This is the final piece in the trilogy: Think Big, Choosing Vintage First, and Steward the Planet. And fair warning: this one is likely the most provocative.

I need you to set aside your beliefs about organized religion and whatever else you’ve come to believe over your life, just for the next few minutes.

You and I found ourselves here on Planet Earth on the day we were born. As a matter of fact, the human species is known to have inhabited the planet for roughly 300,000 years, even though recorded history only goes back about 5,000. For the majority of that time, the planet was lush with vegetation, overflowing with clean air and water, and it gave us shelter, food, community, and friends. Maybe not perfectly, and maybe not easily, but the bones for it were right there for the taking.

Neither of us had any idea how the plants, the trees, the flowers, and the fungus were connected to the forests, connected to the seas, connected to the rest of humanity. We just knew we’d been dropped into a gorgeous habitat. And humans being humans, our species has always been on the lookout to make adjustments to Planet Earth.

You and I have pursued that dream too.  We’ve looked at what we’ve been given and tinkered in any way possible to improve it, make it better and make it easier.  Like our parents and their parents, you and I have successfully upgraded our lives with more convenience, more toys, and more gadgets. For generations, then, we humans have always done things that we thought would make the lives of us and our families and communities better.

In pursuit of that objective

We forgot one important thing. This place we call Planet Earth has a finite supply of everything. And what we did in the name of progress and to make things better significantly reduced the Planet’s ability to regenerate and continue to produce its bounty for the rest of us.  It also reduced our quality of life.

Maybe, like me, you think back to the days in summer where every day, Monarch Butterflies landed on every flower and every twig. Maybe you, too, remember our parents yelling at the top of their lungs to not let the bugs in and close the screen door. You likely remember those cool seatbelt-less rides in the family station wagon.

These days

You know the smog is caused by our fetish with driving everywhere and our dependence on oil. And you also know the newer lie, the one that says working twelve hours a day is virtuous, when really it’s just overwork quietly costing us our health. Did you also know that global rates of mental illness have nearly doubled since 1990?  And according to UN-Habitat data, over 300 million individuals are unhoused globally, and 2.8 billion people lack adequate housing or secure land. I am deliberately not providing any stats on alcoholism, gambling, or the other addictions we endure because you’d just stop reading this. 

For even the most certain of us, we are all just one slippery slope tumble away from uncertainty.

And you’re likely aware that the world population reached 8 billion in November 2022 and sits at roughly 8.3 billion today, having doubled since 1970, when it was around 3.7 billion. You may not know that the Great Barrier Reef has lost more than half its coral cover since 1995. And you may also not know that in 2024, global average temperature rose more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels for the first time on record. The UN’s Emissions Gap Report, released in late 2025, found that global temperatures are now likely to exceed that 1.5-degree threshold on a sustained, long-term average within the next decade.

What we have left today of the original wildlife on this planet is not even 30 percent of what we had 50 years ago. The World Wildlife Fund’s 2024 Living Planet Report found a 73 percent average decline in monitored wildlife populations between 1970 and 2020. Freshwater ecosystems are down 85 percent. Terrestrial ecosystems are down 69 percent. Marine ecosystems are down 56 percent. There is no way to recover from extinction.

I want to be clear. All this occurred because we humans decided we knew better and it was our duty, obligation and purpose to make our lives here better. And as I am sure you can infer from the dates and data, recorded history spans about 5,000 years. Yet the massive devastation to the planet has occurred almost entirely in the last 50 to 100 years. The conclusion is obvious.  Collectively, we’ve failed in our attempts to make our lives better.

There is only one way forward.

Today, in 2026, we are slowly awakening to the fact that GDP, and business benchmarks do not a happy society make.  They make a miserable society.

If we humans, who were never built to withstand extreme heat, are going to have a future here on this constantly heating up planet, our attention has to shift. Away from living as happy, wealth-producing individuals. And toward looking after the planet, so there’s something left for the generations that follow.

This isn’t easy. It demands real rethinking on nearly every front. And damage caused by 50 years of industrialization can’t be undone in a year or two.

Replicating or improving on the previous generation’s lifestyle, endless extraction, the cowboy mentality of I-can-do-it-all-myself, choosing the bliss of technology over the messiness of community, none of it serves anyone, including the planet.

Stewarding the planet is the only way forward that leaves any of us with something worth striving for.

None of us can undo fifty years in an afternoon. But every one of us can decide, starting today, whether we spend the rest of our life extracting from this planet or looking after it. That’s the only real choice left.

What will you choose?