We're all deciders, but the Environment is a unifier

People are beginning to get it. We're all in this together.

That realization is sinking in for millions across the United States, and hundreds of millions more across the globe. Global climate change, and its impact on humans and lesser life forms, can't be hidden, run from, ignored or denied any longer.

It's a big problem. But, lucky for us, an even bigger opportunity.

Through a decade and a half of taking students and teachers on journeys to explore the larger world, we at Earth Explore have found that the environment can be a profoundly unifying theme for we humans. That's precisely why we center our field studies around it.

When you set about to consider how the human community interacts with the larger global assemblage of living, and non-living things, you need all of the tools at your disposal. You need to know something about science, history, cultures and art. And you need critical thinking skills. Study of the environment forces us to come to terms with a supremely complex, multi-dimensional world.

But there's more to it than that. The environment is something we all have in common. A thread that runs through all of our lives, whether or not we like math, get jazzed by science, or are students of culture. The earth's environment is part of us, and we part of it. It shapes us, and we shape it. For better or worse.

Now back to the unifying part. In the same way it pulls our field studies together around a theme, the environment is a truly non-partisan, not polarizing issue around which humans can, and should rally. Yes, we can build our homes on hills, or behind locked gates, but all of us are ultimately the victims, or benefactors of what happens to our shared environment. In this case you could say we breathe...and therefore we are. Linked together that is.

The next ten years will be an opportunity for we as a global community, and most especially the United States as the leading nation of that global community, to recognize the power of common environmental action. Power not only to lift our planet out of peril, but to pull us together as a profoundly, inescapably linked human community, acting in common cause.