Michael L. Fischer, M.C.P. 1967
May 21, 2007

Thank you, Dean Fraker, and a special, humble thanks to Professor Etzel and all of the members of the Committee who decided to honor me with a medal today. No question, it is an honor to share the platform with such distinguished colleagues as Bill Callaway and Craig Hodgetts, a double honor to receive a medal, and a triple honor to be able to say a few words to you on this unique day.

But today is your day, graduates: to you go my heartfelt congratulations. Let me simply say that I stand in awe of you; not for what you have done (which is already pretty terrific), but for what you will do. On behalf of my children and grandchildren, please accept our deepest appreciation for the results of your lives’ works still to come.

I am keenly aware that today is for you, and that my comments are secondary to the recognition and the celebration that you so fully deserve. So I will limit my words; in fact, it is my hope that you will come to remember only 18 of them—when I get there, I’ll let you know.

When I was a student here, 40 years ago, our DCRP class of 1967 had a motto—do you still? Anyway, our motto was in use every day. It served as an expletive, a greeting, a farewell comment, and a “whatever” statement. I kid you not, this was our mantra: “What does it all mean?!” When we came into class in the morning, when we saw one another across campus, say, under the Sather Gate, when we were puzzled by an assignment, when we went home tired after a long day: “what does it all mean?” It was like our special handshake, our connection with each other.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not going to try to answer the question. But please give me license to speak my own perspective on the professional challenges I have faced, and the even larger challenges that might face you:

When I first came to California from Texas, in 1960, I was 20 years old. We settled in the Santa Clara Valley, more than a decade before it was called Silicon Valley. In fact, it was—really—called “The Valley of Heart’s Delight.” By good fortune, I soon landed a job in the City of Mountain View Planning Department. The villages of the Valley (like Palo Alto, Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Cupertino, and Santa Clara), even the somewhat larger town of San Jose, were separated from each other by the apricot, prune, almond and cherry orchards that carpeted the landscape between the Coast and Diablo ranges, which were clear and present almost every day, not obscured by smog. There was not a single freeway. The population of California was 16 million people.

Forty years later, just a few years ago, California’s population had doubled to 32 million, and the Valley of Heart’s Delight is gone. Gone. Silicon Valley has taken its place, and the mountains are usually shrouded in smog, the miles and miles of springtime orchard blossoms are gone. Their aroma, filling the cockpit of my sports car as I drove for hours on the small back roads of the Valley, still linger in my memory, but those orchards and those memories are not at all a part of the lives of the millions of residents of that place now. With the crisscross of freeways and arterials, it’d be tough to find even a mile or two of those narrow, bumpy back roads these days.

In the face of that explosive metropolitan growth and development, it is even more miraculous that the coastal area of northern and central California is almost the same today as it was then. The landscape, the back roads, the social communities, the fragile natural habitats, the local economies, and the views to be savored have changed only slightly. San Francisco Bay, most of which was slated to be filled and developed in the 1960s, is today larger rather than smaller. None of that has happened by accident. Citizen activists, planners, biologists, economists, architects, attorneys, and aggressive nonprofits were successful in influencing the political process to accomplish that. Speaking for the hundreds of volunteers and professionals who made it happen, I have two things to say to you: First, you’re welcome. Second, would you please return the favor?

I mention the figure 40 years because that is your time at bat, starting today. Starting today! 40 years—what will you do with them?

Soooo, 40 years from now. Your watch. By 2050, California’s population is projected to double again to 64 million people. To double again! But in the past 40, we went from almost no freeways to a mature network. Santa Clara Valley has been built out. Even the Bay Area’s “edge cities” (to use Joel Garreau’s term) of Santa Rosa, Gilroy, Santa Cruz, Tracy, and Stockton and as far as Sacramento are already quite congested.

Speaking of Tracy, Stockton and Sacramento: California’s Great Central Valley, 90 miles wide and 300 miles long, is now the source of half of the America’s fruits and vegetables. It is a national treasure of inestimable value. But, but: There is no governmental entity that has a vision for the Central Valley, or a cogent set of hopes for its future, or the authority to implement such a vision. If the “business as usual” land use policies of the 16 east-west counties hold steady (and there is no reason to believe that they will change), most of the prime agricultural lands will be covered by urban sprawl in the next 40 years. The Central Valley won’t be able to feed its own population. That will not only be an environmental, cultural, esthetic, and economic tragedy of the first order, it will be a significant national security challenge. Will you let it happen? It will be your watch, and your architecture, design, landscape and city planning skills are the only ones standing between the development imperatives of a doubling population, coupled with the conservative property rights principles of a rural area, and a better future for California.

Holy smokes, what challenges you face, what problems you will have to solve, what opportunities you will have!

