Cornelia Hahn Oberlander's honorary doctorate address

Here is her acceptance speech:  

Mr. President and Vice-Chancellor, honoured guests, graduates, students,family and friends:

My deepest thanks for this tremendous honor. It’s a great privilege to stand with Concordia University’s administration, faculty and students today.

I want to acknowledge that Concordia University is located on unceded Indigenous lands. The Kanien'kehá:ka [kunyin kehaka] Nation is widely recognized as the custodians of the lands and waters where we are gathered here today.

This land has seen many phases of human settlement, dating back thousands of years before contact with European settlers. The land was covered with forests thick with pines and maples, yellow birch and cedars. The waters offered food and ease of transportation among many nations. So much has changed since that time, yet the power of the natural world persists, reminding us of our deep connection to the land.

Today, Montreal is home to many hundreds of cultural communities, coming here from all corners of the globe to find security, honest livelihood and bright future. The land continues to provide space to make a home – sometimes even space to grow some food – but the demands flowing from a dense and complex urban settlement are proving to be a tremendous challenge for those who live and work in the region.

You have each made many good choices that have brought you to this wonderful day: gaining entry to prestigious Concordia University, bringing focus and resourcefulness to your studies and applying your knowledge and creative thinking to your communities, both small and large.

This is what will make all the difference: your ability to apply yourselves with creativity and resiliency to meet what lies just over the horizon.

The world you are about to inherit is not a simple one: let me quote a poem by Ian McHarg, author of “Design with Nature” which says it all:

We are transients,
But we can be guardians;
we can protect and restore;
…Commitment, energy, and art.
So you must aim to protect
all that is wild and wondrous.
To heal mutilation,
salve wounds.
restore the earth.

The information age of 50 years ago has changed into something quite different in your lifetimes. A constant barrage of beeps and pings that stimulate a connection to those nearby, and those halfway around the world. Indeed, this connectivity is quite brilliant, and useful. But your task, once the shine has worn off, is to remember the people behind the screens – billions of people who rely on access to clean water, clean air, and clean soil.

The threat to our air, water and land is real: climates are changing at an unprecedented rate both locally and globally. We can see the data and the damages; slowly we are grasping how to flex the urban landscape to meet these new conditions, with the aim of minimizing permanent damage.

Perhaps these words from the Landscape Architecture Foundation’s New Landscape Declaration will resonate for you:

“The urgent challenge before us is to redesign our communities in the context of their bioregional landscapes enabling them to adapt to climate change and mitigate its root causes. As designers versed in both environmental and cultural systems, landscape architects are uniquely positioned to bring related professions together into new alliances to address complex social and ecological problems… As landscape architects, we vow to create places that serve the higher purpose of social and ecological justice for all peoples and all species.”

You will be the ones to design and build these systems that will make our time on the fragile planet more peaceful, more stable and perhaps more green.

In his book Biophilia Hypothesis, E. O. Wilson urges us “to preserve every scrap of biodiversity as priceless, while we learn to use it and come to understand what it means to humanity.” Biodiversity is where we can find answers to some of the threats we see in the high Arctic, the southern United States and in the oceans.

My career has brought great opportunities, dishing out challenges and successes in equal measure. Since I was a child, always looking for inspiration, needing respite from the details of my professional years, the natural world continues to draw me outside.

Try to remember, when the noise is to great and the demands endless – find a place where the birds are singing, where the rising sun will touch your face, where the dirt of the earth will stick between your toes. Maintaining a connection to the land, the waters, and the sky is vital to nurture yourself and your work.

The other foundation I have returned to over many decades of practicing landscape architecture is that of collaboration, across the profession and between professional practices. Knowledge of one’s own discipline, coupled with the knowledge of another means that the goals of design, infrastructure, and policy can coalesce to establish a greater impact than one vision here, another one there.

I believe that many of you already know the power of one among many: your individual intentions, paired with those around you, have yielded great results in your studios and seminars. With this same spirit of supporting one another through successes and failures, remember to listen to each other and you will meet the challenges of tomorrow.

So, go forth with courage into this new world, equipped with both local and global aspirations which challenge you to perform at your best. Take the words of Buckminster Fuller, the great architect and futurist:

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

I count on you to achieve this goal!

CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL OF YOU!