Today is Earth Day – a welcome moment to pause and reflect on the planet that carries us, feeds us, and lets us breathe.
As humanity, we have set out on a path. A path of progress. Of inventions that save lives, technology that connects us, and prosperity that makes our existence comfortable and convenient.
But it is also a path of traces. Traces in the air, in the water, in the soil. And the earth – patient as she is – has been carrying those traces for a long time.
My children ask: aren’t we simply in an interglacial period? Isn’t this just nature taking its course?
It is a fair question. And yes: we live in the Holocene, a warm period that began after the last ice age. The earth has always breathed in great cycles, in rhythms of tens of thousands of years.
But the ice cores do not lie. In 800,000 years of air, preserved in the ice of Antarctica, CO₂ always fluctuated between 180 and 280 parts per million. Today we stand at 424, a number never reached before, and a trend break that coincides precisely with the moment we built our first factory chimneys. Nature moves slowly. We move fast.
And yet, even if doubt remains, even if the models are uncertain, another question still stands: what kind of visitor do we want to be?
Because that is what I try to pass on to my children. We are visitors to this earth, not owners. The ground beneath our feet is not our possession – it has been lent to us, by the generations who came before us and by the children who will come after us. The earth was never meant to be a supplier of resources to be exhausted. She has been entrusted to us, temporarily.
And yet we continuously ask her to make sacrifices. For our growth, our comfort, our speed. That sacrifice is unconscious, habit-driven. And the true costs of using resources and raw materials are not reflected in our economic models — as if the earth were free, and her reserves infinite.
The mythologist Joseph Campbell saw sacrifice as the heart of every transformation. In the great stories of humanity -across all cultures, all ages – there is always an offering at the threshold. The hero must let something go in order to move forward. His comfort, his old habits, his certainties. Those who give up nothing do not change. Those who do not change do not return with wisdom. Campbell would say: the conscious sacrifice, the voluntary one, is the only kind that truly transforms us.
The question, then, is not only what the earth is willing to give for us. The question is what we are consciously willing to let go of.
Earth Day is not a day of guilt. It is a day of awareness and an invitation: let us at least do as well as we can with what is within our control.
None of us are perfect when it comes to sustainability, and that is precisely why pointing fingers at each other serves no purpose. The question is not who should be doing better.
The question I want to leave you with is:
What small step can I take? What am I willing to consciously sacrifice?
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