What kind of world do we want for our children?

The picture we carry

Picture the world you would like a child to inherit. Most people see something close to this: forests that are alive, cities quiet enough to hear birds, and streets where a child can walk without fear. Let us take the year 2040 as a point on the horizon. It is not a promise and not a forecast. Nobody knows what that year will bring. It is a picture, and a picture helps us choose which way to walk.

This article is about that direction. It does not say the world will change by a certain date. It invites you to ask a question that sounds big and turns out to be personal: what kind of world do we want for our children, and what is one thing I can do for it today?

Living forests, quiet cities, safe children

Take the picture one part at a time. Living forests come first, because forests are close to our breath. The oceans give a very large share of the oxygen on Earth, often put at about half. The rest comes from forests, grasslands and other plants. Every breath a child takes holds a little of that work. A living planet is not an abstract wish. It is the air in a child's lungs.

Quiet cities come second. Quiet is not only the absence of noise. It is a place where people have time to notice each other. Safety comes third. It is the simplest to say and the hardest to build. Many people feel a child is more at ease where adults look out not only for their own children but for one another.

Where such a world comes from

A world like this is not delivered by one decision on one day. It is put together from small things people do again and again: how we speak to a neighbour, what we give thanks for, where we place our attention. That world is built from what we do every day.

There are about 8 billion of us on Earth. Any two people share roughly 99.9 percent of their DNA, a widely repeated statement from genome institutes. The air is shared, too. Winds keep mixing the atmosphere, so the air you breathe today may recently have been over another continent. A child on the far side of the planet and your own child, niece or neighbour's son are breathing from one shared sky.

Here are a few small steps to begin with:

• Say thank you for your breath once a day.
• Spend one calm minute with a child, away from screens.
• Notice a tree on your street and stand beside it for a moment.

Why begin with gratitude

It is fair to ask what a minute of breathing has to do with forests and children. Nothing, if we expect it to plant trees. Something, if we ask what it does for the person who lives it. In a 2003 study by Emmons and McCullough, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, people who regularly wrote down what they were grateful for more often reported feeling better than control groups did. It is a modest result, and we do not promise more than it shows.

Many people believe that gratitude for breath slowly turns into care for the places the breath comes from. That is not a proven law. It is a hope, and a reasonable reason to try.

A world for children is a direction, not a forecast. We walk toward it with what we do today.