Cecilia V. Estolano, J.D.
Chief Strategist on State and Local Initiatives, Green for All

An Opening to the Good Life: Vision, Values, and the Arc of History

Congratulations, Class of 2010. It is an honor to be your graduation speaker. I want to tell you some truths, give you some hope and then burden you with some aspirations. Most of all, I want you to think a bit about what constitutes your vision of the Good Life. Actually, since we know you are the most proficient multi-taskers in history, let me ask you to think through, while you’re sitting here waiting for my speech to end, how you would describe your vision of the Good Life, the good society, what we ought to be and not just what we are today. Because that should be your starting point as you enter your profession.

But let’s start with some hard truths. Class of 2010 — you know that your job prospects are bleak and your debt-burden is heavy. As you sit in the dappled sunshine of another beautiful California spring day, the long-neglected infrastructure of this once Golden State is crumbling around you. The real estate industry that powers our professions as planners, architects, and designers is suffering its worse conditions in 70 years. The governing institutions of this state have effectively ground to a halt. Structural budget deficits are the new normal. And leadership and character deficits are what dominate the news — witness the three corporate executives who appeared before Congress last week to point fingers at each other over the Gulf Coast Oil Catastrophe.

And yet, you, the Class of 2010, probably have a greater opportunity to re-shape the contours of our economy, society and built environment than any previous class in the 50-year history of this College. Really, you do. There are some prerequisites, of course. But, let’s first click through the strands that are coming together to create this extraordinary opportunity.

The first major strand that gives you the chance to dramatically reshape our society is actually the dismal state of our economy. Because the job market is so tight, you will be called upon to summon astonishing levels of resourcefulness, nimbleness, and creativity to pursue the professions for which you have been trained. You will have to be tougher, smarter, craftier, and grittier than your predecessors. And this will make you steelier and perhaps a little more level-headed than they were two, three, five or even 10 years out of school. If you don’t now have a job, you may find yourself cobbling together consultant gigs, or volunteering with cash-strapped government agencies or community groups just to get some experience. And you might even have to wait tables or tend bar just to pay the bills.

If you do have a full-time job lined up — first of all, congratulations! And now here’s the reality: you will probably be working harder and asked to take on more responsibility at an earlier stage in your career than those that came before you. If companies or agencies are hiring now, it’s because they have wrung every last bit of productivity out of their existing staff and they absolutely need to add capacity to get the job done. Which means you will be expected to make an extraordinary contribution to justify the risk they took by hiring you.

This is all very intimidating, but fortunately, you have an extraordinary set of qualities to cope with these challenges. And this is the second major strand giving you the chance to change the trajectory of where we are headed. You have astonishing recombinant skills — the ability to find, process, analyze and recombine diverse sources and strands of information to produce new ideas and concepts. You have more information at your disposal than ever before and it comes in many different forms and media that you seem completely comfortable accessing and reinventing.

But it’s more than that. You are also a generation that is restlessly, endlessly, continuously seeking social connection. You’re texting someone right now, in fact. Your powerful thumbs and fingertips have launched a massive counterattack on the social anomie that Durkheim bemoaned. We may be bowling alone, but you have made “WII” a social undertaking. And in any case, whatever you do, whether alone or in company, you are inclined to share your thoughts about it, both deep and banal, with several hundred of your closest “friends.” You reach across thousands of miles to spread the word about art, culture, media outrages, food deserts, political rants, gourmet taco trucks, social justice, happy hours, chatroulette, a spreading oil spill and everything in between. And you just can’t stop doing it — even when you are supposed to be driving.

These recombinant skills and the irresistible urge to always stay connected add up to a curious and powerful stew. This is a melange of inspiration, attention-deficit-disorder, empathy, and yes, in a weird, uniquely 2010 kind of way, fellowship. This really matters because you are going to need to quickly assimilate and analyze information, make heretofore-unseen connections and build unlikely coalitions if you hope to realize the good life amidst the wreckage that we have left you.

Now the third strand that is creating this opening for transformation is the fact that we are at this pivotal moment when the basic feedstock of our economy is being contested. This has implications for nearly every production process, the shape of our cities, the design of our buildings, our health and the health of our planet. I’m speaking of course, about our transition from a petroleum-based economy to a clean energy economy. And it is this moment of transition that creates that most rare of openings — the opening to transform the structure of our economy and not just its production process or energy basis.

