"We can no longer just take what we want from the ocean, cut down forests indiscriminately, and keep heating up the planet. We will need to find tools that are elegant and targeted and innovative.
We need to invent the bow and arrow for our own time.” -Frank Carroll
Frank Carroll, Class of 1966, Outstanding Achievement in Environmental Management and Development, International humanitarian and advocate for environmental health.
Frank made this speech for the 2003 Hall of Distinction Induction, at the Fayetteville-Manlius High School Auditorium. It reflects his values, his grace with language, his sense of adventure, and his deep belief that we can solve the problems of the world we live in.
Many years ago, I sat in this auditorium during commencement activities and wondered what I was going to do with my life. Above all, I had the supreme benefit of loving parents who encouraged my independent thinking and honored my personal choices, however wacky they were. And like many of you, I had also lucked into the good fortune of being bestowed with the benefit of a quality education in this ardently supportive environment, in a beautiful setting moreover, here at F-M.
This school, the memories of which I cherish, has demonstrated its continuing commitment to that legacy with an incredible growth of education resources since that time that I was in the place you are today.
At that time, over 35 years ago, my parents had already given me a most valuable gift. To paraphrase the words of a Vietnamese poet I recently met, I was afforded the opportunity to look beyond the bend in the river of my village and personally see across the ocean where people different from me lived. Well, that led to college on the west coast and a year studying in Europe (which helped inform—but didn’t cure—my naivete.) (I’ll leave out the sordid details.)
Coming of age in the peace movement during the American War in Vietnam—that’s what the Vietnamese call it—and I’d like to just say that it always intrigued me how the Vietnamese people felt about Americans. As my friend Thieu said: Well, we were occupied by China for 1000 years, by France for 100, so what is the big deal if the Americans were here only for 10? To return to my story, in the face of that war, my soul sought healing and found it through the opportunity to study environmentalscience.
Through friends in college, I came to meet a wide assortment of interesting characters from developing countries, some of whom I had the opportunity to work with in remote yet fascinating settings organized around the vitality of local communities. These communities were working to enhance their quality of life by developing, conserving and renewing endogenous resources—those assets generated from within the reach of the community.
And because of that exchange of resources between the environment and the people who inhabit it is something I believe is vitally important to our well being, this is the career I have followed. It’s taken me, and keeps taking me, around many bends in the river. For those that choose to follow that path—and I hope some of you will—you’ll be called on to use not just the skills you learn in books and the classroom, but your imagination, your determination, your sense of humor, and sometimes your survival skills.
I’ve worked—often in health and water resources—in Nepal, Morocco, Malawi, and Iran to name a few. Usually, I’ve had to adapt. In Guinea a couple of years ago, I went off the beaten track to get information on the pattern of refugees flowing in from neighboring and war-torn Sierra Leone. There were very few ways to communicate with my colleagues in the city and finally even those didn’t work. I was isolated and left to figure out for myself what needed to be done. But on my birthday there, I was treated to a concert by a village marching band, with local instruments and an electronic speaker—that while it wasn’t hooked up because there was no electricity—was nonetheless carried proudly over their heads.
More recently—after the post-9/11 war in Afghanistan, I helped co-ordinate the shipments of food to hungry Afghanis. There, the challenges were not just getting food to people along incredibly complex routes, but negotiating the politics of “spin”—in other words, deciding between telling people what you know and what they want to hear.
One of the great rewards of this kind of work, as I mentioned before, is the new perspectives you gain from the people you meet—new ways of thinking about how to see the world and how to solve problems.
One project I did some years ago was with the Masai—whom you probably know as the tall, nomadic, warrior people of East Africa. Their traditional ways of taking their herds with them while they followed the waterholes from season to season weren’t working any more. One of the problems was that their bigger neighbor tribes were encroaching on them and forcing them off their traditional lands.
One day, I was driving down a bumpy road with a Masai man I worked with, and he was showing me this area and talking about the threat from other tribes. He looked at my thoughtfully and said: “Well, our neighbors are many more in number and they are strong—they have many spears. But, on the other hand, we have a secret weapon.”
“What’s that?” I asked him. He turned to me and said almost in a whisper, “We have the bow and arrow.”
Now I think this fellow was on to something. As we move on to solve the many environmental problems facing us—which really are the problems of how we best use the resources we have—those crude spears won’t do any more. We can no longer just take what we want from the ocean, cut down forests indiscriminately, and keep heating up the planet. We will need to find tools that are elegant and targeted and innovative.
We need to invent the bow and arrow for our own time.
Here are just a couple examples of this kind of innovation. In San Francisco, where I live now, they are designing ways to harness the energy from the tides in the neck of the Golden Gate. In a little town in northern California called Arcata, they constructed a sewage treatment wetland that is also a beautiful recreational area and a wildlife habitat—and that example is being copied in many places around the world. There are many more ways creative minds are solving problems.
Even if you decide not to become a scientist or an engineer or a professional environmentalist, you need to be a thinker and a participant. To go back to the Masai again, we helped find them a new, more stable source of water, but that solution brought other challenges. If you have water in one place, you don’t have to wander, and you can grow crops year round. But growing crops and staying in one place brought up the problem of land ownership—something they’d never thought about before. And now they needed more community participation to solve all these problems—beyond their traditional tribal councils. But they are figuring in out. They had town meetings. They presented their differing views. They made decisions together.
Now, the way you participate in our technologically advanced society may be very different—but it’s just as important to make your individual voices and your values heard.
One way to start right now is to get involved in a local watershed group. If you can’t find one, start one. One of the classes here at F-M has begun to look at and study your local watershed, the Oneida watershed. I’ll refer you to the teacher, Ms. Sajnew for more information. You can rest assured that you will have compatriots with whom to share your ideas and experiences all over the world.
So I’ll leave you with this thought—slightly paraphrased—not from a scientist but from an artist (Paul Klee, I think)—
“The mother of the arrow is the thought: How can I expand my reach?”
Good luck to you all.