Taming the River to Let In the Sea

Featured Story

February 2005
Southern Louisiana is sinking into the Gulf of Mexico.  The surprising culprit is overambitious flood control. By Shea Penland

In February 2005, the late Shea Penland, Director of the Pontchartrain Institute for Environmental Sciences at the University of New Orleans, and the University's Braunstein Professor of Petroleum Geology, outlined the threat of hurricanes and catastrophic flooding to the city of New Orleans and the surrounding Mississippi Delta region. With Hurricane Katrina, the full horror of that threat was realized. Behind the tragedy lay both natural trends and the impact of human settlement and engineering. Penland's article, reproduced below, explored those factors and provides a guide to the obstacles that still must be addressed as the devastated region is rebuilt.

If you live in Louisiana and don’t know how to swim, now might be a good time to learn. The state is rapidly disappearing into the Gulf of Mexico. As a result of hundreds of years of natural-resource exploitation and modifications to the flow of the Mississippi River, whose silty waters created the delta region of southern Louisiana, the state’s coast lost more than 1,900 square miles of land in the twentieth century alone. At the current rate of loss in Louisiana, an area of wetlands the size of the Baltimore-Washington, D.C., metropolitan area will disappear by 2050. Without putting a massive program of ecological restoration into effect immediately, the fertile crescent of the Mississippi River is doomed to wash away sometime in this century.

Habitable land has always been a critical issue in coastal Louisiana. Much of the state lies only a few feet above sea level; the highest elevation in Louisiana is only 535 feet. Much of the city of New Orleans is actually below the level of the Gulf of Mexico. No wonder, then, that the earliest European explorers, colonists, and entrepreneurs became preoccupied with “taming” the Mississippi. Wherever people settled, they built levees, channels, and canals to control the floods; they reclaimed land from the bottoms of swamps and running rivers; and they did whatever else they could to harvest the bounty of Louisiana’s deltaic Eden.

Actual and projected areas of land loss and gain in coastal Louisiana are detailed on the map above, based on a map by the Louisiana Land Change Study. Land builds up when the Mississippi, its flow slowed as it meets the still waters of the Gulf, deposits its burden of silt. Some land loss results from erosion, but the most important effect is subsidence. Silt left by flooding subsides with time, and without regular flooding to renew the layers of silt, the ground can sink low enough to become immersed in the Gulf. The areas running from just east of Morgan City, eastward to Head of Passes and the Chandeleur Islands are the ones affected by the absence of regular flooding; two centuries’ worth of levee building and flood control on the Mississippi have led to that unintended consequence. The most active areas of land buildup are the Atchafalaya Delta, south of Morgan City, and limited areas around Head of Passes, at the present mouth of the Mississippi. Map © U.S. Geological Survey, National Wetlands Research Center

The Mississippi and other rivers, of course, are not the only threat to Louisiana’s lowlands. Every year hurricanes pose a threat from the Gulf of Mexico. The accompanying storm surges cause local, short-term flooding, but they also lead to permanent erosion of the coastal marshes and barrier islands in the Gulf, which provide the only protection for the inhabited lowlands farther inland. Louisianans have focused on river flooding for hundreds of years, yet only in the mid-1970s did the state begin to take the coastal erosion problem seriously.

The breakdown of the marshes and beaches coupled with the drainage of reclaimed lowlands remains a disaster in the making. New Orleans’s defenses would simply crumble if a truly enormous storm lingered over the city for long: a storm the size of, say, Hurricane Ivan, which made landfall along the Gulf coast of Alabama last fall, roughly 150 miles to the east. 

Important as they are, though, beach erosion and flooding are still not the heart of the problem facing Louisiana: subsidence of the delta plain is. Before the levees were built to channel and “control” the Mississippi and other nearby rivers, floodwaters would spread out and slow down as they flowed over the delta. When the flow slowed, the river would deposit its burden of silt, forming a new layer of earth. But the levees, which now constrict floods along a 1,200-mile corridor of the Mississippi, keep the floodwaters from spreading across the delta. Instead, the river-borne silt is lost off the edge of the continental shelf.Even many residents do not realize that New Orleans is on the brink of becoming the next Atlantis, the fabled island that, according to Greek legend, sank into the sea.

