April 22 was the International Day of Planet Earth, where we develop our conscious lives as human beings, in coexistence with many other species, more or less away from our usual habitat. Most readers of this article will not be older than 120 years. We live in a moment of paradigm, in the anthropogenic era or geological age, in which geophysical, geochemical, astronomical and atmospheric phenomena (derived from the previous ones) are no longer those that mark the evolution of life on the planet, which emerged 1000 million years after its estimated creation (4550 million years ago), if not the activity that many consider their greatest plague and many others their greatest hope: humanity.
Maintaining the vital activity of the more than 7500 million humans that inhabit the planet, feed us, clothe us and manage the waste products of those we consume, both biologically own and processed in our more or less civilized activity, is what impacts our environment the most in all scales. From our neighbourhood to region at the antipodes of it.
Something in which governments and NGOs agree is in the main challenges to avoid destruction or exhaustion of resources that support human life on the planet, and to change the ways in which we obtain and consume those resources such as food, energy, water, shelter, health and hygiene, and how we discard or reuse the waste products of our activity in the industrial processes that supply the population with goods and comfort. Food is provided from agriculture, energy, from renewable or non-renewable sources and fossils; shelter, from construction and services to maintain hydration, hygiene and electricity, and shelter, through shelter and clothing. They are very simple and abbreviated ways of summarizing in very few areas our way of life, to which we must add gadgets and utensils for our convenience and domestic and industrial processing of food, as well as for our leisure. Everything we consume, in turn, generates some other waste materials.
We are 7500 million humans. Most of us reside in cities, better or worse, with more or less CO2 emissions that favor more or less climate change, and more or less efficient waste, water and energy management. In any case, when the majority of both governmental and non-governmental organizations on the planet recognize that there is a need to look for more sustainable forms of activity on all fronts, organizing a change in the use of resources and waste management, the feat is so colossal that it requires organization in groups and communities at different scales with laws, directives and initiatives with real time horizons and achievable objectives.
For this reason, the UN, proposed in 2015 the Sustainable Development Goals, to be reached in 2030. With a series of lines of action and proposals that, if the majority of companies assume with actions and initiatives, as small as they may be, they will already be facing the problem. These objectives are a call to adopt measures that eradicate inequalities and poverty, guarantee peace and prosperity and, ultimately, the protection and preservation of the planet and its terrestrial and marine ecosystems, reversing the exaggerated impact of human beings on our planet, that although it will continue to rotate, it will do so without harbouring our species in the not to distant future. In our hands is to continue taking care of this home and source of life that is planet earth.