To my future kids:

I have recently traveled to Montana for the first time, and saw signs and license plates referring to it as “The Last Best Place”. The landscape was so pristine, with beautiful mountains, streams, bighorn sheep, elk and trout. Driving from one town to the next, we did not have cell phone service, and we were glad. Grandpa took me and your Uncle Max here to go fly fishing, which I hope to be able to to do with you in your lifetime.

With a president like Donald Trump cutting funding to the EPA, I fear that Montana will only have been “The Last Best Place”;, and this land will not be the same as it was when I visited it. I hope that deforestation, mining and fracking do not destroy this landscape. I was unaware that such an uninhabited place still existed in the United States. I currently live in Chicago in an apartment, so this environment is near the polar opposite of what I am accustomed to, and it is the most beautiful thing I have seen in my lifetime.

I hope that you get to enjoy places as beautiful as Montana. I hope these places can continue to be preserved, and that biodiversity can remain intact.

I plan to donate money to the Environmental Defense Fund, the Nature Conservancy, and American Rivers, in hopes that I may be able to make it more likely that you can live to see beautiful, untouched landscapes like Montana. I am currently still figuring out what I will be doing for a career, but I would like to be able to contribute to preserving our Earth.