This rarest of moments is happening because the transition to a clean energy economy is occurring at precisely the same moment that a global economic crisis has shaken this nation’s beliefs to its core. And this is the final strand that is leading up to this great moment before you. Levels of trust in this country are at an all-time low. Our faith in the most basic institutions (the church, our pension systems, our banks) has been shattered. And the Free Market orthodoxy that has held us in thrall, which we aggressively exported around the world through financial weapons of mass destruction (sorry, Greece) — this seemingly unassailable civic religion is now at its lowest ebb in 30 years. The dangers of deregulation have come home to roost. Communism collapsed 20 years ago and now free market capitalism has plunged us into crisis. In this moment, when “all that is solid melts into air” and “the center does not hold,” we have a chance to recreate our underlying structures to resemble something more like our vision of the Good Life.

What exactly is this vision of the Good Life, you’re wondering. Here is where you, the class of 2010, get to fill-in the blank. Remember at the start of my speech I asked you to reflect upon your vision of the Good Life?

I’ve been telling you about these strands of history that create this opening for you. But I also said that there are some prerequisites for you to be able to seize the moment. First and foremost is that you have to have vision. Call it the Good Life, utopia, sustainability, or whatever you want, but you have to have a vision of what our society can be. And it has to be so compelling that it can motivate people to vote and protest and confront their boss and organize their workplace and take back their communities and even reach out to talk to their neighbors.

What are we as planners, architects, and designers, if not visionaries? You must project a vision of the Good Life, especially now when the future is so uncertain and America has lost its self-confidence.

In my vision of the Good Life, we focus on equity — we strive to broadly spread the benefits of economic opportunity to all segments of society. In my world we would measure our success by the quality of life, both physical and emotional, of all members of our society. We would measure our success by the extent to which we have secured for everyone the robust blessings of liberty: safe and secure housing, healthfulness, quality education, and our opportunity to actualize our human potential. And we would act out of the belief that all people, including the most vulnerable, must be empowered, must have the ability to improve their material and spiritual conditions. I mean spiritual in the broadest sense. I mean our spirit of hope, opportunity, compassion, connection, and wonder; our spirit that gives us profound satisfaction in realizing our species-being — the ability to “make” something, the very act of creativity that defines us as humans. In my vision, we would take care of the basics, so that everyone would have the time and space for beauty, play and delight.

You may not agree with this vision. That’s okay. But I think you better have one of your own. It might not be fully fleshed out, but you have to be driving towards something if you are going to move this world during this opening in history.

The second prerequisite for seizing this moment is that you have to understand the values underlying your vision. A vision is informed by values and the best of visionaries are cognizant of the biases underlying their construct. If you want to move the world, you need to embrace the discipline and integrity of constantly questioning the consistency of your actions with your values. This is going to be very important for you because you are going to be buffeted by the economy and a competitive profession. All that scrabbling to make ends meet in the early years of your career will force you to make compromises. That’s just life. The point is to reflect on those compromises and think through whether the experience changes your values or shapes your vision.

Because the real test is when you achieve success. When you are finally at a place to breathe and can flex a little power, the question will be what are the values that inform your actions? On whose behalf will you weigh-in? Will your vision of the good life extend beyond your own comfort and that of your generation? This is a little like making exercise a habit in your 20s, so you’re healthier in your 50s. If you get in the habit of asking yourself these questions now, your chance of remembering to ask these questions later, when you have power and when it really matters, will be much greater.

The third prerequisite for moving the world is to be bold. Back in 1929, the great justice Benjamin Cardoso wrote of amusement park rides, “The timorous may stay at home.” Well, you are in for quite a roller-coaster ride. That’s just how it is to be graduating in 2010. So this is not the time for timidity. What’s the point? You have nothing to lose, because it is all up for grabs. It is all contested terrain and there is no predetermined winner at this moment of transition. If you think we should redesign our food distribution system, then do it. If you think our cities can go off the grid, then make it happen. If you didn’t want to change the world and didn’t think you could actually do it, why did you even come to this school?

