We need the Earth, but the Earth also needs us. Great policies are not enough to safeguard our planet from exploitation. Each of us must commit to reducing consumption. Starting with food. Here are our recycling recipes, for a daily anti-waste battle
We are facing obvious climate change. Increasingly longer summers interspersed with violent storms, capable of discharging the amount of rain that falls in a month in just a few hours. The so-called flash floods. Real storms with devastating tornadoes. And this also in a country like Italy, where the rhythm of the four seasons has always characterized the mild climate of the boot. At the same time, the glaciers of the Alps are shrinking at a worrying rate, while at global level the situation is certainly not better. The ice of the Poles shrinks, producing in the long (but not too long) period an elevation of the sea with millions of square kilometers of coastline that could end up under water; Siberia is on fire, Alaska is on fire, Amazonia burns incessantly. And to make matters worse, Donald Trump wants to take away the Tongass National Forest of Alaska, the largest forest in the United States, from the restrictions imposed 20 years ago on cutting and transporting timber; the deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon has exceeded the threshold of three soccer fields per minute under the Bolsonaro presidency; Putin looks away while Siberia goes to ashes; Japan has declared that having no way to store Fukushima radioactive water, it will be discharged into the Pacific with incalculable damage to the ecosystem that could involve all the Earth's seas.
Already, our seas, proven by fishing activities that, although prohibited, are often practiced, illegally, the same; our seas, where immense islands of plastic waste float adrift; our seas, where rivers are discharged, often reduced to open-air sewers, saturated with poisonous substances.
And then there is the bad air we breathe, especially in large metropolitan areas, despite many efforts to contain pollution.
Human activities have such a strong impact on the Earth that this year the Overshoot Day (the day when we consumed all the resources that the Earth offers us in 2019) we reached on July 29th: then we started to consume in deficit , to consume the resources of 2020!
Is it man's fault?
The question that many politicians, scientists and ordinary people ask is: is all this human activity, often also reckless, responsible for climate change? There are two currents of thought, both supported by scientific studies. There are those who say that yes, it is the fault of man and his exaggerated exploitation of the planet. Then there are those who claim that there have always been climate changes, even devastating ones, because they are cyclical and occur beyond human activity. In support of this theory they show us the climatic history of the Earth, the great changes of the past, when man was not even there. But also the minor ones, in any case important, intervened before the industrial era, of pollution and of the massive exploitation of the planet's resources, such as the Small glacial age (Pet), which occurred between the mid-fourteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. An icy cold that was preceded by a long period of relatively high temperatures called Medieval hot period. After the Pet, which ended around 1850, temperatures started to rise again, causing a new reduction in the mass of ice, a phase that is still ongoing, compounded, perhaps, by human factors that produce the greenhouse effect on the atmosphere: the in short, global warming.
One thing is certain: that climate changes are natural or the consequence (total or partial) of human activity, pollution is (obviously) wrong because then the "jewels" of the Earth we must eat, drink, breathe us all. It is therefore necessary to reduce, without ifs and buts, our "weight" on the planet paying particular attention to the waste, in order not to burn unnecessarily the energies, not infinite, of our great Earth house. And this is not the task only of governments and states, with far-sighted policies, when unpopular in the short term, but a commitment, indeed an obligation, which concerns us all individually, daily, meticulously.
Anti-waste recipes: because recycling is good, it's good, but above all it's right!
Let's start from here: on 29 January 2019 it was calculated that 1.3 billion tons of food are thrown away before reaching our table; then there is what we waste at the table. A quarter of that same food would be enough to feed the more than 815 million hungry people.
It makes you shiver, right?
And yet, in our own small way, in our daily lives, each of us participates in this waste. And then, always in our own small way, in our daily life, we learn to correct our bad habits. For example, optimizing spending, thus lowering our non-essential consumption and consequently reducing the production of industrial foodstuffs, the waste we produce, the monetary outflows of our portfolios.
And then there is one thing that you must never forget: in the kitchen nothing is thrown away, because everything (or almost) can be recycled, transforming what is about to become garbage into a new dish, good, creative and nutritious. Fantasy in the kitchen, then!
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