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Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was a French writer, poet, and pioneering aviator best known for The Little Prince. Flying mail routes over the Sahara and South America gave him a perspective on the Earth that few writers of his era had — vast, fragile, and breathtakingly beautiful from above.

Earth Day exists because of a simple but radical idea: we are not owners, we are stewards. This quote — often attributed to Saint-Exupéry, though its exact origins are debated — captures that idea better than almost any other. It shifts the moral frame from what we inherited to what we owe, making environmentalism not a political position but a parental one.