Something that genuinely makes me optimistic is how seriously young people in my country take environmental problems. I'm a fifty-eight-year-old retired civil servant living in Bogotá, so I've seen several generations grow up, and this one feels different.
I noticed it mainly through my granddaughter Valentina, who's fifteen. A couple of years ago, her school started a recycling project, and she came home lecturing us about plastic bags. At first I thought it was just a phase, but then I started noticing the same attitude everywhere: teenagers organising tree-planting weekends, students repairing old bikes instead of buying new ones, young people in my neighbourhood cleaning up the river path on Sundays.
It affects all of us really, because these are the people who'll be running businesses and governments in twenty or thirty years. It's also changing families. Our household now separates rubbish, and I've stopped buying bottled water, simply because Valentina would never let me hear the end of it.
The reason it gives me hope is that when I was young, almost nobody talked about the environment. We thought nature was endless and that problems were for scientists or politicians. My generation made a lot of mistakes because of that. Today's young people seem to understand that their everyday choices matter, and they're not afraid to tell adults when we're wrong. Of course, attitudes alone won't solve climate change, and some of them feel anxious about the future. But knowledge and determination are the starting points for real change, and from what I see, they have plenty of both. That makes me feel the future is in reasonable hands.