Somewhere in northern Botswana there is rain that has not fallen, and there is a river that is waiting for it. An elephant is walking a path her great grandmother walked. She doesn’t know where the border is. She never has. The land does not either.

That’s the whole idea. That’s the Summit.

For twenty-one years, IYMS has asked young people to point a camera at the world’s biggest problems. This time we’re asking something else first: point it at yourself, and notice you and your fellow humans were never alone in the frame. The elephant has been standing there with you the whole time.

We didn’t invent this idea. Botswana has been living it since long before anyone called it an idea at all. The San people who have walked the Kalahari for tens of thousands of years never drew a hard line between the person, the animals and the environment. Their stories cross it freely. Their art, still visible on stone at Tsodilo Hills, remembers a world where that line was never there to begin with. We are simply the latest guests learning what the land already knew.

Why This Theme Matters

Somewhere, right now, someone is watching a place they love change faster than they can explain it to their children. A farmer watching a season arrive late. A fisherman pulling up less than he did the year before. A parent trying to describe an animal their grandmother saw every week, but their own kids may never see at all. This isn’t happening in one country. It’s happening in every country, at once, in a thousand small, local versions of the exact same story. And although we were taught to think of ourselves as separate from all of it: the animals, the weather, the water, the land; the truth was always simpler. We were never watching from the outside. We were always an inherent part of it: the growth, the devastation.

This theme of the oneness not just of all humanity, but of all life, is the basis of the Botswana Summit. That’s why a delegate from a city that’s never seen an elephant can walk into this theme and feel it in their chest just as fast as a delegate from a village next to the Okavango. Every culture on earth has its own version of this knowing, buried somewhere in its oldest stories. Because the ask is, remember you were never separate from anything alive.

So, bring your camera. Bring your questions. Bring whatever story you were told about being human, separate, above, in charge, and be ready to leave with a truer understanding. Because the elephant is more than a symbol here. The San philosophy is more than a metaphor. It’s the plot.

This Summit just says it out loud, together, on camera, for two weeks, in one voice.