Thank you, University of Exeter & University of Exeter Cornwall, for such a special day receiving my Honorary Doctorate of Science!
It's a pleasure and an honour to be recognised by a university that is a real leader in furthering our understanding of pressing global issues such as plastic pollution - thank you for all that you do.
Here's my message to the class of 2022!
"Thanks to Professor Brendan Godley for such kind words. Although what he didn’t mention in his deceptively seamless summary of my last 14 years… is all the stuff that went wrong along the way! All the times I thought, “oh, that wasn’t quite what I was expecting, and what the heck am I going to do now?!”
Like the time I arrived in Shanghai, after spending 6 weeks getting there – by train, camel and horse to study a zero-carbon city… only to discover the city didn’t exist and it was just media hype.
Or the time I was living on a small island 10 foot above sea-level to be woken up one morning, in a hurry, by the word tsunami.
Or the time we hit something in the middle of the Pacific and came up on deck, to find… we were surrounded… by plastic. We had discovered the North Pacific Gyre, the largest accumulation zone of plastic pollution, and although I didn’t realise it at the time, that day, I also discovered, my career.
In fact, when I look back, all the major mishaps, resulted in fairly major revelations. Time at sea taught me how to navigate my life a bit like the way you sail across an ocean – constantly reacting to the changes in the environment around you. If the wind picks up, or the waves change direction, you have to adjust your sails and shift your course – sometimes your life even depends on your response.
This idea of reacting to the world around me has been core to shaping my own direction and I think key for all of us, especially as new graduates, living in such uncertain times.
Today makes me think back to my undergraduate degree and I often get asked what on earth architecture has got to do with sailing the world studying plastic, and if I wish I’d made a more logical choice and studied Life and Environmental Sciences like many of you.
But when you study at degree level, I feel it’s not only what you learn, but how you learn it. A way of thinking, a way of looking at the world that helps you ask the right questions and find answers. For me, architecture felt like a big problem-solving exercise – here is a brief, go design a building to solve it.
When I was confronted with the plastic pollution problem in the middle of the Pacific, that training kicked in. And you will have all picked up new ways of thinking during your degree and started to identify, what I like to call, your ‘superpower’ – the thing that makes you unique and brilliant, and the thing that you love.
My work has shown me that rarely global problems have a silver-bullet solution. Instead it takes diverse skillsets to tackle a problem from every angle. So we need all superpowers collaborating to solve big challenges. The key is to work out what you want your contribution to be.
This topic of solving big problems is hard to avoid with the degree subjects you chose and are graduating with today. The combination, in this room, of those who’ve spent the last few years studying our home – Planet Earth – and those who have studied human behaviour and how we all co-exist on this home as an international community.
These areas of study are, I’m afraid to say, the most important jobs in the world. Your future work to understand and protect our planet and those who live on it is the biggest challenge of our time. Which also means you have the biggest opportunity to make a difference.
Today is a celebration of the end of your studies, but really, today, is day one. You’ve got big lives ahead of you, and so much to do, so let’s get started.”
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