Written 8th January 2015

First you see the famous picture of a polar bear on a piece of ice, floating in the middle of the sea and it really shocks you. Later on, you read some piece of news about the climate change, its consequences, how we help to accelerate it and so on. Some time later, you see something on TV, probably exaggerated and beyond reality, and this time you don’t just feel sorry for the ”poor polar bears”, but you also become afraid. Is my own life also under some kind of risk? you wonder.

Because of these and some other similar events, some years later you end up at University learning more and more about the ”human being- Earth” relationship and trying to get some skills that will eventually help you solve some of these issues.

This long succession of episodes is at least what happened to me. And right now I am at he final stage of my university life. In two or three years time I will (hopefully) get a job, where I will help to reduce the impacts we have on the place we live in. How to achieve that? That is something else...

I will most probably work in some kind of environmental company, where we will try to mend the environmental impacts caused by others or we will try to find more efficient ways to do things, so that we can reduce our impacts. That is probably the most straightforward way reality offers us to solve these problems. And actually, we are being trained to be able to propose that kind of engineering solutions.

However , in my opinion, the issues we are dealing with are so global, so massive, that it is not enough if only some people who are concerned try to do something about it. This would be the same as when a school teacher tries to pick all the toys up while the children keep on taking them out of their trunks and messing all around.What would the solution be in that case? It is obvious: educate the children.

The same thing should be applied to our global problem. We should try to convince society and show them that a global change is necessary and that this change has to start with us, each and everyone of us. Easy to explain, not easy to make it happen.

Some years ago, I don’t really remember where, I heard or read about the variety of reactions people have towards environmental problems. If we analised the current situation, we will find that there are those who have never heard about the reality we are facing. This might not be happening in most of the ”developed” countries (I hope so), but in some other places, where survival is the main concern it does.

Among those others who have sometimes receives information about what is going on, different responses can be observed:

a) I don’t believe it

b) I don’t care

c) It won’t ever affect me, so b)

d) Ooooh! That is something serious, I should do something...

e) Ooooh! That is something serious, I’ll get involved and work to solve the problem

It would be interesting to know the distribution into these five categories among the population as it would represent the ”work we still have to do”.

Our final goal is to create a society in which all the members answer either d) or e). Actually,if everybody answered d), it would be more than enough. Thus, the strategy would have to be, to upgrade people’s thinking: from a) to b), from b) to c) and so on.

In my opinion, changing the mind of those who don’t believe it is a problem is not that difficult (I am working on something related to that, to be published in future releases). However, making people take the next steps (i.e. b) -¿ c); c)-¿d), etc.) looks a little bit more difficult.

Right now, if I had to convince somebody in categories b) or c), I would not do much more than what I would do with category a). I would simply repeat once more and with more details what I know about the problem we have, If after that the answer I get is again ”I don’t care”, I would just explain how selfish I find that attitude. Probably the reply to this would be, once more, ”I don’t care”...

That is more or less how I feel the situation is nowadays. Of course the solution in the long term is to educate the children, so that in the future nobody would answer: ”I don’t care”- anymore (However a a new problem arises at this point: what if the educator is somebody who answers ”I don’t care”?...never mind).

In that way, by the time all the ”well educated” children will have already grown...the world will be a better place...if it is still a place...

Written 8th January 2015

First you see the famous picture of a polar bear on a piece of ice, floating in the middle of the sea and it really shocks you. Later on, you read some piece of news about the climate change, its consequences, how we help to accelerate it and so on. Some time later, you see something on TV, probably exaggerated and beyond reality, and this time you don’t just feel sorry for the ”poor polar bears”, but you also become afraid. Is my own life also under some kind of risk? you wonder.

Because of these and some other similar events, some years later you end up at University learning more and more about the ”human being- Earth” relationship and trying to get some skills that will eventually help you solve some of these issues.

This long succession of episodes is at least what happened to me. And right now I am at he final stage of my university life. In two or three years time I will (hopefully) get a job, where I will help to reduce the impacts we have on the place we live in. How to achieve that? That is something else...

I will most probably work in some kind of environmental company, where we will try to mend the environmental impacts caused by others or we will try to find more efficient ways to do things, so that we can reduce our impacts. That is probably the most straightforward way reality offers us to solve these problems. And actually, we are being trained to be able to propose that kind of engineering solutions.

However , in my opinion, the issues we are dealing with are so global, so massive, that it is not enough if only some people who are concerned try to do something about it. This would be the same as when a school teacher tries to pick all the toys up while the children keep on taking them out of their trunks and messing all around.What would the solution be in that case? It is obvious: educate the children.

The same thing should be applied to our global problem. We should try to convince society and show them that a global change is necessary and that this change has to start with us, each and everyone of us. Easy to explain, not easy to make it happen.

Some years ago, I don’t really remember where, I heard or read about the variety of reactions people have towards environmental problems. If we analised the current situation, we will find that there are those who have never heard about the reality we are facing. This might not be happening in most of the ”developed” countries (I hope so), but in some other places, where survival is the main concern it does.

Among those others who have sometimes receives information about what is going on, different responses can be observed:

a) I don’t believe it

b) I don’t care

c) It won’t ever affect me, so b)

d) Ooooh! That is something serious, I should do something...

e) Ooooh! That is something serious, I’ll get involved and work to solve the problem

It would be interesting to know the distribution into these five categories among the population as it would represent the ”work we still have to do”.

Our final goal is to create a society in which all the members answer either d) or e). Actually,if everybody answered d), it would be more than enough. Thus, the strategy would have to be, to upgrade people’s thinking: from a) to b), from b) to c) and so on.

In my opinion, changing the mind of those who don’t believe it is a problem is not that difficult (I am working on something related to that, to be published in future releases). However, making people take the next steps (i.e. b) -¿ c); c)-¿d), etc.) looks a little bit more difficult.

Right now, if I had to convince somebody in categories b) or c), I would not do much more than what I would do with category a). I would simply repeat once more and with more details what I know about the problem we have, If after that the answer I get is again ”I don’t care”, I would just explain how selfish I find that attitude. Probably the reply to this would be, once more, ”I don’t care”...

That is more or less how I feel the situation is nowadays. Of course the solution in the long term is to educate the children, so that in the future nobody would answer: ”I don’t care”- anymore (However a a new problem arises at this point: what if the educator is somebody who answers ”I don’t care”?...never mind).

In that way, by the time all the ”well educated” children will have already grown...the world will be a better place...if it is still a place...