Unless we act now, we will doom our descendants to living in a world very different from the one in which we were raised, or even the one in which we live now.
Here’s the silver lining: Every individual has the power to effect great change, and today’s students are tomorrow’s leaders. Teaching Environmental Awareness is dedicated to fertilizing the grass roots, to grow and expand to regional, national and global levels.
Each scholarship will empower younger generations to stand up against the environmental crisis, to assure humans and the natural world can coexist harmoniously.
Your individual contributions — toward protecting Earth’s fragile ecosystems — brings us one step closer to providing a sustainable and functional world for future generations to inhabit.
We are all one. Together, we share the landscape. It is up to us to protect the environment on which every one of us, every organism large and small, depends for survival.
The runaway growth of terrestrial population has put pressure on the planet like never before. A person who is 65 years old today has seen Earth’s population triple in his or her lifetime, to (now) 7.6 billion. We can no longer maintain supplies of water, food and fuel to sustain such growth.
The air we breathe, the water we drink, the soil we nurture to grow the foods that feed our bodies — all have been compromised by chemicals and other toxic elements. Fossil fuel emissions have accelerated global warming and climate change at unsustainable rates.
Some of the challenges facing 21st-century humanity are:
- waste management and disposal, notably plastic and electronic waste;
- depletion of fossil fuels and other natural resources, calling for renewable resources;
- a loss of biodiversity on land and in the oceans, with deforestation as a key factor.