Not only will the scale and pace of change over the next 40 years be double that of the past 40, but the character of the change will be markedly different: within 10 years, 30% of California’s air pollution will come from Asia; sometime during the next 40 years, a great earthquake (or other major disaster) is probable; with climate change, the Sierra snow pack is going to provide far less of California’s water supply, since more precipitation will fall in the form of rain, bringing severe summer droughts; most of the people living in California will be Spanish-speakers, enriching our communities and bringing different cultural and political realities to the table; sea level rise will inundate many of the wetlands restored in the past several decades, placing threatened species at greater risk, and requiring major redesign of low-lying roadways and public infrastructure, especially the levees and dikes of the Delta, the wellspring for Southern California’s water.

These examples, and more, of the changes to be expected during your 40 years pertain not only to our own island nation of California, but they are also hints at, and analogues to, the challenges that you and your colleagues will face on every continent. I truly hope that you are eager to address these challenges with enthusiasm and creativity, and not a sense of beleagurement.

Where can you seek the best positions to make the difference you must during your 40 years?  My wife, Jane Rogers, stood in the snow in front of the nation’s Capitol to hear the inauguration speech of President Kennedy when he exhorted us to “ask not what America can do for you, but what you can do for America.” For my part, I took it as a central tenet of my life’s work when he told us “public service is the highest calling.” That meant to many of us that we should seek careers in the public sector. But those were different days. It is a truism that “we will not be able to attract great public servants if we continue to degrade (and denigrate) them,” as Robert Rubin told Columbia University graduates several years ago. Well, our society and our media have quite successfully besmirched that calling. In the right agency, yes, with the right leadership and with a critical mass of extraordinary colleagues, there remains much that you can accomplish by seeking a career in government.

But for my own part, I have become convinced of the need for, and the effectiveness of, civil society organizations. Some call them nonprofits, some call them NGOs. There, for now, is where a principled, energetic, imaginative, strategic professional can make a real difference, in my experienced judgment. I have had the privilege to watch—and work with—courageous civil society leaders as they forced progressive change in the Russian Far East, in Mexico, in Hawai`i, in Canada, and throughout the United States. I have been one of them, and I have been a government official in cahoots with many of them. Without working closely with them, I couldn’t have been an effective public sector professional. Land trusts, nonprofit affordable-housing developers? Great stuff happens there.

Of course, the built environment that will be essential to accommodate the 30 million new Californians who will come to live here during your 40 years will be designed and constructed by those of you who will work in the private sector. Please realize that the design of a stupendous building for an appreciative client with raves from architectural critics is only a quarter of your job. That’s why Nat Owings of SOM apologized, time and again, for the Bank of America building in San Francisco. A marvelous edifice, but what an affront to the City, he explained, in retrospect. Be partners in designing vibrant, diverse, walkable communities, not just dramatic and “efficient” buildings. And don’t think that your client’s wishes define the limits of your professional duties. Take Dean Fraker’s challenge to you in the current issue of CED’s Frameworks to heart: take the megawatts needed to serve your buildings, and convert them to “negawatts,” as Amory Lovins calls those energy savings essential to a sustainable future.

During my 40 years, I was strengthened and buoyed by the lessons I learned here at the College of Environmental Design, and nowhere else:

• Never seek a piecemeal, deconstructive approach to any problem;
   
• Always seek to integrate, to assemble a comprehensive, holistic, collaborative long-range approach;
   
• Technical skills are essential, but only if they are married to effective, strategic, gutsy political advocacy;
   
• Teamwork, partnerships, respect for individuals and embracing diversity is essential for long-term solutions; and
   
• Future generations are the true constituency toward which our professional careers should be devoted, most decidedly not only our immediate private or public employers or our clients.
   

Those were the five lessons taught not only in class but also in the many examples set by the interpersonal relationships among my fellow students and professors. I remember them with great gratitude.

So, what does it all mean? OK, here are the 18 words for you to remember. They are the words of John Muir, the founder of the Sierra Club in 1892. Normally a prolix writer and a flowery speaker, in this important case he was quite pithy. I have kept his words, framed, over my desk for decades:

“When we try to pick anything out by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”

Indeed, I have a rare letterpress version of those words here to present to Dean Fraker. I hope that this print will be displayed in Wurster Hall and that these words will help to inspire him, his colleagues, you, and students who will follow you to look beyond the immediate problem and address the long-term needs of the future.

And now, I ask for a final indulgence. During most of my career, I have been known to pull out a book of poetry and read a poem at the drop of a hat—whether at a staff meeting, a speech, a wedding, or a class. When I tell my friends and colleagues that I was honored to address you today, they will invariably ask, “What poem did you read?”  Clearly, I cannot say, “none.” So my answer to them, and to you, is Mary Oliver’s Wild Geese:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
Love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile, the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
Are moving across the landscapes,
Over the prairies and the deep trees,
The mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
Are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
The world offers itself to your imagination,
Calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—
Over and over announcing your place
In the family of things.

Again, today is your day, and a big one it is! My warmest congratulations to you, your partners, your parents and your children. May the sunrises of the next 40 years shine brightly upon you, may you each make a great difference in your own way, and may you find peace.