[Solar Impulse round the world flight]
As we head deeper into the 21st Century, the problems for the human species seem to keep mounting up.
Population pressures, increasing social inequality, scarce resources, a changing climate, the globalisation of... everything. Everywhere you look it seems there are issues we need to address to secure the prosperous future that surely just about everyone wants for the next generation.
And I'm not just speaking as a new parent - although that always heightens the desire to do whatever's possible to protect those coming after us.
Often all these issues just seem too overwhelming and it feels like there will never be a way to solve even some of them. Certainly spending too much time absorbing mainstream media can make it come across that way.
Yet every day I get to meet so many people who are already striving to change the small part of the world they can. Cleantech business owners finding ways to turn our waste into zero-emissions energy. Indigenous Australians finding ways to help themselves in spite of government intransigence. Climate researchers continuing in the face of intimidation and harassment. Water management experts in Holland and Australia trying to build community resilience to the increasing risks of severe flooding and drought. Leaders within the corporate world trying to nurture new ways of doing business like Shared Value.
We're going to need a lot more people like this in the coming decades. But every wave of (r)evolutionaries that comes through makes it that much easier for the ones that follow. Every successful innovation, every policy change made, every community that bands together to change something. It all starts to build, one solution on top of another.
I feel immensely privileged to be able to meet so many of them through my day job. To hear their stories and to be able to help some of them make an even bigger impact in the years ahead.
We certainly have no shortage of challenges facing our species, but we also have no shortage of this new type of (r)evolutionary doing their utmost to re-write the future that appears to be ahead of us.
Isn't it time more of us found a way to play a fuller part in the (r)evolution?
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