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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)