And the final prerequisite for you seizing the moment is that you must have idealism. This is not the time for cynicism. You have to redesign our water and power grid systems to be sustainable and reliable. You have to plan and build a high-speed rail network that will reshape our urban form and ecosystem. You have to lift up the poor and dispossessed. You have to figure out how to shrink cities like Detroit and repurpose stranded retail centers in the exurbs.

You have a lot of things to do. We don’t have the time or patience for you to lament the fact that you didn’t get to experience the boom. Okay, so maybe you didn’t get to design speculative skyscrapers and subdivisions that will never be built, like my generation did. You don’t get the luxury of nostalgic yearnings for the American Century. Heck, most of you entered high school long after the Cold War ended and the so-called New World Order was turned on its head by terrorism. What do you know about triumphant American exceptionalism? You need not be burdened by fear and disappointment about the end of American hegemony, because, frankly you never really knew it. Your higher education has been shaped by the rise of China, India and Brazil, by the threat of global climate change, by local action compensating for national inaction (at least before January 20, 2009).

You have to be idealistic because a lot of the “great” ideas that shaped my generation — Marxism, laissez-faire capitalism, Proposition 13, the Bush doctrine of preemptive war — have been shredded, discredited or collapsed under their own weight. You have to be idealistic because we need ideas right now and we need true believers in something more than just the generalized anger of the Tea Party set. We need a constructive, propositional movement of scrappy, gritty, hyper-informed, social networking visionaries. And we need it now, before the window closes, and the moment ends.

Don’t underestimate the significance of this moment and don’t think that I’m just pumping you up because I’m your graduation speaker. I truly believe we are in a transformative moment. And I have waited my whole life for this. I can remember being in college reading Marx, Smith and Weber and then reading urban theory in planning school and wondering if I would live through one of those transformative moments in history that all those writers described. And if I did live through it, whether I would recognize it. And if I recognized it, would I have enough energy and idealism left in me to try to shift the arc of history.

Well we are living in that moment right now. We can use the disruption caused by the global economic crisis and the threat of climate change to push for a more equitable, empowering, livable and sustainable economy and society. You can take what you’ve learned here and what you will learn picking through the ruins we’ve left and reconstruct a world that looks more like your vision of the Good Life. As a progressive, I hope your vision looks like mine. I hope it involves broad coalitions of labor, community, social justice advocates, environmentalists, and the innovators in business and technology.

But whatever it is, seize the moment now. Hold onto the values, boldness and idealism you need to drive your vision through this crack in the time-space continuum. You can and must shape the arc of history. Bend it to your vision of the Good Life.

And we will follow you.

Thank you.

Green For All is a national organization that advocates for broad access and opportunity in the clean-energy economy. Cecilia Estolano oversees Green For All’s State and Local Initiatives and the Capital Access Program. She is charged with spearheading Green For All’s effort to scale public-private partnerships as a means to grow family-supporting green jobs in cities across the United States, particularly in under-served communities.

Prior to joining Green For All, Estolano served as Chief Executive Officer of the Community Redevelopment Agency of the City of Los Angeles (CRA/LA). With an annual budget of over $726 million and a work program covering 32 project areas, Estolano redefined the role of the largest redevelopment agency in the State of California. Under her leadership, CRA/LA rebuilt its housing department, adopted a landmark policy on local hiring in construction jobs, adopted a Healthy Neighborhoods policy, and created a $42 million Land Acquisition Fund to jump-start development in underserved markets like South Los Angeles.

Prior to joining CRA/LA, Estolano was counsel in the Los Angeles firm of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. She represented developer, private equity fund and lender clients in land use, zoning, redevelopment, environmental, real estate, energy, and telecommunications matters.

Estolano has served on the California Coastal Commission, as a Special Assistant City Attorney, as a Senior Policy Advisor with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and as Environmental Policy Advisor to Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley.

Estolano was the Deputy Chair of the Environmental Protection Agency Review Team, Energy and Environment Group for the Obama Presidential Transition Team. She is currently a member of Senator Barbara Boxer’s Judicial Advisory Committee.

Estolano is a graduate of Boalt Hall School of Law and holds an M.A. in urban planning from UCLA. She received her undergraduate degree in social studies with honors from Harvard-Radcliffe Colleges. Estolano is a Regents Lecturer at UCLA where she teaches courses in urban planning.