This post will try to dig a little deeper into the role plastic plays in our society, its advantages and disadvantages.

Sustainability is humanity’s North Star. —Hannah Ritchie (2024)

Aedes albopictus—or tiger mosquito—can transmit Chikungunya and Dengue

Out of the unrelenting application of reason, and the acceptance of what we truly are, our dreams will finally come home to stay

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)

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.

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.

In merely 122 years, emissions have multiplied by a factor of about 10, while the world population has grown about 3 times. We are three times as many humans as in 1900, using each one of us, every year, on average (but with huge differences between rich and poor countries), about three times as many fossil fuels as any person did at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Overlapping with the beginning of industrialization, the modification of this current began in the nineteenth century. However, the changes in the Gulf Stream have sped up since the 1950s

The Northeast Passage winter navigation could allow an increase of Russia’s exported natural gas from thirty-two million tons in 2020 to eighty million in 2024, and to 130 million in 2035—precisely what the environmental doctors ordered, and the planet needs.

Data from forty-three countries indicate that between 1991 and 2018 the deaths due to heat increased from 20.5% to 76.3% of total deaths in the warm season, affecting all continents.

Our society is fed with fertilizers, is supported by steel bones and concrete muscles, its blood is diesel and gasoline, and its skin is plastic. All of them are made with fossil fuels.

Africa emits less than 4% of global CO2 emissions, although it has about 18.6% of the world's population (2024 data). On average, a U.S. citizen consumes in four days the electricity that an Ethiopian use in the entire year (2). Only twenty countries are responsible for the bulk of greenhouse emissions. USA, China, and India are the three leaders of that group.

Average temperatures rise, glaciers melt, sea levels rise, plant cycles alter, snow and rain patterns change, and the intensity of extreme weather events, such as major storms and historic temperature records, increases.

Seventy thousand years ago Homo sapiens was still an insignificant animal minding its own business in a corner of Africa. In the following millennia it transformed itself into the master of the entire planet and the terror of the ecosystem (Yuval N. Harari.)

Longevity is related to economy, even in the most developed countries, like the U.S.A. that is not a good example of life expectancy in comparison with other developed countries.