Mark Burget -- Remarks
The Nature Conservancy North America Senior Leaders Meeting Atlanta
3/11/19
Good afternoon, my Nature Conservancy family. Welcome. How good it feels to be with you -- the wonderful, smart, caring, capable people of this amazing organization. This amazing force for the future of life.
But bear with me; instead of the future, I want to talk about the past. And I want to turn from our moment of celebration to a bit of consternation.
Let’s travel back in time. Back to before I was born. This is a true story. The year is 1954.
A prescient scientist – an ecologist -- sits at a desk, worrying about the havoc that humankind is raining down on the natural world. Our ecologist knows, well ahead of so many others, that nature is the foundation on which our own lives so clearly depend. It’s 1954 – 65 years ago – yet already it is so obvious to this scientist that we are facing a crisis.