We can do it right. We can create a future for these strange and lovely animals.

This is a personal matter. But it is not only my personal matter. This is personal for each and every one of us. And it is more than a ‘matter’. It is about the invisible connections among friends, family, and our own children.

In a broader context all our relations, all of our empathy and love, need a physical place to evolve and flourish. We need an environment that inspires us to love ourselves and others. Nature can give us this ground to recognize ourselves as human beings and as a part of an interdependent global ecosystem.

But how does our self-perception change when our surrounding nature gets devastated? It is easy to become depressed when seeing polluted oceans, deforestation, extinction of animals and plants. But we need to see things clearly – humanity is degrading the environment of our living planet at an unprecedented speed.

Are we all condemned participants in this predetermined story, a story with a bad ending? Can’t we rewrite it?

Today, humanity is at its highest level of technical innovation since the beginning of our civilization. We are connected globally, we build Artifical Intelligence, we have instant access to vast amounts of knowledge, we fly to the moon, and we plan to colonize Mars.

But cultural innovation hasn’t followed. It should! And yes, we can re-engineer our story. Equipped with all this technical brilliance and knowledge, we should be able to understand the interdependencies within the ecosystems and our own dependency on them. We can write a new story. A story that does not artificially separate us humans from the living environment. We can change our behavior.

Let’s love ourselves and the planet. Let’s collaborate and not constantly compete. Let’s share and not build walls of separation.

Let’s take the chance and negotiate the best possible outcomes at the Climate Conference in Madrid. There is so much to win!


I dedicate this blog post to my children. I dedicate my whole work to a future in which they can love and live.

Author

Founder and CEO, OpenForests. Passioned about finding answers to the burning questions of our time. With our tools, we want to connect people and forests.