ECO THINKING, A REFLECTION
by Santiago Moreno Muelas
An article about eco-thinking can be approached in many different ways. From a fact-checked and objective collection of data that shows the actual environmental situation worldwide and the actions that are and aren’t being taken to correct it to a very subjective description of the problems that one can observe on his daily routine or local community. I will focus on my very personal impressions, build on scientific evidence and shaped by my personal views.
My point is clear, either we undertake major changes in almost every aspect of our actual society (mostly in the western countries) or we will face problems of such magnitude that are even difficult to imagine. Some of them are already here: environmental changes that affect crops, animals and cause severe weather, bigger and more frequent economic crisis, geopolitical instability and so on.
The changes needed to overcome this future situation or at least to try to soft its impact are not easy and not even clear, as there is a lot of discussion on which are the best ways to face the problem. For sure we need to reduce our compulsive consumption as society. Nowadays most things are produced to be used and discarded, with shorter and shorter lifespan, which means that we need to constantly increase the extraction of raw materials and the production of energy. As we live in a planet with limited and not renewable resources, it is obvious that this system can’t last forever.
As individuals our main tools to face the problem are being aware of it, talk about it to other people and act as conscious as possible. Lets hope that a society that step by step is becoming more aware will be able to push major powers to take action and launch the changes that this challenge is asking for like never before in human history.
To finish, I will like to rise awareness of the dangers of some actions that seems to be good and beneficial for the planet but are just “Business As Usual” or green washing. One of the bigger examples of this practices are the electric car, that don’t change the fact that one person is using a machine of one thousand kilos to move himself, because it’s still great and unnecessary waste of energy. All in all we should adapt ourselves to lose some of the comforts we have developed in the last decades in order to have a chance to see something that could be called Future.