Human hybris and how discipline and self-sacrifice can save us all
Tags: Circulareconomy, Economy, Capitalism, Environment

In 1950, world GDP was 9.25 trillion dollars.

In 2015 it amounted to 108 trillion dollars. While this amount remained more or less constant in the past two millennia, in the period after world war 2 we saw an unprecedented growth in personal wealth and living standards.

In 1990, 1.9 billion people lived in extreme poverty (less than 1,90$ a day), 36% of the world population. In 2015 this number was reduced to 730 million people, 9,9% of the population.

Regardless of our personal conditions, while still many live below the poverty line and there is still so much work to do to give everyone the means to live a fulfilling life, we can’t deny that right now is the best time ever to be alive in human history.

Unfortunately, not all that sparkles is gold.

There is indeed one major fault in the system: how did we reach such amount of wealth and wellbeing in such a short amount of time?

By using pesticides we made our crops more resistant, our factories used for decades non-renewable energy to create the products we find in our supermarkets and the need for cheap and fast goods meant the rise of single use plastic.

All over the world we pour damaging chemicals in our springs and we are still drilling the arctic to find oil or gas.

What started as a race to improve human condition, became a race of greed and exploitation.

We became masters of our planet, so powerful and efficient in our exploitation that no corner on Earth stands today unaffected from our footprint.

This was our sin, this was our hybris.

We thought that all of that was given.

We thought that we could pollute our oceans and it wouldn’t come back to harm us.

We thought that we could exploit our natural resources endlessly and it would have no effect.

We thought that those dark cloud coming from burnt oil would have no effect on our air.

We were wrong.

Australian wildfires are just a glimpse into what we are to expect from the next 100 years.

Our footprint got so deep so swiftly that we started to destroy the fabric of the balance that characterizes our geological era.

The balance between the seasons started shifting, the temperatures started rising, wild life started to disappear and our ice poles started to melt.

The same processes, mindsets and activities that made us wealthy are now putting in danger the existence itself of our species on this planet.

Environmentalists have been working for years to fight the most destructive aspects of capitalism and human greed, and the general public is now aware that we need to save our planet.

I am sure that, just as me, many times you have heard or pronounced slogans such as “save our planet”.

While I agree with it, I think it might be slightly misleading for some.

Our planet itself will be just fine in the end.

What we need to save is us.

Our planet doesn’t actually care about us, or about the conditions that made us thrive just as it didn’t care about the extinction of the dinosaurs or anything that happened on its surface for the last 4 billion years.

Our planet withstood 5 mass extinction and life always found a way to thrive once again.

The Earth will easily outlast us.

If the we as human race don’t act now, decisively and united, we will perish in a matter of generations because of our arrogance and our hybris.

I know, it sounds grim and hopeless, but I believe there is a way out.

I believe that we can find our way out of this situation through goodness.

We are incredibly powerful when we work together if we make the right decisions and we have all the tools we need to transform our economic model into an engine of change for the whole human race and tthe biodiversity that inhabits this planet.

Entrepreneurship as a lifeboat

Private enterprises are now the most wealthy entities of this planet.

While profit was a good drive for growth, it can’t be our only value and our only goal.

If we are willing to sacrifice part of our privileges, if we look around ourselves and we understand that we don’t need to consume this much, to waste this much and that we start to understand the effect of our actions, I firmly believe that we could be able to make it out alive.

If we as companies can make a good use of our profits, if we become less greedy, we could be able to plant so many new trees every year, recover our soils and fund water purification projects everywhere on our planet.

If we as consumers make an effort to be more sustainable in our purchases, we will see the amount of trash in our landfills and our oceans decrease dramatically.

If we shop differently, reusing and recycling, and reduce our meat consumption we will see CO2 emission decrease year by year: the effect of the change would come as a reward of our efforts in no time.



If we all realize the we need to change our lifestyles and sacrifice small privileges we got used to, we can help this planet, this “pale blue dot”, keep us alive.

And this is good.