Consumer Choices Now Moral, Barbara Kingsolver '77 Tells Centre College Graduates

May 25, 2005

May 25, 2005, Greencastle, Ind. - "Novelist and essayist Barbara Kingsolver told the graduating seniors at Centre College that their choices on what to produce and consume have become moral choices in a way they weren't 100 years ago," notes the Advocate Messenger of Danville, Kentucky. Kingsolver, a 1977 graduate of DePauw University, delivered the commencement address at Centre Sunday and was awarded an honorary degree.

"Kingsolver told the seniors they are coming of age in an era of scarcity and that their generation will be the first to make decisions based on 'what you really need, and what others really need,'" the newspaper reports. "In a talk titled 'Picking up the bread,' Kingsolver, author of the Pulitzer Prize-nominated The Poisonwood Bible, described the numerous ways in which Americans are 'wrecking the planet as fast as we can' and consuming far more than our share of natural resources. She closed with a number of examples of ways in which creative social entrepreneurs are making decisions based on sustainable models, and stated that the profit motive had been 'trumped by the ecological economy of planet earth.'"

Read the complete story by clicking here, and access the text of the speech here.

Barbara Kingsolver is among the contributors to the recently released This Is My Best: Great Writers Share Their Favorite Work and My Mother's Garden: A Collection about Love, Flowers and Family.

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