To the high school graduates of the years 2030 and 2050,

Congratulations on finally getting through high school. I’m sure you learned a lot and took from it many experiences and memories. Hopefully some of you were able to find things that motivated you, things that inspired you, and things that you strive to become better at.

I’m writing in 2017 as a freshman in college, just beginning on a road that many of you will start on in the coming months. The year I’m writing in is a crazy and chaotic one, one that will definitely go down in your history books. In the United States alone we have a very heated political climate, protests and riots hitting the streets, bans on immigration, and many more social and political issues that we face and hear about day to day.

What we, as a society, have come to take for granted over the past few centuries, and even more so nowadays in a corporate-run America is the environment, the planet that we live on. As we battle for personal rights and fight social issues day in and day out, we neglect the issues that plague our planet, issues that drive not only our species but every species on Earth towards extinction. Issues like climate change, deforestation, acidification, pollution, losses of biodiversity, honestly the list can keep going for a long while.

It is impossible for me to tell exactly how the future is turning out. I’m hopeful that our generation is the one that is able to make moves towards fixing the issues our planet faces. In fact it is a dream of mine that people are able to look past the money aspect of things for just a little while and realize that life is so much bigger than that, that in order for our species to continue to thrive, in order for this planet to exist and thrive long after our existence, since we as a species are just a blink in the eye of the timeline of this planet, we need to make some serious adjustments in a short period of time.

I don’t know what your environment is like, but hopefully it is one where Miami still exists. Hopefully the planet you live on still has frozen ice caps, as cool as it would be to sail through the North Pole, that would be absolutely devastating to be missing that on this planet. Hopefully you guys still have elephants and tigers and lions and pandas, all the endangered species that were shown to me as a kid, animals that were said to be protected by us. Hopefully we were able to make this planet a place where you can see, hear, feel, and taste the diversity the nature of this planet has to offer.

I know that as a generation we are making moves, but you guys are next. Wherever we took you guys to, wherever this planet lies because of my generation, it is up to you guys to keep the progress going. Educate yourselves on what exactly can be done by you individually and by your communities to make this a greener planet to live on. As a country right now it would take 6 of our planets to sustain our resource usage. The reality is that we only have one of our planets, and once this one is gone, it is over. Do your best to make this a place where your kids can grow up and see the wonders this world provides.

Anyway we make the planet suffer will in the end affect us. We can’t do anything without these resources. With your promising futures and bright minds, go out into the world and save the beauty that is the nature of our planet.

Godspeed.