Letter to the Grandkids
To be opened July 2076 (written July 2026)
Dear Isabelle, Juliette, Rae, Lee, Samuel:
I’m sorry.
It rings hollow and is completely inadequate to say that to you now, given everything that has happened, but it is true. Your Nana and I are profoundly sorry that we didn’t try harder to stop the harm we were doing to our world.
We lived in the time where the “climate” was not a thing that most people, including us, really thought about. We thought about weather. Is it going to rain today? How cold is it outside? Global warming only entered our conversation and thoughts when a few scientists raised the concerns that it was happening and began more measuring, modeling, and study of the causes and effects. It took almost 20 years for this work to reach the point where some humans began taking action.
There was optimism when this first started. The countries of the world gathered, shared results, and debated how to respond. Agreements were signed committing countries to reduce greenhouse gases (GHGs) that were causing this warming. Rich countries committed to help poorer countries and those more exposed to the consequences of climate change. It was an optimistic time. We humans had this.
As you know, it turned out to be too little too late. Human tendencies to get distracted and not work together also got in the way. Most of us continued doing what we had always done. Get a good job, make more money, buy a house, take a vacation to a distant part of the world. We were civilized people living in a civilized world and did our best to keep it that way.
You asked me: “Grandad, why didn’t you do something to fix climate change while you could?” It is a good question. For a long time I couldn't answer. The eventual answer came to us too late to be a reasonable response. So we did what humans often do when faced with a giant problem that needs us to make profound change. We fought about it.
What happened — and why we couldn’t address climate change in time — is that we were working on the wrong problem. We were working on symptoms of the problem, like emitting too much greenhouse gas and perpetuating activities that made the warming problem worse. Not the root cause of the problem.
The root cause of the problem is that we humans forgot that the “civilization” that we lived in was created by us. We invented it. We made it up, not all at once but in fits and starts over millennia. We used our very well-developed intelligence and imagination to create all the artifacts of civilization that made up our “world.”
We invented markets so we could exchange things, money to help make markets work, governments to organize and administer our towns and later nations. Writing was created so we could better communicate across distances and remember across time. Nations, property rights, and ownership ... all invented. Some people committed themselves to learning and studying nature to better understand it and invent new devices to make life easier. We invented religions to help explain what we didn’t understand and enable people, who might never meet, to share beliefs and stories.
We kept driving for more and better things. As we discovered new facts about nature we used them to push even further. We put humans on the moon, we cured some diseases, we eased the human condition so that many humans could live more comfortably and for longer. We told ourselves that we were doing good work and committed ourselves to making progress. Of course, there were some humans who did terrible things to each other in the name of progress, something we usually tried to correct.
We lost sight of the fact that what we considered to be “real” in our civilization were artifacts made by us. Yes, we made many real, tangible things that are part of our civilization. We made cars, houses, airplanes, roads, particle accelerators, nuclear power plants, and nuclear weapons. All tangible and “real” things. Products of our civilization.
Unfortunately, we forgot that at the actual base of reality is nature and our natural world. Rivers, trees, air, oceans, animals, birds, humans. These things are fundamentally real, in a more foundational way than artifacts. We have become so immersed in our “civilization” that we forgot that civilization lives within nature. Nature is larger than civilization. Nature doesn’t need civilization, civilization needs nature.
As we moved down our road to becoming more and more civilized, we began treating nature as ours to do with as we wished. We extracted minerals from it, often defacing it in the process. We “tamed” nature by building dams to divert water and generate power, we burned forests to make more land for cities and farms, we filled the air with chemicals so we could make our lives better, all the while doing harm to nature that ultimately made it worse.
We forgot to give nature rights. Salmon have no legal standing in our civilized world. Neither do rivers, bees, or air. We left them behind and forgot to give them rights above those of our civilized society.
We came to this realization too late, and now it is up to you to do “civilization” better than we did. I know you will remember that nature is bigger than we are and give it the voice it needs to have. We humans have the intelligence and imagination to create a better civilization than we did on the first try.
Please do better.
Love Grandad