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A Letter to the First Global Generation in Human History

You see, it doesn’t have to be this way.

There is no law, no religion, and nothing in your genes, that says that young people must grow up so deeply worried about your future.  

No Commandment in any Scripture states that you must live with a deep, dark, heavy sense of dread every day . . . because the Climate Crisis is going to destroy your world.  

No destiny ever declared that your generation is doomed to live in quiet but constant fear of nuclear weapons.  

No curse was ever placed upon your generation, declaring that “Thou must live and die in war upon war upon war upon war unto eternity.”

Global problems require global solutions.

We’ve got to wrap our minds around the entire planet, and we’ve got to reach with our minds to the end of the 21st Century, at least.

Technology alone will not save us.  

We need a new way of thinking.  We need a new way of working with each other.  We need a new way of living on the planet which has supported life for three and a half billion years.

A revolution in technology, such as the Industrial Revolution which began with the steam engine, may be a very good thing, but it’s not enough.

A revolution in the way we govern ourselves, such as the American Revolution or the Russian Revolution, may be a good thing, or a horrible thing, but it is not enough.

We laid railroad tracks across the American continent as part of the Industrial Revolution, but we killed millions of buffalos, and we killed hundreds of thousands of Native Americans, along the way.

We need more than new machines.  We need a new way of thinking.

The young people of the world—with their laptops and telephones, with their scorn for the Profiteers who are killing their biosphere and thus killing their future, with their disgust with yet another war . . . and with their multitude of untested talents, their unrelenting energy, their indomitable hopes, and their instinctive sense of right and wrong—yes, the young people of the world are absolutely ready to become The First Global Generation in Human History.

They are ready to build the Renaissance of the 21st Century, if we would only let them.  

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Book categories: Climate Change and Clean Energy