Short Speech about Environment: Dear Future Generations

Dear Future Generations: Sorry

Dear future generations, I think I speak for the rest of us when I say sorry. Sorry we left you with our mess of a planet. Sorry that we were too caught up in our own doings to do something. Sorry we listened to people who made excuses to do nothing. I hope you forgive us. We just didn’t realize how special the Earth was, like a marriage gone wrong. We didn’t know what we had until it was gone.

For example, I’m guessing you probably know it as the Amazon desert, right? Believe it or not it was once called the Amazon rain-forest and there were billions of trees there. All of them gorgeous and oh… you don’t know much about trees, do you? Well, let me tell you trees are amazing. I mean we literally breathe the air they are creating. They clean up our pollution or carbon. They store and purify water, giving us medicine that cures our diseases, food that feeds us which is why I’m so sorry… to tell you that we burn them down. We cut them down with brutal machines horrific at a rate of forty football fields every minute. That’s 50% of all trees in the world gone in the last hundred years, why? For this (money). That wouldn’t make me so sad if it weren’t so many pictures of leaves on it. You know, when I was a child, I read how the Native Americans had such consideration for the planet that they felt responsible for how they left the land for the next seven generations which brings me great sorrow because most of us today don’t even care about tomorrow. I’m sorry that we put profit above people, greed above need, and the rule of gold above the golden rule. I’m sorry we use nature as a credit card with no spending limit over, drafting animals to extinction, stealing your chance to ever see their uniqueness or become friends with them. Sorry, we poison the ocean so much that you can’t even swim in them. Most of all, I’m sorry about our mind-set because we had the nerve to cause this destruction progress. Hey, Fox News, if you don’t think climate change is a threat, I dare you to interview the thousands of homeless people in Bangladesh. See while you were in your pit house nestle, their homes were literally washed away beneath their feet due to rising sea levels. Sarah Palin, you said that you love the smell of fossil fuels, well I urge you to talk to the kids of Beijing who are forced to wear pollution masks just to go to school. So you can ignore this but the thing about truth is it can be denied, not avoided. So I’m sorry, future generations. I’m sorry that our footprint became a sinkhole and not a garden. I’m sorry that we paid so much attention to ISIS and very little to how fast the ice is melting in the arctic. I’m sorry we doomed you and I’m sorry we couldn’t find another planet and time to move to.

You know what? I’m not sorry. This future, I do not accept it because an error doesn’t become a mistake until you refuse to correct it. We can redirect this. How? Let me suggest that if a farmer sees a tree that is unhealthy, they don’t look at the branches to diagnose it. They look at the root. So, like that farmer, we must look at the root and not to the branches of government and not to the politicians run by corporations. We are the root. We are the foundation. This generation is up to us to take care of this planet. It is our only home. We must globally warm our hearts and change the climate of our souls and realize that we are not apart from nature. We are part of nature and to betray nature is to betray us, to save nature is to save us. Whatever you’re fighting for racism or poverty, feminism, gay, rights or any type of equality, it won’t matter in the least because if we don’t all work together to save the environment, we will be equally extinct. Sorry.