The goal of each EarthEcho Expedition is to inspire and empower youth around the world with the knowledge and tools to take an active role in protecting critical natural resources in their own communities.

Growing up with my father's legacy, we never felt that we had to do anything, but we were always raised to think: What could be better than to explore the wonders of the world and share that with people? To try and make the world a better place. And I guess it stuck.

Sumatra has these lush forests and huge, amazing creatures like elephants, orangutans, and tigers. They're disappearing because of industry coming in and cutting down the forests.

We've built, drilled, and shipped indiscriminately across our oceans, with little consideration for the natural environment that is critical to the health of many of our other ocean uses, like food and recreation.

Republicans can continue to protest reality and stick their heads in the sand, but the sooner they acknowledge the very basic facts of climate change, the sooner they can get to crafting a conservative strategy to combat it, instead of ceding the territory solely to Democrats.

We must act to reduce the increasingly dangerous and destructive levels of carbon pollution that account for practically all of global climate change.

As fears about the energy and environmental crises reach a fever pitch, we're all searching for solutions. And one possibility is that we could fix everything if we'd just shrink our population back down to about 2 billion people - which would put us roughly where we were at 80 years ago.

As an issue, climate change was unlucky: when nonspecialists first became aware of it in the 1990s, environmental attitudes had already become tribal political markers.