To those who come after me,

I want to start by saying I’m sorry. I’m sorry for the world we have left you. A world of excess consumption, greed and exploitation. We assumed that progress meant using as much of this planet as we possibly could. We were so, so wrong. Looking at the current path we are destined to travel, I can assume that the world you now inhabit is not a pleasant place. It pains me to think of all the marvelous specifies of this planet that I have gotten to experience that you never will. For your generation, these species are immortalized in the pages of history. For that, I am sorry. They say no one man can change the world. But for my generation, living on the tipping point of catastrophe, it would have only taken one powerful man to put our planet before profits and make a difference. Perhaps it is human nature to destroy everything we hold dear. We are certainly not an empathetic species. So once again, I am sorry. On behalf of all of my generation and those that came before me, that we couldn’t leave this planet in better condition than we found it. My only hope is that this letter is wrong about the future. Your reality. That we came to our senses and changed. I hope that whoever reads this looks around I sees that I was wrong and that we left a planet for you that we can be proud of. I remain cautiously optimistic.