it’s made out of palm oil palm oil comes
from big plantations in Asia where there
used to be rain for us they cut down the
rainforests to grow palm
to create cookies no rainforests no
orangutangs so the orangutan is going
extinct because we continue to have a
huge market for cookies now you may
think well that’s too abstract for me I
don’t under I don’t get that I don’t see
the link that’s the point the point is
the food is abstract so all you want is
your cookie if there’s an orangutan that
you see in a newspaper that’s going
extinct you can’t see the connection the
connection is direct it’s direct the
decline of the monarch is direct to the
way we eat we spray a chemical called
glyphosate better known as roundup on
tens of millions of acres around the
United States to kill weeds now the
World Health Organization recently
called it a probable human carcinogen
this is being sprayed all over our land
it’s getting into our drinking water
it’s getting into our food it’s getting
into our bodies this is just one of many
many industrial scale chemicals we’re
spraying on our food the things that we
use to kill insects of course are having
all kinds of negative consequences like
they’re causing what’s called bee colony
collapse you’ve heard about this bees
pollinate a very large percentage the
amount of food that we eat
so no bees no food there’s something
called neonicotinoid pesticides that are
made in Germany but they’re banned in
Germany in fact they’re banned in most
countries in Europe but we will happily
use them here run off when we’re
spraying all these fields with
fertilizers and with scent insecticides
and herbicides that runs off into our
rivers and our streams ends up in our
big watersheds and here we have a
picture of the Chesapeake Bay which is
right where I live in Baltimore and when
all this stuff pours into these Bay’s it
continues to fertilize things all kinds
of things grow it creates what are known
as dead zones but you can actually see
from outer space this is a hypoxic area
in the water there were nothing below it
can live drive across the United States
as I did and you’ll see all these kinds
of fields corn wheat soybeans wherever
you go and nothing else think about what
you don’t see you don’t see forests you
don’t see flowers you don’t see wild
animals and you don’t even see
vegetables it’s food but it’s a kind of
a food
now we’ve planted the United States so
completely with these crops that we’re
now pushing into South America and we’re
cutting down rainforests in Argentina
Paraguay Brazil to repeat this whole
process now the question of course to re
empower ourselves with this depressing
dispiriting system that we’ve grown up
with what are we supposed to do alright
one thing we can do is to create what’s
called perennial polyculture agriculture
70% of our diet comes from grain and
grain is the problem it’s not that we’re
planting too many tomatoes that’s
causing the province we have the wrong
kind of grain there’s guy named Wes
Jackson at a place called the Land
Institute in Kansas who is developing a
kind of plant called Kearns ax it’s a
it’s a grain that has root systems that
are 10 and 12 feet deep that reduce the
need for agricultural chemicals reduces
our need for irrigation reduces the soil
runoff sequester’s carbon coming out of
the atmosphere fantastically Bob
promising agricultural technology what I
like to do with my students I like to
take them out to local farms and have
them learn about local food production
so they decrease this abstraction
between them and their food eat local
food local local local is the answer to
these problems I teach English majors
that potatoes grow in the dirt and it
really turns their being around these
are not AG students these are English
majors getting their hands dirty
that’s my beloved daughter holding a
chicken she can tell you where chickens
come from the earth is sacred and always
has been right the wisdom we don’t have
to reinvent wisdom wisdom is out there
we have just lost sight of it we’ve lost
sight of it so we have to figure out
where to rediscover it we can rediscover
it in things like the science of ecology
where we learn from people like Aldo
Leopold that something is ethical if it
improves or maintains the biotic
community it’s unethical if it doesn’t
we can rediscover indigenous wisdom all
over the world and learn that people for
thousands of years had a much more
sustainable relationship with their land
and their food I teach my students about
contemplative traditions like Buddhism
where you learn that your mind doesn’t
have to reach for the chicken nugget
just because it’s always reached for the
chicken nugget the mind is actually
trainable we can learn about why it is
that we do things the way we do things
I teach Taoism fabulous philosophical
tradition out of China that has a
statement that says things like you can
learn from non-human teachers you can
learn from water the best way to be is
to be like water because water nourishes
all things and goes against none of them
we can rediscover our beautiful
watersheds get back in touch with our
land the Susquehanna River which is
right down the road is one of the oldest
rivers in the world it was a river
before Pangaea broke apart I take my
students canoeing on the river every
semester to get them back in touch with
the land we’ve forgotten our connections
with the land we need to rediscover them
that will put us back in touch with
things it’ll break down the abstraction
and things will start fresh and that is
