i read something in the past in a book i cant remeber, but the author argued, we are in some way doomed to destroy ourselves, because we cant see past the interest of our own generation, i tend to agree with this.
I also remember having a teacher that had out of the box ways to reach students, he often incorporated other culture examples and sayings, and in one of those examples i remember him saying, that native americans had something along this lines, "this earth is not ours we borrow it from our sons and daughters" i always in my idealist young age thought that if we taught this to all students in the world we could change it... part of me i guess still believes this to some point...
Our own self-interest, though it ends up not in our best interest.
One of my favourite passages is from Khalil Gibran on Children:
https://poets.org/poem/children-1