At Nick Clegg’s pre Rio+20 reception yesterday, there was lot of excited anticipation about the impending earth summit. It may have already started, but things don't really kick off until next week and many in the room, including the Deputy Prime Minister and Caroline Spelman, were yet to travel.
The process of turning the summit's proposed text - the so called zero draft – into a final agreement is well underway. The process has taken it from 16 pages to over 200 so far, but we've now come down to 80. So much to be done if we don't want to fell a rainforest to print all the copies!
One of the things the Deputy Prime Minister was keen to talk about was intergenerational equity. Not a phrase you hear every day! It basically means that if we get this wrong, we screw up and our children pay the price by inheriting a world that’s in a worse state than it was when we received it.
For me, that’s really what our own Wildlife Explorers is all about. Teaching the core values of nature and the need to protect and cherish it to our children, in the hope – no, the expectation - that we will pass this planet on in no worse state than we found it and that our children will do the same for the generation that follows.
That idea has really set me up for Rio. As a parent, how could I not be inspired to step up for nature?