Throughout history, since the beginning of our time as a species, the human being has left his mark on the planet through the successive generations that inhabited and inhabit it, modifying the Environment, which conditions the conditions of life, not only of the human being in each generation, but of all living beings. It is the responsibility of the human being, because we are the only living being that has this capacity, the one that has to take care of the preservation and care of our environment, in short, of preserving our legacy, which I divide into five parts:
- The natural legacy: the conservation of the Planet
- The ethical legacy: values and sustainability
- The social legacy: our lifestyle and our education
- The cultural legacy: history, our culture, and our traditions and customs.
- The economic legacy: the debt
The natural legacy: the conservation of the Planet
The Environment is subject to normal natural changes, which occur slowly, which affect the climate, and which are measurable: we refer to temperature, rainfall, etc.
Throughout time, human beings have made modifications to the natural environment that affect the environment, but in such a way that it could assume them: the felling of forests to obtain wood to work or for fuel, or the reconversion of land to make them arable, or to obtain pasture for livestock, their ability to change the environment was limited in pre-industrial times, which span a period from the dawn of humanity to the mid-18th century.
Since then, various industrial revolutions have taken place, which over the last 270 years have produced an enormous wound in the environment of our planet, a wound that will have serious difficulties in healing.
This is part of the legacy that previous generations, and especially the most recent four or five, leave to future generations.
Today we know, thanks to science, that the damage suffered by the planet is immense, and is reaching a point of NO RETURN due to the high concentration levels of GHG gases that heat the air, and that in turn alter ocean currents and meteorology at a global level, causing droughts in almost all continents, causing increasingly frequent extreme weather events, which cause serious damage and loss of human life, in what is known as Anthropogenic Climate Change, and which even affects the regulatory layer of the atmosphere that is responsible for ensuring the stability of the climate.
The successive Climate Summits proposed some objectives for reducing GHG gas emissions so as not to exceed 1.5ºC of the global average temperature, objectives that are not being met, and that will worsen the climatic legacy that we leave to our descendants.
The Ethical Legacy: values and sustainability
It is evident that we have reached this point of environmental deterioration, it is because little or nothing has concerned us with the environment. We all enjoyed our lives burning fossil fuels, either to keep warm or to get around, consuming without measure, exhausting the resources available to us, without worrying about tomorrow, ignoring the consequences of our actions, the way we have been consuming for decades in a horizontal economy based on buy-use-throw away, which has filled the planet with garbage that we have been hiding under the planet’s rug for years and that we are not capable of eliminating.
Today we live in a world in which ethical values have taken a backseat at best, while at worst they lie beneath various layers of superficiality. This is the first thing that must be reversed, since it is the foundation on which sustainability must be built in everything we do, which is the form of behavior that must allow us to act correctly in each case and continuously, avoiding all action that can damage the environment, and this ranges from avoiding throwing a piece of paper on the ground, to moving on foot avoiding the car on short trips, recycling rubbish, extending the life of things, such as clothing or utensils, or consuming natural foods avoiding consuming the ultra-processed, etc.
The Social Legacy: Education and Lifestyle
The Contemporary Age is the period of our history that produced the greatest changes in society, nature, economy and technology, and on which the current environmental disaster was forged.
It is the period of the birth of democracy, of demographic transition, of economic growth, of the improvement of our standard of living, and at the same time of the increase in social inequalities, it is the Era in which the world population has multiplied by five , and in which we are about to exhaust the natural resources available to us.
One of the characteristics of today’s world is the orientation towards the future, because it continues to hook the idea of advancing, of innovating, we like the new, the most recent, the most advanced…, but in the age of the Internet and the immediate present we can make the mistake of forgetting the past, of not taking into account everything we have learned throughout our history.
Our Social Legacy is closely linked to ethics. The Educational Legacy is perhaps the most important part of what will later form the Social Legacy, it is what prepares us to build a better and more reasonable world, more distributed, less unequal, a world of rights and obligations accessible to all.
The Cultural Legacy: history, traditions and customs
When the past is not taken into account, when all the richness and knowledge of a history and a culture treasured both over time, of customs and traditions that identify us and unite us, at the same time that, if the referents that allow the unity of a community are lost or distorted, it changes or loses the course that will take it away from a sustainable and fair future, it is then that the cultural legacy will lose part of its value.
A look at history will help us to know the foundations on which we have been founded. In other words, it will allow us to understand each other as people and as societies in order to move towards a common goal. In this increasingly polarized and politicized world, it is necessary to return to what has kept us united, to shared culture to recover the idea of community and that favors coexistence.
Only in this way is it possible to achieve advances and innovations at the service of all, based on knowledge, with the cultural and philosophical legacy, with the ethical values that our current society has forged and that will allow us to guide our future.
This cultural legacy is made up of language as a means of communication, our customs, traditions, ethnic values, the conception of the family, of social groups, elements that must condition our lifestyle and our happiness.
