U.N.'s Sustainable Development Goals ask countries, regardless of their wealth, to promote people's prosperity while protecting the planet

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one that responds best to change (Charles Darwin)

This post closes the series on Progress and Inequality initiated with the post on the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

According to Thomas Piketty if we want society to be cohesive, then we must prevent economic inequality from becoming extreme.

One of the reasons for the poor performance of democracies, even those most advanced and consolidated, is extreme inequality.

690 million people suffered from hunger in 2019 (8.9% of the world population). This disgrace is expected to reach 840 million in 2030

Every 2 or 3 generations, when the memory dries up ... reason eclipses and other men spread evil again.

Juan Ponce de León searched for the Fountain of Youth.

The development of mRNA vaccines for COVID-19 is an example of cooperation

The plague, (or diseases in general) is perhaps the horseman of the Apocalypses that we have managed to dismount with greater success

And again, a new day begins. And when the sun rises, the world will watch in horror run over its fields four horsemen enemies of man.

We humans are predators. We target more than a third of the vertebrate species. Pet trading, medicine, and other uses now affect almost as many species as those targeted for food, and we threaten almost 40% of exploited species.

According to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) we waste up to a third of the food produced. Only in the European Union (EU), with about 450 million inhabitants, eighty-eight million tons of food end up in garbage dumps every year. That is close to 200 kg of food per inhabitant.

New Zealand—antipodal of Spain—with 4.5 million people, has fifty million sheep, more than ten sheep for every human. The municipality of Lorca, in Spain, has about 96,000 inhabitants and one million pigs.

More than 50% of humanity already lives in cities. In China, this figure reached 67% in 2024. This fact, together with the slowing rate of global population increase, could represent an opportunity for the recovery of a part of the planet's surface to a state like its original condition, prior to human transformation of the land.

Yuval Noah Harari, in his book Sapiens: A brief History of Mankind, coined the term "ecological serial killer" to describe our image in the eyes of other living beings. Since the departure of our species from Africa, this image has not improved—quite the opposite.

Each extinct species because of human action, including those that we will never know about, is associated with a cost impossible to calculate. I refer both to the moral damage and the economic cost. Scientists discover around 20,000 new species every year, but they still expect to discover about 85% of the world’s animal species.

We function as if resources were inexhaustible and there was no impact in dumping waste under the carpet of the surface of the land and sea, into the air, and even into space, which far from becoming the final frontier can become the most recent garbage dump.

David Attenborough and many scientists tell us that we have already surpassed the threshold of planetary stability in four areas: 1) climate change; 2) fertilizer use; 3) land conversion; and 4) biodiversity loss.

Human activities, principally through emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG), have unequivocally caused global warming, with global surface temperature reaching 1.1°C above 1850–1900 in 2011–2020.