You are the Hope of the Future
Featured image: Kids from Taos Day School hiking in the Rio Grande del Norte National Monument © John Miles
You are the Hope of the Future
From Dave Foreman’s Closing Keynote Talk at the 50th Anniversary of The Wilderness Act in November, 2014 in Albuquerque, reprinted in “Around the Campfire” #64.
Thank you, all you folks who are in your 30s and 20s and younger, who are here, and those like you who are carrying on—because you are the hope of the future. You truly are the greatest generation and you have the greatest responsibility of any generation that has ever lived since we came out of Africa 50,000 years ago and spread around the world.
Your job is nothing less than to save Earth from all the damage all the previous generations of Homo sapiens have done. And don’t worry, you’ve got plenty of help from the past. All you have to do is look back at the great champions of life on Earth, the great champions of humility, and know that you’re following in those footsteps. You just need to have bigger shoes than we had and do more and really save it.
To show how this works, let’s look at what human society really is. Edmund Burke, the great English philosopher and the founder of intellectual traditional conservatism—and there are no more intellectual traditional conservatives alive other than me today—said, “Society is a compact between those who came before, those who are here now, and those who are yet to come.”
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Dave Foreman is the founder of The Rewilding Institute, co-founder of The Wildlands Project and Earth First!, and author of several acclaimed books on wildlands conservation. Books: Rewilding North America | Man Swarm: How Overpopulation Is Killing The WIld World | Take Back Conservation …among several other Rewilding books you can find here. [Photo: Dave Foreman in the barren grounds of Nunavit, Canada © Nancy Morton]
Awesome