The 'future we deserve' is a phrase which can be taken at least two ways. In a positive sense, we might use it to affirm that we have rights as citizens of the world and that we collectively should be working towards a future that we all - collectively - deserve.
But to me, the phrase has resonance with the idea of getting the 'politicians we deserve' - meaning that if we are apathetic about our future as our body politic, we'll get what we deserve, ie a lot less than we would have had we thought and planned for a better future.
We live in wildly enlightened times, or perhaps more accurately wild enlightened space. We expect our futures to be better than our past, even if we are not really able to articulate what we want from the future that is better than we have today nor how we will be able to show that things are better when we get there. For a large proportion of those of us who live in the wealthy west, by many measures, our lives have never been better and it is difficult to imagine a world where it could get any better for us. We are slow to realise that our future will be shared with billions of people whose urges for improvement are more urgent, more demanding, more ethical than ours. Mostly we want them to develop, but relatively slowly and not at our expense.
But that is not an option in the future we all deserve. We, on a planet scale, will not all survive and the rich are the least able to cope with change, so most of us (include me writing this and you reading) are going to need to swallow a lot of humble pie and remind the rump of humanity why we are worth keeping.
I think we have two things to offer humanity, both related to our history.
First, we made a lot of agricultural mistakes and learned our way out of them. We did it before, we can do it again.
Second, we can do more than we think we can do, particularly with regard to agriculture and soil management.
Soil science is a strange amorphous subject which is rarely taught or studied in any depth in British universities. This is largely because it demands students to learn something about a massive range of subjects - agriculture, microbiology, plant history, genetics, ecology, zoology, geology, meterology etc - as well as many minority subjects such as pedology.
It does not take a genius to realise than many of these subjects are in conflict with each other, and that the soil scientist walks a perilous tight-rope when trying to converse with anyone from these disciplines. Usually he is left in the position of knowing too much in general whilst knowing too little in particular about them.