I wish someone had told me – earth’s resources are finite

Did you know that we add 1 million people to the global population every 5 days? Over the last two centuries we have seen the global population grow from one billion to over 7 billion people, an exponential growth curve that has put our planet under server pressure… which is just managing to hold it all together.

How is this growth sustainable you may ask? Well it’s not and we are running out of time to act and course correct.

Being passionate about sustainability, I am continuously pushing myself to find different ways to share, educate and enact the change that we need to work towards so that we can play our part in fixing the world we live in.

I have gone down many rabbit holes in discussions surrounding sustainability, our environment, climate change, and our consumption habits. In the effort to keep this piece short and two the point, I encourage us to rethink two elements. Firstly, our drive to create and secondly our drive to consume. If you watch the documentary, you will see that they make reference to how we would need five planet earths should everyone on earth consume in the same way that Americans’ do…

During a conversation while down in the Eastern Cape a few weeks ago, a friend shared the below documentary with me. The Endgame 2050, it will get you to open your eyes and I hope ask you to re-think some of the choices that we make on a daily basis.

At the end of the documentary, it encourages viewers to become vegan, as they believe that this is one of the quickest methods to help address some of the issues we face as humanity.

However, I think that the action we need to take doesn’t purely lie in one specific area, because this is using siloed thinking which is one of the reasons, we are facing the challenges that we have today. I think that we need to be more conscious of our behaviour, because if we wish to establish lasting change, we need to engrain these steps in society. As individuals we have a choice – we need to use this to hold businesses and ourselves accountable – if we don’t start to change the narrative and keep thinking someone else will do it we won’t be able to create a sustainable future.

Let’s remember our actions will have an influence on people’s lives that we will never meet. So, be more conscious and recognise the true interconnectedness of the world in which we live. Don’t consume endlessly, educate yourself, question things, and remind yourself that small changes compound.

“I wish someone had told me” is a series of posts that feed into our inquisitive nature at CN&CO. Each week we hear from someone in our network about something interesting or surprising that’s recently happened or occurred to them – or lessons they learnt. These blogs are a way to pay it forward and form part of CN&CO’s belief that the world can be a better place – and we all have a responsibility to make it so. We are changing this series up a bit and look forward to continuing to grow its diversity.

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