The delta, primarily mud that already filled the Mississippi River valley before the levees were built, is continuously being compacted under its own weight. As it compacts, it loses elevation, and without floods, no new sediments can arrive to build the land back up. In the past several hundred years, subsidence rates have ranged from a foot to four and a half feet per century.

Compounding the risk of catastrophic flooding is global climate change. Many climatologists expect such change to cause hurricanes even more frequent and more violent than the ones of the past several years. Sea levels are expected to rise by ten to twenty inches. As Louisiana’s marshes and barrier islands sink farther into the sea, the people of Louisiana could find themselves exposed to the elements. But the present trends and 

The threatened collapse of coastal Louisiana has been centuries, even millennia, in the making. Eighteen thousand years ago, with the end of the last ice age, sea levels began to rise dramatically. For thousands of years the great glaciers that had formed in the preceding era melted into the ocean, until, four thousand years ago, the sea level stabilized. But the Mississippi now met the sea in what had been its old valley. The river water, halted in its course by the Gulf of Mexico, no longer had the energy to carry its sediment. The sediment, falling out of the flow, began filling in the ancient river valley. The result was a subsidence-prone delta that could maintain its elevation only so long as sediment from upstream reached the delta plain each year.ominous signs of coastal land loss in Louisiana threaten much more than just the environment, economy, and people of the state. The importance of the Mississippi and, in particular, New Orleans to the commerce of the nation makes the crisis a threat to the entire United States.

Meanwhile, for thousands of years, the Mississippi Delta has undergone a process known as “delta-lobe switching.” The path the river takes to the Gulf is constantly changing, because the river is continuously drawn along the most efficient path to the Gulf [see map on opposite page]. Thus time and again the delta forms and reforms. By roughly four thousand years ago, the St. Bernard delta lobe was building up to the east of New Orleans and cut off three bays from the sea; those became lakes Maurepas, Pontchartrain, and Borgne [see map above]. The lobe terminated at the Chandeleur Islands, to the east. Geologically, though, that drainage did not last long. By roughly three thousand years ago, the Mississippi was probably also entering the Gulf via the Lafourche lobe, 

In the past thousand years the volume of flow through the St. Bernard and Lafourche delta lobes has waned significantly. Their distributaries shifted to a more efficient course through what is now the main stem of the Mississippi, downstream from New Orleans. But that course is doubtless no more permanent than the others.which lies southwest of present-day New Orleans. That delta lobe formed the region around the present-day communities of Houma, Golden Meadow, and Grand Isle.

As I noted earlier, ever since European settlers began living in the Mississippi River valley, they have been building levees to protect themselves—both their farmland and their cities—from the river’s floods. By 1812 the levees on the east bank extended 135 miles, from New Orleans to Baton Rouge. The levees on the west extended 210 miles, north to the Red River.

Mouth of the meandering Missis- sippi has relocated sev- eral times in the past 6,000 years. The map shows the extent of some of the delta lobes, or land built up by river-borne sediments, together with the estimated period of the main sediment de- position. The dates for the deposition of the lobes sometimes overlap. The delta lobes are marked by a series of colored dots. The present delta is marked in white. The lines of red carets upstream mark the extent of today’s system of levees for flood control.

Illustration ©  www.advancedillustration.co.uk

Unfortunately, levee construction during that early period of flood control was of poor quality. The levees were narrow, low, vulnerable to destruction by large floods, and generally ineffective at controlling the river. The shoddy workmanship, combined with severe flooding in the first half of the nineteenth century and the growth of New Orleans and surrounding communities, compelled the U.S. Congress to act. The Swamp Land Act of 1849 authorized Louisiana to create a system of levee districts. Each district received donated federal land that it could sell; the proceeds were to finance levee construction and land reclamation.

