I remember when I was about 22 years old and starting my professional career, I complained about the bad state of the world that my father and his generation had left us. The depreciation of José López Portillo and then the difficult crisis of the entire six-year term of Miguel de la Madrid.
And now, at almost the same age my children have when I was young, I wonder what world am I leaving them?
During these almost 40 years I have enjoyed incredible comforts, such as telecommunications, smartphones, travel and in short, a waste of energy that has implied the destruction of the world.
If you want to become aware of these issues there are many books, but an excellent one that I just read and I recommend you is "A Life on Our Planet: My Witness Statement and a Vision for the Future" written by the British scientist and producer Sir David Attenborough .
David published this book at the age of 94 (a few months ago), a work full of anecdotes and experiences from when with the BBC he produced countless documentaries to discover the world of nature and show it to the world.
In his book he tells us his stories, his encounter with gorillas and whales, his travels to countless places in the world. But even from that time, the destruction of biodiversity was already noticeable, which today is at its peak.
We would not have existed with our civilization if it weren't for the time we live in, the Holocene, which is an era in which strangely the climate has been very stable compared to other times. But since 2016 the phrase of a new era in which we are destroying everything was coined: the "anthropocene", which would begin in approximately 1950. I have been part of this time and I believe that we do not want to realize the destruction that we are doing to the world.
The book is worth reading. Some important lessons and points that David comments on in the book:
- Stop thinking that the important thing in life is to grow. That is over, we are reaching the limit. Today we must find new ways of doing things being who we are in the world.
- Use clean energy. It is so obvious and only a truly ignorant few will be against it.
- Rebuild the seas: we have destroyed 90% of many types of marine life. What to do?
- Use less space: we are using a lot of land to produce food for ourselves and the animals we eat. If we didn't eat so much red meat and chicken we could greatly decrease the farmland we need and eat even better.
- Rebuild the earth: we have destroyed forests everywhere and changed the earth in such a way that we have reached our carbon footprint limit, we must stop this.
- Plan to start decreasing the number of human beings on earth, the more education people have, fewer children, which is better for the planet.
- Live more balanced lives. Do we really need a new car every two years, clothes for every event, or a cell phone every year?
We are perhaps the last generation that can do something before there is no remedy, if we do it our children will thank us.