what I was here to say so thank you very
much [Applause]
about what you had for dinner last night
and contemplate this we all know that we
are what we eat but that’s not always a
good thing
so think as closely as you can about
what you had for dinner if you’re like
most Americans you had one of the three
primary food groups you had a hamburger
you had a piece of pizza or you had a
chicken nugget
or maybe you’re health-conscious and you
had a big salad with some lettuce and
tomatoes and maybe some sunflower seeds
because you’re health-conscious what I
would like you to think about is uh if
you can for a moment think about where
that food came from where did the
hamburger meat come from specifically
where did it come from what state did it
come from
if you had a piece of pizza where did
that flour come from where the tomato
sauce come from if you had a chicken
nugget what is a chicken nugget actually
and if your health conscious where did
that lettuce come from and how many
calories did you get from that lettuce a
couple calories right 1015 calories and
it probably was grown in California how
many calories of fossil fuels did it
take to get that lettuce to you so you
could have very few calories in your
meal or if you had a tomato what country
what continent to that tomato come from
if you ate it in March in Delaware where
no tomatoes grow this is what I want you
to think about and then I’d like you to
contemplate for a moment how many
generations of human beings in the
history of human beings have not been
able to tell you where their food came
from specifically like what farm grown
by what farmer in what season and the
answer that question is about three
generations of people about three
generations of human beings have not
been able to tell you where their food
came from and that has led to all kinds
of strange consequences that we are only
beginning to understand so what I would
like to suggest is that a lot of this
predicament that we find ourselves in
and I’m telling you it’s a very serious
predicament with all kinds of very dire
health consequences and environmental
consequences has its roots in the
post-world War two ERA so think about
this for a second before the 1940s most
Americans lived either in
city’s only lived on farms there was no
suburbia to speak of after the war we
came back after this trauma in Europe
and we learned a few things from the
Germans including how you can build an
infrastructure to defend yourself so we
built the interstate highway system now
you may not think of this but the
internet if you drive up and down i-95
on the east coast every now and then
you’ll see a road sign that says the
Eisenhower interstate highway system
with five stars in a circle those are
the five stars for Dwight Eisenhower’s
rank as the commanding officer of the
Allied forces the interstate highway
system was built in what we would now
think of as a measure of homeland
security to protect our country from
invasion to move troops and vehicles
around the country safely it’s forty
seven thousand miles long it connects
all the major cities in the United
States north-south east-west what it
allowed people to do for the first time
in American history was to work in the
city and build a house in what they used
to call the country so millions and
millions of people came back from the
war and they started to use these big
highways to build houses outside the
city and commute back into the city
that’s a story we are familiar with
that’s how suburbia was born what’s less
understood is that we turned four
million small farms into tens of
millions of houses so the joke nowadays
or it has been for 30 or 40 years is
that farms on the East Coast don’t grow
food they grow houses so most of my
students at the University of Delaware
grew up in places like this in a
subdivision that was built sometime in
the last 20 30 or 40 years our land
was totally transformed in this period
from farms and forests into housing and
shopping malls this is something we all
are familiar with we’ve all grown up
with it as if it is a given as if this
is the way the land has always been it
a consequence of this is that we all
became intensely internal interior
people we know this from many
best-selling books about how kids no
longer play in the woods they don’t even
have woods to play in anymore because we
cut them all down to turn them into
housing or into shopping malls what
happened then of course because all
these people in suburbia had to eat is
all the farms moved somewhere else all
the farms migrated I like to think of
like little beads of mercury all
migrating to the Midwest and instead of
4 million small farms growing a great
diversity of food now we have mega farms
growing basically three things corn
wheat and soybeans those are the
ingredients that make you think when you
walk into a supermarket and you see
something like 47,000 different products
for sale and in a supermarket you think
you’re being offered this great
diversity of food what you are actually
being offered is a great variety of
things made out of corn wheat and
soybeans that’s true for the food that
you eat whether it’s corn chips or
whether it’s the meat you eat because
all the meat that you’re eating whether
it’s beef or pork or chicken is it’s all
been fed these grains what’s happened in
addition to all of that of course we
know the health consequences of that
bean you know the national obesity rate
is going up all kinds of related
consequences for that but we’re also
looking at a dramatic centralization of