The Economic Legacy: the debt
The Contemporary Era has also been crucial in shaping our current Economic Legacy. In this era, capitalism was created, industrial revolutions took place that gave us the ability to obtain goods and services in a massive way that reached a large part of the population unequally, which grew exponentially until it quintupled. It is the era of waste, consumerism, indebtedness, environmental damage, and all these elements have generated debts that are still uncollected, but that must be settled in a timely manner. All this makes up the economic legacy that will be left to future generations.
The worst of all this is that we are not aware of the size of the problem that we have generated. So that we realize the disaster, I will give my country, Spain, as an example, which is not one of those in the best position, nor is it the worst.
The debt
Debt is any amount of money that we have had to borrow from someone, usually a bank, to do something or buy something. It is something that must be returned at the time and in the agreed manner and that, in adverse circumstances, can be a heavy burden to carry.
Spain had a census of 47,326,687 inhabitants at the end of 2021. The state debt today, the day I write this essay, amounts to 1 Trillion 462 billion 557,296,353 Euros. But if we add to this amount that of the other public administrations, that is: that of the autonomies, the councils, and that of the municipalities, this debt goes to 1 Trillion 831 billion, 888,989,067 Euros, almost half a billion more.
It seems like a lot, but the figure does not give us an idea of what we have before our eyes. A former mayor of a city in my Community said the following: “For my city, I do what I must, but I owe what I do.” This vision of this mayor of the debt is more present in today’s society than one thinks. That’s why I think we have to see the debt from other perspectives, to try to understand the dimension of the problem. Let’s review the data of the Spanish Debt:
First we are going to divide the total of both debts by the number of inhabitants, and then by the number of taxpayers, since not all inhabitants receive income or pay taxes. This way we will obtain the amount of debt per individual. We do the math and the following comes out:
It is a lot, it is more than most taxpayers earn in a year, but even so, we still may not be able to understand the size of the problem, for which we will try to calculate what can be done with all that money. We do the math, and the following comes out:
Ah, gosh! Now we are beginning to see the debt in a different way. It turns out that with what we owe, we can build almost 300,000 km of highways…, it doesn’t matter, we don’t need that many. But we can pay for a couple of university courses for all young people of study age and we would still have half the money left over… who would have thought.
But let’s look at the problem from another angle. He said that debts must be paid; So, how much would each of us touch if we had to take care of the debt?
Let’s calculate the fee -not including interest- for a person who earns the minimum wage, and another who earns the average wage, since those with high wages would have no problem paying their part of the payment, since even the majority could do so in a single payment. Let’s also see how long it would take to meet our installment-share if we converted the debt into a mortgage loan. We do the accounts, and the time it would take to get rid of the debt comes out.
Oh! A long time it seems that we are going to have to be paying the debt. Well, that’s how it is, and we’re going to do it the same way, but through the taxes with which we already pay the interest — those that were previously excluded — and whose payment is contemplated in the General State Budgets. This is our legacy of a debt that continues to grow day by day, and that seems to have no end.
In order for us to realize how fast the debt problem continues to grow and worsen, a few additional calculations have to be made, bearing in mind that all these calculations have been made using official data.
The appropriate question at this time would be the following: How have we been able to get to this situation?
The answer is simple: buying without having the money to buy what we want or need, or what it is, getting into institutional debt, which is what the aforementioned mayor of a city did. Keep in mind that we are talking about State Debt, not Country Debt, which includes other concepts, such as debts for consumption, personal loans, debts accumulated on credit cards, loans to private companies , which are also debt and this is not quantified in the graphs shown.
hese debts must also be part of our legacy, because people may not know it, but debts are inherited. This is established in article 659 of our Civil Code, which says the following: “Inheritance includes all assets, rights and obligations of a person, which are not extinguished by their death”, so we must say yes, that debts are part of our legacy.
Taking into account what is stated in this section of the Economic Legacy, and contemplating the previous concepts of the different legacies already expressed, it seems clear that the panorama that we leave our descendants is not at all rosy, and that many things we will have to change if we want not to definitively mortgage your future.
Perhaps the most important of all the changes to be made is the urgent need to change our lifestyle globally, something that personally seems impossible to achieve at a time when the need to enjoy life and live day to day, is the prevailing general trend in our societies, and that this lifestyle is not only not redirected, but we continue squeezing the lemon of our lives with more and more force, as if its juice were endless.
If there is not a radical change in society, in a global and uniform way, it is impossible for the planet to recover from the damage that we are viciously and continuously causing it, and in this way the day will come when our light, and the world darkens, although I don’t think it will turn off, because before the planet turns off, it turns us off.
From that moment on, we will suffer continuous crises of all kinds, economic, political, environmental, social, etc., which will make survival the goal of our new lifestyle, replacing the previous goal of living life. We will change the experiences for survival, which is not a super experience, but we will have to fight to obtain what is necessary to survive. Then we will regret not having done what we had to do on time. That’s how we are, because we have no remedy.
Data source: Public Debt of Spain (private website)
El artículo se puede leer en español en este enlace.
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