And along with all the joy of anticipated ski trips and fishing adventures and cuts and bruises and breaks and ball games, I knew that night that some day and somehow I will have to explain to you what I and those who came before you have done to the world in which you will live and love. And you will ask “why didn’t you stop it happening?”

What will I say?

Well, here is the story of the seemingly impossible and absolutely essential that I hope I can tell you on November 5th, 2020:

By 2010, my team and our partners helped to join 500 cities around the world and the communities living in the riversheds, bioregions and planet that supports them

in a shared community that manifested its deepest values and highest purpose in a clear, tangible, joyous and irresistible journey towards a world of peace and sustainability.

These communities pledged to leave your generation with the legacy of a worldwide culture dedicated to the healing of humans and the ecosystems we depend on and to commit themselves to achieving their highest imaginable goals by 2020. Their citizens engaged and acted to ensure that sufficient progress towards these goals was made every day, every week, every month and every year. We helped the people that live in these cities and the communities in their riversheds to build simple, elegant plans that would interact like an ecosystem to create a shared path to the type of future you and your children and theirs deserve.

For my part in this work I did my best to hold my love for you and my hope for every child in the world in my heart and in my actions and when I failed, my colleagues, friends and family helped me back to my path.

And here are my highest hopes for your lifetime, the impossible dream that we must make reality.

• I hope the world’s mayors and community leaders and the citizens they represent show the highest levels of ethical leadership, joining together to transcend national and psychological barriers and outdated governmental policies to create a culture of peace and happiness, shared prosperity and ecological health.

• I hope we invest nothing in war and everything in peace.

• I hope for clean air, clean water, clean land.

• I hope the world’s cities generate most of their own food in rooftop solar organic greenhouses, urban organic farms and community and individual organic gardens.

• I hope for the true democracy that is currently avoided by the most powerful nations in the world, even as they offer democracy to offers.

• I hope all toxic chemicals are replaced with natural alternatives.

• I hope the most heavily armed nations in the world show the rest of the world how to disarm and become powers for peace.

• I hope human activities generate zero waste and zero net greenhouse gas emissions.

• I hope we produce zero ozone depleting chemicals and that the ozone hole continues to heal.

• I hope humanity works to restore and replenish the natural environment - to stop desertification, to protect and connect precious pockets of biodiversity and to protect and restore the forests that nourish air, water and human spirits.

• I hope the greenhouse gas content of our atmosphere is stabilized.

• I hope every home, every building and every city generates renewable energy and that we leave earth’s remaining fossil carbon reserves in place.

• I hope schools become places of physical and mental adventure.

• I hope that most of the species that existed when you were born will still exist when you die.

• I hope children and youth take their place with other citizens in a truly engaged, democratic system.

• I hope we will have stopped plundering our seas and allowed fish stocks to recover.

• I hope every form of governance contains a human rights charter that protects every child, woman and man and a biodiversity charter that protects nature and I hope that these rights are enforced.

• I hope we see children free to really play again.

• I hope we create lasting art, products and services of beauty and purpose from recycled materials using renewable energy.

• I hope we learn to respect ourselves, each other and the rest of nature.

• I hope we see the end of the worst of poverty and greed.

• I hope you can show your grandchild a salmon leaping a waterfall.

• Most of all, I hope your generation, will forgive mine and that we will work together to leave your children and theirs a better world.

All my love and hope,
Dad

Copyright Colin Grant, 2006