The Future

One of the great truths about the human experience, the human condition, is that the sample size of the past is one.

That's true of our own individual lives, our individual pasts. It's also true of the past nations and of communities. But the future has a sample size of infinity.

There is any possible range of futures that we ourselves can forge depending upon which decisions we make across a wide spectrum of ideas and themes. That's why it's so particularly important that the youth of nations engage in the critical debates of society because they bring the energy.

They bring in the new ideas. They bring the new way of looking at things. Their minds are not yet shaped by all the experiences of their lives and sort of calcified to any extent. They're capable of reaching out for any idea without thinking first about the limits of it, but just being enthralled by the beauty of it. It is absolutely critical that youth engage in the debate over conservation. No matter what their viewpoints are. They don't have to agree with something like hunting, for example. They don't have to ever want to become a mountain climber. They can have their own experience in the natural world or their own concerns for conservation but it is critical that the engage because in this infinite range of futures that we can forge by our own actions, our own ideas, our own efforts, we can be assured that the conservation of the natural world must be one of the constant elements. There is nothing that we have achieved, no technological advance, no intellectual creation, that has yet been able to separate us from the basic rhythms and requirements of all animals that are dependent on the natural systems we have.

We need fresh water.

We need clean air.

We need food, but we also need beyond these basic requirements places where the human soul can be restored.

We can perceive beauty and understand the value of that in our lives. While we can marvel at these other wild creatures who essentially made us human and taught us to understand our differences from them, these are critical things for society's going forward and young people must engage in this debate and realize that if they don't that our generation will move on and someone must be the custodian of this natural world and they are the inheritors of this legacy and are also the inheritors of this responsibility. Their engagement has always been seen as a way of shaping the social norms. Students, young people fighting with passion for the things that they believe in, we need to make more and more of them passionately engaged in the debates over the conservation of nature.