The American Civil War, and severe floods in 1862, 1865, and 1867, undid much of the work done under the Swamp Land Act. In 1879 Congress made the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers the leader of a new agency charged with 

A further problem became apparent in the early 1940s. At that time the Mississippi River Commission engaged Harold N. Fisk, a geologist at Louisiana State University, and a team of geographers and geologists to investigate delta-lobe switching by the Mississippi. Fisk and his colleagues realized that the Mississippi River would soon shift down the shorter course of the Atchafalaya River to the Gulf of Mexico. In response, the Corps of Engineers built a massive concrete structure known as the Old River Control Structure, at the confluence of the Red and Mississippi rivers, where the Atchafalaya begins. This structure controls the volume of water that flows down the Mississippi, allowing no more than 30 percent of the flow to enter the Atchafalaya. The remaining 70 percent continues past Baton Rouge and New Orleans to the Mississippi’s present delta in the Gulf. With the completion of the Old River Control Structure, the Mississippi River appeared tamed.controlling the river, the Mississippi River Commission. The commission established new standards and methods for levee construction, and it operated under those guidelines for nearly half a century. The record flood of 1927, however, forced a radical reconsideration of the commission’s levees-only policy of river control. That year’s flood inundated 26,000 square miles of land, killed hundreds of residents, and displaced hundreds of thousands more. After the flood, existing levees were rebuilt, extended, and reinforced with revetments. But the commission also tried new approaches, building floodways to divert water from the river and digging cutoffs to speed the passage of floodwaters.

It was obvious, even in the 1950s, that the sediments of the historic spring floods no longer reached their natural resting grounds in levees, swamps, and marshes. At the time, that seemed a blessing. The primary effect, however, was to restrict sedimentary land buildup to two isolated locations on the coast: at Head of Passes, seventy miles southeast of New Orleans, where the Mississippi River reaches the Gulf, and at the Atchafalaya River outlets, south of Morgan City. Elsewhere across Louisiana, coastal land loss continued to worsen. Flood control had set the stage for disaster.

Initially, no one viewed coastal land loss as a problem as severe as flooding. Hurricanes, though causes of flooding and locally catastrophic erosion, did not immediately affect state or national coastal policy. The first official recognition that beach erosion in Louisiana needed higher-level attention came with a Corps of Engineers report on Grand Isle, the state’s only developed barrier island.

The state did not sit up and take notice, however, until shoreline erosion began to threaten state coffers in the 1950s. Controversy arose over the ownership of mineral rights under the Gulf of Mexico, between the offshore boundary of Louisiana and the water bottom claimed by the federal government. The office of the Louisiana attorney general, seeking to garner support for offshore claims, conducted the first comprehensive analysis of shoreline erosion for the period from 1932 until 1954. The survey showed that Louisiana’s Gulf shoreline had receded by an average rate of six and a half feet per year. By 1969 the rate of erosion had risen to seventeen feet per year.

Louisiana soon had more bad news. In 1970 a report noted that the state had lost interior coastal lands at a rate of almost six square miles a year between the 1890s and 1930s. Furthermore, the rate had accelerated to more than sixteen square miles a year by the 1950s. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service found that between 1955 and 1978, Louisiana lost more than thirty-five square miles a year.

Such conditions put human settlements at great risk from encroaching water. To combat it, New Orleans and other communities are protected by two kinds of levee. One defends against the Mississippi’s annual floods; the other protects against deadly hurricane storm surges. Meanwhile, without the floods, 

The downside of flood control is not limited to the natural dispersal of sediments. It also interferes with the dispersal of nutrients across the delta. Even before the twentieth century, early conservationists noted that the river alterations were causing entire ecosystems in areas away from the main stem of the river to decline. Years after the levees and spillways were completed, investigators from the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium discovered a “dead zone” of water—at times as large as Massachusetts—spreading over the Gulf of Mexico from the shoreline at the mouth of the Mississippi. Devoid of dissolved oxygen, the dead zone owed its existence to massive flows of fertilizers collected by the Mississippi and its tributaries.New Orleans, like the rest of the delta, is subsiding as its sediments compact—and there is no question, of course, of intentionally letting muddy waters into the city to add new sediments there.

By the early 1980s, despite the signs of impending disaster (many of which had originated out of the decisions made by the federal government), federal and state agencies were still reluctant to attempt any kind of restoration. So locals acted first. In 1984, the frustrated government of coastal Terrebonne Parish, some forty miles southwest of New Orleans, appropriated $1 million for the first barrier-island restoration project in Louisiana, at Isles Dernières, under the direction of Robert S. Jones, the parish engineer and a leader in barrier-island restoration.

