How do we make this world worthy of our children? I’m sure we’d all like to know. The way we’re going, more and more potentially great parents are choosing not to bear children because of who we’ve become and what we continue to do to our human neighbors and our precious Planet. This makes the choice to have a child, to raise a child, to try our best to teach them who they are either totally pointless or a complicated act of courage. I’m not totally sure we parents know which it is until we become…well…until we become parents.

So you go parents!!! And heed Pablo Casal’s advice. Your only job, really, is to convince your child by what you say and how you live that they are truly a marvel and, compromised as it is, we live in a marvelous world. So that as they grow up it becomes less and less possible that they could ever harm another who is, like them, a marvel. And less and less thinkable that they—that we—could ever harm the marvelous living systems that welcome us and allow us to make our homes here.