This is an excerpt from a speech given on 9 July 1965 by Adlai Ewing Stevenson Ⅱ (1900-1965), his final speech before the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland. (The US ambassador to the UN passed away less than a week later in London on 14 July.) In 1971, the prominent environmental leader (and later executive director of Friends of the Earth) David Brower (1912-2000), described the quote as “A veritable universal pledge of allegiance to this planet and to its peoples” in his own speech, “What Organizations and Industry Should Do,” delivered at the First International Conference on Environmental Future, held in Finland from 27 June to 3 July 1971. The speech was published in the proceedings of the conference, The Environmental Future (ed. Nicholas Polunin, 1973), p. 478.