Terrible Tenants
I recently heard someone say something that stuck with me:
We don’t own the land, we are renting it from the generations that come after us
And if that’s true, what kind of tenants have we been?
Terrible fucking tennants.
Maybe not all of us, but most of us for sure
If we had a landlord who walked around and saw what we were doing to the property—cutting down forests, polluting rivers, filling oceans with plastic, exhausting natural resources, destroying habitats, and treating the planet like an endless supply of whatever we want—we probably would have been evicted a long time ago.
Who Do We Think Owns the Land?
We talk about land as if ownership gives us unlimited permission.
My land. My house. My property.
But what does ownership really mean when you’re only here for a few decades?
The trees were here before us.
The rivers were here before us.
The mountains were here before us.
If those after us are lucky, these things will be here after us. But at this rate and for the first time in human history there really is no guarantee
Because whatever we do today doesn't end with us.
The decisions we make become someone else's inheritance.
We need to change our thought process from destroying everything in front of us to make a buck, to is this something that will harm the earth for those coming after me?
We have proven that we can destrpy things at an incredible rate. Can we start to save living things at an incredible rate?
What Are We Leaving Behind?
Every generation inherits something from the one before it.
Clean water or polluted water.
Healthy forests or disappearing forests.
Abundant resources or depleted ones.
A livable planet or one that requires increasingly desperate solutions just to survive.
We often think about what we want to leave our children financially—a house, savings, investments, property.
But what good are those things if the world they inherit is worse than the one we were given?
What if our greatest responsibility isn't what we accumulate, but how we leave the places we have in habited.
Change Starts With How We See It
Maybe the first step isn't recycling more.
Maybe it isn't buying fewer things.
Maybe it isn't planting a tree.
Those things matter, but they start with something deeper:
How do we see the world?
If we believe this planet belongs entirely to us, we'll use it however we want.
But if we believe we're temporary tenants—borrowing the land, the water, the forests, and the resources from people we've never even met—then our responsibility changes.
A good tenant doesn't leave the place destroyed.
A good tenant leaves it in a condition that the next person can live in.
So what kind of tenants are we?
And when the next generation finally takes over this place, will they look at what we left behind and be grateful?
Or will they wonder why and how we could have treated it with such carelessness. Why we cared so much about money and so little about our legacy as one-time stewards of the earth.
