Harrison Ford Looked a Generation in the Eye and Told Them the Truth: “We Left You a Real Mess”
At Arizona State University, Ford delivered a blunt warning about extinction, corruption, climate breakdown, and the fight for the future that now belongs to young people.
I’m a huge fan of Harrison Ford, and not just because he narrated a movie I’m in about two weeks a few of us spent with His Holiness the Dalai Lama at his home in Dharamsala and McLeod Ganj.
Ford stood in front of Arizona State University’s graduating class a couple of months ago and did something almost no politician in Washington has the courage to do right now. He told a generation of twenty-two-year-olds the unvarnished truth about the planet they’re inheriting and the people who handed it to them in this condition.
“The world you’re stepping into, the world my generation left you, is a real mess,” Ford said.
He didn’t dress it up, and he didn’t reach for the kind of corporate-friendly hedging you hear from senators who take money from ExxonMobil.
He told those students they have an “essential mandate to protect 30 percent of the world’s land and sea by 2030, to prevent the mass extinction, to slow the warming of our planet,” and then he reminded them that despite better science and better policies, we’re still hemorrhaging nature to “profiteering, corruption, conflict.”
Ford has been on the board of Conservation International for about 35 years now, and what he said in Tempe is something the data makes impossible to dismiss. The World Wildlife Fund’s 2024 Living Planet Report documented a catastrophic 73 percent average decline in monitored wildlife populations since 1970, with freshwater species down 85 percent and Latin American and Caribbean populations collapsed by an astonishing 95 percent.
We’re not approaching a tipping point in some distant future. We’re already deep into what scientists openly call the Sixth Mass Extinction, and it’s the first one in the planet’s 4.5 billion year history caused by a single species, us.
I remember walking with Louise through a forest outside Berlin years ago, the kind of dense, ancient woodland Germans have spent generations protecting because they understand, in a way most Americans no longer do, that a country without intact nature is a country eating its own future.
The Germans learned the hard way in the 1980s, when their forests were dying from acid rain, that there’s no economic strategy clever enough to outrun ecological collapse. They acted, they regulated, they invested.
And here we are, four decades later, with an American president who took us out of the Paris Climate Agreement on day one of his second term and made us the only nation on Earth to walk out of the global compact to save ourselves.
But that was just the beginning. Trump’s Interior Department just rescinded the Public Lands Rule, eliminating the requirement that conservation be considered alongside mining, drilling, and grazing across 245 million acres of public land that belongs to all of us.
His Agriculture Department rolled back the 2001 Roadless Rule that protected old-growth forests from logging on millions of acres, and his budget proposal would slash funding for public land agencies by more than a third and transfer national park units permanently out of federal ownership.
In Arizona, where Ford was speaking, the administration is trying to open the brand-new Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni National Monument to uranium mining and drilling just a few miles from the Grand Canyon.
When Trump’s people solicited public comments on rescinding the Roadless Rule, more than 99 percent of the over 600,000 comments opposed the rollback, and for the Public Lands Rule, 98 percent of commenters opposed rescission. They did it anyway.
This is what Ford meant when he said we’re losing nature to profiteering and corruption. The American people aren’t asking for any of this. The oil companies and mining interests are, and they own the people running the agencies.
But Ford went somewhere deeper than the politics, and this is what made his speech matter. He talked about the Indigenous communities who, in his words, “have long understood that the trees, the mountain, water, soil, are not commodities. They are relatives to be cherished for following generations to embrace and protect.”
Then he said something that hit harder than anything else in those few minutes at the microphone. He said these communities are “being marginalized, and in many cases, killed in cold blood.”
That’s not Hollywood rhetoric. The London-based watchdog Global Witness documented 146 land and environmental defenders murdered or disappeared in 2024 alone, with 82 percent of those killings happening in Latin America. Colombia accounted for 48 of them, and Guatemala saw its killings jump fivefold in a single year.
Since Global Witness started tracking in 2012, more than 2,253 land defenders have been killed, most of them Indigenous people and small-scale farmers standing between corporate extraction and the last intact ecosystems on Earth.
They’re dying so a mining executive in Toronto or a soybean baron in São Paulo or a timber consortium in Houston can squeeze a little more profit out of land that took the planet millions of years to assemble.
Ford drew the line very precisely. “Humanity is a part of nature, not above it,” he said. That’s not a sentimental flourish. It’s the scientific truth that the entire Western capitalist project has spent five hundred years denying.
We’ve been operating on the John Locke fantasy that the natural world is just inert raw material waiting for a clever European with a deed to convert it into wealth, and we’ve finally hit the wall that any first-grader could have predicted.
But you can’t run a civilization on the assumption that the air, the water, the pollinators, the soil microbes, and the climate itself are free and infinite. They’re not. They’re services the natural world provides for us that we cannot replicate at any price, and we’re systematically destroying the systems that produce them.
The 30 by 30 target Ford mentioned was adopted by nearly 200 nations at the 2022 Kunming-Montreal biodiversity summit, and we’re currently at roughly 17 percent of land and 8 percent of marine areas globally with four years left. The wealthy nations, including ours, pledged $20 billion a year to help the Global South protect their forests and reefs, and most of them, including the United States under Trump, have walked away from the commitment.
What Ford told those graduates is vital:
“Your generation has far more power than you may realize. And if you harness that power, if you find your leadership, your issues, your voice, the world will not be able to ignore you.”
He’s right about that. The Civil Rights Movement was built by college kids, the movement against the Vietnam War was built by college kids, and the first Earth Day in 1970 brought twenty million Americans into the streets and produced the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the EPA, all signed by a Republican president because the political pressure was overwhelming.
We’ve done it before, and we can do it again.
Call your senators and representative through the Capitol Switchboard at 202-224-3121 and tell them to oppose every public lands sell-off, every monument rollback, and every attempt to gut the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Air Act, or the Antiquities Act.
Register and check your registration at vote.org, find out who’s running for state office where you live at openstates.org, because most of the actual fights over public lands and water and habitat happen at the state level, and support the legal work of the Center for Biological Diversity, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the League of Conservation Voters, all of whom are in court right now fighting these rollbacks. If you have it in you to do more, join the work of Conservation International, the organization Harrison Ford has given the last 35 years of his life to.
If this piece spoke to you, please share it widely and forward it to anybody you know who cares about whether their grandchildren will inherit a living planet or a wasteland. Subscribe to Wisdom School at wisdomschool.com to keep this work going, and tell a few friends about it today.
Democracy runs on the daily decision of ordinary people to refuse to be silent, and the graduates Harrison Ford spoke to in Arizona have four years to bend the curve before the 30 by 30 deadline hits and that window slams shut. Their power is real, and so is yours.