Thank you, Mayor Franklin, on behalf of my 4,000 associates and their families at Interface for your very generous remarks (I should say, accolades) and for your exemplary years of service to our city.  Thank you, too, Sally Bethea and your Board for selecting Interface and me for this high honor.  Would the Interface people please stand to be recognized.  Thank you.  You represent some 20,000 people, counting spouses and children.  Laura Seydel, I believe I see your fine hand in helping to create this great turnout.  Thank you, too!

 

And thank you all for turning out for this great organization, The Upper Chattahoochee Riverkeepers. 

 

And, let me say congratulations to the other recipients tonight:  Ga. Tech (Marsha, I wore my Tech colors for you), and Representatives Buckner and McKillip.  Thank you for your commitment to the environment.

 

As many of you know, I am dealing with cancer – effectively, so far.  But, cancer is no fun.  If you don’t receive the right treatment, you die; and even with the very best treatment, you can still die.  I seem to be receiving the right treatment, though the very best result one can hope for, complete remission, leaves one knowing it can recur, maybe in a different part of the body as a metastacis, or maybe in a mutated form.  It’s difficult not to let cancer take over your life.
   

As you can imagine, I find some interesting analogies in this experience.  Bear with me as I share one:  In cancer it’s often not clear whether the original cause was hereditary or environmental – nature or nurture.  My mother was one of seven siblings.  My father, too, was one of seven.  Not one of those 14 people who were the generation before mine had cancer.  In my generation, my two brothers, one of our first cousins, and I have had cancer.  One would tend to think that the probable cause is nurture – something in the environment, not naturally inherited, that got to us.  And, of course, the “environment” is, in this case, paradoxically, nurture, not nature.  Nurture is what we are exposed to that, perhaps throughout the branches of human evolution that led to us – my two brothers, our cousin, and me – our forebears were never exposed to, at least not in deadly amounts.  Our forebears, therefore, never had the need to evolve immunity to cancer; so my generation has no inherited immunity – instead we have the cancer.
   

But, believe it or not, these are not intended to be comments about my cancer.  To the analogy:  These are comments about the “cancer” that is attacking the earth, for lack of the right treatment.  And what is that right treatment?  I suggest the missing treatment is a genuine, enlightened sense of responsibility throughout the industrial system.  And like human cancer, the earth’s cancer can take over our lives.  What do I mean?
   

Like my brothers, our cousin, and me, life on the earth is “seeing,” i.e., being exposed to, hazards it has not seen in the earth’s entire 4.5 billion year-long existence:  man-made substances – chemicals, synthetics – that are completely unnatural and foreign to our bodies.  Even substances the earth put away down there in its crust millions, even billions, of years ago through sedimentation and sequestration, so we could evolve up here in a healthy environment, are being dug up or drilled up, processed and reintroduced back into our surroundings.  And earth’s fragile ecological balances are abused constantly.  By whom?  By homo sapien sapien – modern man, doubly aware man, man who knows and knows he knows – and who by now ought to know better.
   

So this brings me to my point.  Irresponsible businesses – the diggers, the drillers, the processors and purveyors of unnatural poisons, the abusers of the environment, all of whom ought to know better – they and their abusive industries – are a cancer on society.  Humankind cries out for responsibility to be taken seriously by them and, in fact, by all of industry.  To me, 16 years ago, that meant starting with my own company.

 

It’s high time to start the right treatment of this hateful cancer that is inflicted on the earth by us humans and our much lauded industrial system, before it takes us all down.  It’s time for the public – the revered marketplace – you and me (we are part of the treatment) – to say to the institution of business:  “You think you cannot afford to act responsibly; but here’s the truth:  You can no longer afford not to act responsibly; stop your companies’ crimes against nature, for we, we (!) will run you out of business if you don’t.”

 

Riverkeepers, led by Sally, you have led the way in protecting our precious Chattahoochee for 16 years or more.  Thank you!  Please keep leading the way.  You have spoken and acted for us all this time.  But, now it’s time all our voices joined in and were heard more loudly, and it’s time our actions matched our words.  What we have in this small watershed, upon which we are all so dependent, can and should be an exemplary model for watersheds everywhere, thanks to Upper Chattahoochee Riverkeepers.  And metaphorically, for the entire precious natural environment, without which there would be no economy, and no life, at all.  Earth’s cancer cannot be allowed to win.  You and I are the beginning of the right treatment. 

 

There – I’ve said my piece.  If the shoe fits, wear it.  Thank you again from the people of Interface.