We are elders. Through the course of our lives we’ve witnessed or been guilty of a shortsightedness that, over the past few hundred years, has been destroying a Natural world many of us failed to understand. But lately, we’ve been called upon by that same Nature to examine our legacy, and we see that many of the choices we made (where we had the power to make choices at all) have contributed to the current crisis of global climate change that will greatly diminish the lives of our offspring.

We have perhaps only twelve years to make the massive changes needed to mitigate a catastrophic global warming brought about by human-kind’s addiction to fossil fuels. We feel we must speak while we still can for the unborn generations, and support our grandchildren around the world who have begun to petition for change.

Make no mistake, many of us believed in the dreams we pursued in their time. Many of us risked our lives in a great mobilization against a monstrous tyranny (yes, many believed in this too), but we also eradicated polio and we saw men step onto the surface of the moon for the first time, so we can attest to the human capacity and energy to make big things happen.

From a place of long experience with human folly and human redemption, we now call upon everyone, especially the leaders of government and industry in the developed world, to put aside identity or partisan politics and change direction. We ask for the mobilization of all the resources available to policy makers, technologists, and the human imagination to be put into a concerted and vigorous effort to ensure a livable world for future generations. We also ask the United Nations to declare a global emergency, calling upon sovereign nations to cooperate as one in this response.