Rally for Science speaker series: Rob Davies

Posts in this series are transcribed from speeches given at the March 7 Rally for Science, from the steps of Logan Courthouse. Rob Davies is a long-time Cache Valley resident, educator, and physicist.

Hello Everyone…
The good news is I'm the warm up act… and I'm ok.
But the great news is the rock stars of our community are coming.
Among them are the organizers of this today
This doesn't just happen
So Nancy, Charles, Jack… and all involved, thank you. Truly
And thanks to all of you for showing up today for your community
And for each other.

Today we're standing up for science
And to be clear the attacks are real…
Also to be clear, this is nothing new.
And to be clearer still… it's not science under attack
It's reality.
But these attacks will fail
Because the reality is…
... reality has a way of forcing it's way into the room.

You can attack climate models as "uncertain"
And call vaccines a scam
But we feel the heat when temperatures rise
And deadly diseases once thought eradicated
Come roaring back.

We like to thing this is a story about villains
And yes, there are villains
But this is not their story
This is not a story about villains
This is a story about systems

There will always be villains
But it's the systems that empower them
Or render them irrelevant.

So, while the bad news is:
Empowered villains... using systems of power
Are indeed crippling and corrupting and closing
Our institutions of knowledge
For climate
For health
For the arts
For wellbeing ― human and nonhuman, present and future

The good news is… the villainy is too late.

Those institutions of knowledge... have done their jobs.
They've already given us the knowledge we need
We don't need more knowledge

What we do need… is to honor the knowledge we already have
With wisdom
And with action

We know… a lot!
Now we need to believe what we know.
To behave… like we know it.

And know some pretty difficult things.

We know we are disrupting the entire planetary climate system
And that this is dangerous.

But we also know it goes well beyond climate.
We know for example that of nine critical Earth systems
Regulating atmosphere, oceans, forests, water, soils… yes climate
And most of all… LIFE
We are pushing nearly all of them ―
These Planetary Boundaries ―
Well past the safe limit.

Taken all together, we know our civilization
Is in deep overshoot of the planet's ability to sustain us.

We also know that these are symptoms
Emergent, from a global economic system
Singularly premised on one thing:
MORE.

Always more.
Of the wrong things.
It's a system singularly premised on growth without limit.
Designed not for people, but consumers
Hounded to consume each day more than the last

And we know that on a finite planet, we know how that ends
You don't get to do that thing forever
And "forever" ― we know ― is here
We have come to the end of this road
Overshoot, by definition is a temporary condition
The old systems are going away, like it our not.

That… is difficult knowledge to have.

Fortunately, the knowledge we have doesn't end here.
We also know
That it doesn't have to be like this.

We know the design principles
For doing things differently
― knowledge recently re-acquired by science
But possessed long before institutions of science existed
Coming to us instead, from the Earth herself
Knit into our bones across deep time
Through hundreds of generations of communities
Establishing relationship with place.

Yes, the barriers to applying this knowledge
― cultural, social, political barriers ― are high

But we also know that these are barriers of feasibility
Not physics

There's no physics preventing us from overcoming, tunneling under,
Or simply dissolving these barriers.

And yes, these paths are hard. But not impossible
And hard is better than impossible.

And here's the insight that gets me up every morning
When it all feels… well… impossible.

The question isn't "Can we get to the top of this mountain?"
The question is: "If we were to get there, what would be next?"

And this I say to you, my neighbors, with deep conviction:
Whoever you are
Whatever your talents
Whatever your means
What ever it is that brings you joy
Whatever your capacity
There is an answer to "What's next?"

At any scale:

What's next in aligning our global civilizational systems
With physical reality
What's next in building alternative systems
What's next for our local food / energy / governance systems
What's next for me in my life / career / community.

This isn't the ten-step solution
It's next-step navigation.

What becomes possible ― what becomes feasible ―
Changes as we navigate
And as the world around us unfolds.

I think you will find in the words of those following me today
A number of answers to "What's next?"

Because they themselves are applying their talents and joy
To "What's next?"

Speech by Rob Davies