power into the hands of very few
companies that are selling us these
seeds which now of course are almost all
GMO and we are consolidating power in
the hands of a very few number of
companies so all these roads that we
built have led to a dramatic change in
the way we eat no people in the history
of humanity of eating the way we do most
of our meals now are even quickly and
cheaply and many of them are eaten in a
car it turns out because we like to
drive on all these big beautiful roads
and we don’t have time to sit down for a
nice meal so we got to go through the
drive-thru and get as much food as
quickly as you can and shove it down the
hole that’s how Americans eat we want
our food fast and we want it cheap
that’s we want and that’s what we get so
this system is perfectly designed to
deliver us cheap fast food
this food is not nutritious it is very
high in calories which is why the
American waistline has grown and why its
nutritional value has dropped this is
all because of an industrial food system
that is aggregated as I said because of
the construction of the roads which led
to the disappearance of the farms there
are all kinds of consequences one of
which is that we’ve dramatically reduced
the number of varieties of kinds of
fruit of foods that we are given access
to farmers are now planting 97% less
diverse crops than they used to
just thinking about apples we are now
eating 10% of the varieties of apples
that we used to eat before the war it’s
very convenient this way of eating it’s
very convenient it’s not particularly
flavorful and we know that it has
dramatic negative consequences for our
health
some people are becoming much more aware
of the damage that it’s doing to our
ecosystems as well but when I said we
are what we eat for better for worse it
also has to do with our identity and our
sense of ourselves this food is very
abstract ask a friend of mine is a
farmer she says sometimes she goes into
a high school in a city and she asks
students where potatoes come from and
kids raise their hand and say they think
they grow on trees and why would that be
well because most people if you think
about it maybe secretly admit this to
yourself and maybe you’ve never seen a
potato growing when you think of a
potato you think of it as a salted fried
slice in a vacuum sealed bag I hate to
break it to you but that’s what a real
potato looks like potatoes don’t grow on
trees they grow in the ground they come
out of the dirt and when kids especially
little kids discover this they get all
gross down they say oh I’m never I don’t
I don’t want eat that that’s an abstract
potato the other thing of course it’s
abstract in a much more dispiriting way
are the nine billion animals that
Americans consume every year these
animals are invisible and if you don’t
believe me think about when the last
time was that you saw the animal that
was turned into your hamburger and the
answer if I you’re on the East Coast is
never you’ve never seen that you may
have seen a cow and you may have seen a
hamburger but you haven’t seen what
happens in between
and that’s because we have a dramatic
network of infrastructure of roads and
railroads it’ll ship cattle out to the
Midwest where they get slaughtered they
get processed they get sent back to you
and you get to eat them free pre frozen
at a fast-food restaurant or in the
supermarket but the point is they’re
invisible now they didn’t they weren’t
always invisible
they’ve been invisible recently for the
first time in all of human history the
animals we eat are invisible now you may
or may not like that fact you may or may
not be a vegetarian you may or may not
be an enthusiastic meat-eater but the
invisibility of it is a problem it makes
all kinds of things possible that you
might not normally put up with for
example the treatment of most of these
animals or the land on which they are
raised or the treatment of the people
that are responsible for processing
these animals into the food that you eat
on the Eastern Shore of Maryland where
we we are here just to the east of us
there are five hundred and seventy
million chickens on any given day how
often have you seen them how often have
you been inside a chicken house to see
five hundred and seventy million Birds
never the answer is never because the
companies won’t let you in them so we
have these abstract thing is happening
our food comes from somewhere we have no
connection to it there are all these
consequences now we’re at the beginning
to understand like the dramatic decline
in the number of monarch butterflies now
what does that have to do with our diet
well monarchs essentially eat one kind
of plant it’s called milkweed milkweed
is something that grows on the side of
farms or grow it used to grow all around
North America now because we spray our
crops with so many herbicides to kill
the weeds to support the soybeans we are
killing all the food sources of monarch
butterflies it was not the intention to
kill monarchs but the growing of the
food the way we do has a negative
consequence of killing the food source
for monarchs so now you see I think
monarchs are running at about 4% of
their traditional populations orangutan
so you may not think well what do I eat
that is a problem for a rangas well a
lot of the fast like the desert things
like cookies and things anything made
out of palm oil you’ll notice if you
look at the ingredients of desert foods
it’s made out of palm oil palm oil comes
from big plantations in Asia where there
used to be rain for us they cut down the
