Greta Thunberg is the perfect activist because it’s difficult to challenge or attack her, irrespective of the difficulty to refute her positions. She’s a 16 year old girl. How can you speak vehemently against a 16 year old?

Her words and actions have moved me and made me introspect. Here I am traveling around the world—taking several long flights—“just" to experience it. I’m trying to put together something that can contribute to our species and our planet, sure. But it makes me question my choices. And I think that’s exactly what’s needed.

What does the world need? If we rank the most important things we can accomplish politically, how would we go about that? Well, we need a planet. That’s pretty important. So I’d say arresting climate change would be the number one priority. We can’t do anything else without Earth itself. Political polarization, differences in religious ideology, economic and class issues—everything else kind of falls to the wayside when you don’t have a planet to live on.

What comes second? I’ll frame this by asking what we search for when we look for other planets that might harbor life. If a planet is in the “Goldilocks Zone,” what’s the main criteria we look at? Water. Water is what makes Earth unique; it is our planet’s most important resource. All of our ecosystems, all of our life, depend on it. This is not a single-species issue. So it seems that protecting and nurturing our water supplies, their purity, and their accessibility to our entire planet is pretty important. Not just for the 8 billion people living here, but the millions of other species we share this rock with as well.

From this larger perspective, these appear to be the 2 most important problems facing our planet. Can we look at this on a global scale, from a global perspective? Cynics say it will never happen, that people care primarily and almost exclusively about their own economics. I refuse to believe it. We’ve never had the technology, the connectivity, or the freedom to properly try. Can we rise above our own biology? Can we act collectively, for the survival of our species and our planet, when the situation is at its most dire?

I believe we can. And I believe we will.