Our unpayable debt to the environment
Throughout more than two hundred years of industrialization, humanity has contracted a debt with the environment that gave birth to it: we have taken materials and substances at our whim, we have modified them and then we throw them away without caring how or how long it takes humanity. nature to recover its balance, or what the long-term consequences of our production models may be. And as everyone knows by now, the payment date may be close.
In nature, as in the economy, resources are finite and scarce. There are hardly any that we can use indiscriminately and eternally, or at least not without having to face some kind of unforeseen consequences. This is because the physical, chemical and biological system that sustains the environment is extremely complex, too complex for us to hope to understand right away, and yet that does not prevent us from exploiting it as if from an endless gold mine. treated. And today, the currency of such a loan is called energy.
The problem of obtaining energy
Energy, as we know, is constant in the universe. It cannot be created or destroyed, but it can be transmitted and transformed. And the latter is what we have best learned to do with the passing of time, especially when it comes to generating electricity, which consumes all our devices and allows us to sustain a lifestyle. We use this energy to produce, to cool or heat our homes, to light up our nights and entertain our spare time, without being too clear about where it comes from and how much it costs to get it.
It is important to know that there is no clean and 100% ecological way of obtaining energy. All the methods that we know of so far have what we might think of as side effects, although some are much more pernicious on a large scale than others. The combustion of fossil substances, for example, is the most efficient of all the ways we know of to obtain energy, but it is also the most expensive, both in its extraction, processing and use.
Other methods, such as wind power, have a tremendous impact on local wildlife and generate disturbing noise for miles around, while hydropower devastates aquatic ecosystems and requires the modification of water courses. Nothing is 100% green.
The truth is that everything on the planet is connected, and the use of a resource should be considered a loan: somehow we will have to pay it back later. Maybe not us directly, but other species in our place, but other species depend on them and so on, until our domino piece falls.
A debt to the future
It cannot be explained, therefore, that it is the same economic sectors that defend austerity and that insist that nothing is free, who try to turn a blind eye to our environmental debt. Either their theoretical convictions aren’t really that strong, or then they have a pretty magical idea of how nature works. Two centuries of gas discharge into the atmosphere inevitably have consequences. Two centuries of destruction of the plant biome and the impoverishment of biodiversity obviously have consequences. And those who cause these phenomena will be the ones who must face the bill: us, or our future generations.
So, if we understand indebting a country for several generations as something immoral, how can we not think in the same way about our growing and unpayable ecological debt to the environment? Are we not pawning the future of our species to enrich a few today? Perhaps the time has come to undertake ecological austerity. And as always happens in crisis scenarios, the fight will be to determine who is responsible for paying what percentages of the debt. It is time to start thinking about these matters.
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