rainforests to grow palm
to create cookies no rainforests no
orangutangs so the orangutan is going
extinct because we continue to have a
huge market for cookies now you may
think well that’s too abstract for me I
don’t under I don’t get that I don’t see
the link that’s the point the point is
the food is abstract so all you want is
your cookie if there’s an orangutan that
you see in a newspaper that’s going
extinct you can’t see the connection the
connection is direct it’s direct the
decline of the monarch is direct to the
way we eat we spray a chemical called
glyphosate better known as roundup on
tens of millions of acres around the
United States to kill weeds now the
World Health Organization recently
called it a probable human carcinogen
this is being sprayed all over our land
it’s getting into our drinking water
it’s getting into our food it’s getting
into our bodies this is just one of many
many industrial scale chemicals we’re
spraying on our food the things that we
use to kill insects of course are having
all kinds of negative consequences like
they’re causing what’s called bee colony
collapse you’ve heard about this bees
pollinate a very large percentage the
amount of food that we eat
so no bees no food there’s something
called neonicotinoid pesticides that are
made in Germany but they’re banned in
Germany in fact they’re banned in most
countries in Europe but we will happily
use them here run off when we’re
spraying all these fields with
fertilizers and with scent insecticides
and herbicides that runs off into our
rivers and our streams ends up in our
big watersheds and here we have a
picture of the Chesapeake Bay which is
right where I live in Baltimore and when
all this stuff pours into these Bay’s it
continues to fertilize things all kinds
of things grow it creates what are known
as dead zones but you can actually see
from outer space this is a hypoxic area
in the water there were nothing below it
can live drive across the United States
as I did and you’ll see all these kinds
of fields corn wheat soybeans wherever
you go and nothing else think about what
you don’t see you don’t see forests you
don’t see flowers you don’t see wild
animals and you don’t even see
vegetables it’s food but it’s a kind of
a food
now we’ve planted the United States so
completely with these crops that we’re
now pushing into South America and we’re
cutting down rainforests in Argentina
Paraguay Brazil to repeat this whole
process now the question of course to re
empower ourselves with this depressing
dispiriting system that we’ve grown up
with what are we supposed to do alright
one thing we can do is to create what’s
called perennial polyculture agriculture
70% of our diet comes from grain and
grain is the problem it’s not that we’re
planting too many tomatoes that’s
causing the province we have the wrong
kind of grain there’s guy named Wes
Jackson at a place called the Land
Institute in Kansas who is developing a
kind of plant called Kearns ax it’s a
it’s a grain that has root systems that
are 10 and 12 feet deep that reduce the
need for agricultural chemicals reduces
our need for irrigation reduces the soil
runoff sequester’s carbon coming out of
the atmosphere fantastically Bob
promising agricultural technology what I
like to do with my students I like to
take them out to local farms and have
them learn about local food production
so they decrease this abstraction
between them and their food eat local
food local local local is the answer to
these problems I teach English majors
that potatoes grow in the dirt and it
really turns their being around these
are not AG students these are English
majors getting their hands dirty
that’s my beloved daughter holding a
chicken she can tell you where chickens
come from the earth is sacred and always
has been right the wisdom we don’t have
to reinvent wisdom wisdom is out there
we have just lost sight of it we’ve lost
sight of it so we have to figure out
where to rediscover it we can rediscover
it in things like the science of ecology
where we learn from people like Aldo
Leopold that something is ethical if it
improves or maintains the biotic
community it’s unethical if it doesn’t
we can rediscover indigenous wisdom all
over the world and learn that people for
thousands of years had a much more
sustainable relationship with their land
and their food I teach my students about
contemplative traditions like Buddhism
where you learn that your mind doesn’t
have to reach for the chicken nugget
just because it’s always reached for the
chicken nugget the mind is actually
trainable we can learn about why it is
that we do things the way we do things
I teach Taoism fabulous philosophical
tradition out of China that has a
statement that says things like you can
learn from non-human teachers you can
learn from water the best way to be is
to be like water because water nourishes
all things and goes against none of them
we can rediscover our beautiful
watersheds get back in touch with our
land the Susquehanna River which is
right down the road is one of the oldest
rivers in the world it was a river
before Pangaea broke apart I take my
students canoeing on the river every
semester to get them back in touch with
the land we’ve forgotten our connections
with the land we need to rediscover them
that will put us back in touch with
things it’ll break down the abstraction
and things will start fresh and that is
what I was here to say so thank you very
much [Applause]
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