As individuals we can, each of us, assess our own faiths and beliefs, measure our stores of energy, take account of our own pressing personal responsibilities, and then respond, inventing together another way of life, one less harmful, less cruel than the one we have now...
Simply put, the impact of human enterprise on nonhuman systems has created an unusual and strange urgency. In a relatively short time, we're going to learn whether we are indeed a match for the various threats science enumerates. We are going to find out whether we can actually be as empathetic toward one another, as tolerant, as imaginative as we believe we can...
I look at my own tasks as a writer and humanitarian and know this one thing: With-out other men and women, hard at work devising a safer future for every life on Earth, my task is like the song of a man living alone in a box: beautiful, perhaps, but of no great help to humanity. I need these men and women. Before long, each of us will be looking to our right and to our left for eyes that we can believe in. It is with these women and men that we will initiate the work that will impel those still to come, including our children, to praise us - and to understand the fierceness of our determination that they not be born in vain because, facing great threats, we fell down.
-Source Barry Lopez's article for Oprah Magazine (April 2009). Barry has traveled to more than 60 countries and worked on international humanitarian project with Mercy Corps and Quest for Global Healing