In 1989, finally prodded into action, the Louisiana legislature established the Louisiana Wetlands Conservation Authority, and Congress subsequently passed the Coastal Wetlands Planning, Protection, and Restoration Act of 1990 (CWPPRA). By that time the combined funding of various state and federal coastal restoration programs in Louisiana had reached more than $50 million a year.

Throwing money at a problem is one thing; spending it wisely is another. But the restoration projects envisioned seemed to incorporate the best thinking about how to address the present problems. The projects included the diversion of freshwater and its sediment from the Mississippi into marshes, the creation and protection of marshes, shoreline erosion control, and the restoration of barrier islands.

One of the first restorations was the Caernarvon Freshwater Diversion Project, which began operation in 1991. Planned prior to CWPPRA, the project called for discharging as many as 80,000 gallons of freshwater per second into the swamps, marshes, and shallow bays east of the Mississippi River and downstream from New Orleans, in Saint Bernard and Plaquemines parishes. That lowland area had been losing as much as a thousand acres a year. The Caernarvon project consisted of a set of diversion gates built through the existing flood-control levees; the flow through the gates was intended to mimic the natural over-bank flooding that built the delta.

Since 1991 the Caernarvon project has become a model that has afforded valuable practical experience with restoration techniques. But it has also had unwanted effects. For example, the freshwater diversion project disrupted seafood harvesting by coastal communities, and as a result of lawsuits brought against the project, local oystermen have been awarded more than $1 billion in damages.

From 1991 until 1998, more than forty-five projects began under the auspices of the CWPPRA. But it soon became obvious to both state and federal governments that the coastal land loss in Louisiana far exceeded the capabilities of the original CWPPRA legislation to address it. A new effort, known as Coast 2050, was set up to evaluate and plan for a larger-scale restoration of coastal Louisiana. That work resulted in a plan with an anticipated price of $14 billion.

The Coast 2050 effort subsequently evolved into the Louisiana Coastal Area Ecosystem Restoration Project, or LCA, in which I participate as a geologist. In an effort to draft the legislation needed to

The magnitude of the crisis, though, should be obvious: the largest river ecosystem in the United States is collapsing right in front of us. And if leaders are wondering whether we can succeed, the answer is yes—our experience with CWPPRA has taught us we can. No handbook for coastal restoration exists, but willing spirits can and will move ahead to restore America’s wetlands.carry out restoration, multiple LCA teams write, meet, review, and rewrite feverishly. Congressmen, government leaders, and other power brokers have also descended on Louisiana to determine how big the crisis is.

My colleagues and I proceed according to the best principles of practical science: we apply what we know, we test and adjust in the field, and we are not afraid to seize on unexpected success. But what we learn through hard empirical work will someday create a body of disciplined knowledge that can be applied throughout the world. Our work in Louisiana will someday form part of the foundation of a new field—environmental restoration science—that will prove as important to university education in this century as geology and engineering have been to date.

In 1925, one visionary, Percy Viosca Jr. of the Louisiana Department of Conservation, foresaw the impending ecological collapse of coastal Louisiana and the necessity of restoration. He wrote:

Man-made modifications in Louisiana wet lands [are] a failure, destroying valuable natural resources without producing the permanent compensating benefits originally desired. . . . Our future conservation policy should be a restoration of those natural conditions best suited to an abundant marsh, swamp, and aquatic fauna. . . . [With them] the state and nation may enjoy . . . a more enduring prosperity.

Raised in northeastern Florida, Shea Penland  was fascinated from an early age by the  mysteries of coastal phenomena. While  pursuing a Ph.D. in coastal geomorphology at  Louisiana State University in the late 1980s,  he investigated such environmental threats as  coastal erosion, wetland loss, and oil spills  throughout the world. As Director of the  Pontchartrain Institute for Environmental  Sciences at the University of New Orleans, and  the University's Braunstein Professor of  Petroleum Geology, Penland collaborated with  fellow scientists and educators on practical  solutions to coastal and environmental problems  in Louisiana and elsewhere. Penland died in late  March 2008 at the age of fifty-four.

Copyright © Natural History Magazine, Inc., 2005

Steve Jobs's commencement address at Stanford, June 12, 2005

'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says Stanford Report, June 14, 2005 This is a prepared text of the Commencement address delivered by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, on June 12, 2005.

Video of the Commencement address. I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.