President Obama Credits Mom and Hawaii For His Love of Nature | National Geographic

It's something to see, is it not? Amazing! It's great to meet. Wonderful. Thank you for... We just diving in? Are we good? I think so. Okay, come on.

Yeah, so I understand that you're a big fan of your White House science fairs and that you seem to enjoy actually talking to scientists and thinking about science. Where does that come from? You know, my mom was somebody who loved—and I'm not pandering here—loved National Geographic, and she was an anthropologist. You know, she's the kind of person who would wake me up to see a full moon if it was particularly spectacular and would drag me around to Natural History Museums. And, you know, so I give her a lot of credit.

The memories of my childhood in Hawaii are so important to me. People always ask, “Why do I stay calm in the midst of a lot of crazy stuff going on?” Well, I always tell people I think part of it's just been born in Hawaii and knowing what it's like to jump into the ocean and understanding what it means when you see a sea turtle in the face of a wave. And the notion that this would be inaccessible to my kids or my grandkids is unacceptable.

I live in Chicago. It used to be that there were patches of rivers and lakes in the Midwest that would catch on fire; they were so polluted. And now you've got boaters and recreational users on those lakes and rivers. And now, climate change is going to be the biggest of challenges because our capacity to generate energy worldwide is still tied to fossil fuels.

But if you look at what's happened in the United States, we've been able to grow our economy and increase the use of clean energy faster than anybody else and reduce carbon emissions faster than anybody else. And what that tells me is that old notion that somehow you can't be an environmentalist or conservationist without sacrificing economic growth or standards of living is just not true.

I'm 55. Well, believing the presidency and beginning a new phase. This is a time when you start thinking about what are you leaving behind when you're present in the United States. This strange privileged position that you hold for eight years or less...

[Music] The scale of the issues that you deal with, they're enormous. And the way you think about it is each day you just want to make progress. You kind of leave it up to the historians to decide what your legacy was.

If we want to leave behind the same kind of incredible beauty that sustains not only our bodies but also our souls, then we've got to work for it. Teddy Roosevelt understood that when he started the National Park System. When you look at the impact of the Clean Air Act and how it's been able to transform urban landscapes, lakes, rivers all across the continental United States, imagine what we can do if we get serious about clean energy and we get serious about reducing carbon. Get serious about making sure that places like this survive.

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