With a temperature above 40 degrees, how can you take one out of the house? In mid-May, speaking to a Catalan friend, he told me: “If we are like that in mid-May, summer will be a kind of hell.” At the same time, we could read in the media that India and Bangladesh had a temperature of between 40 and 50 degrees, as well as the most important floods in history. Several experts say climate change will be the main cause of migration in the future.

We can read the topic of climate emergency everywhere, and although some question it, we can feel with the five senses the signs of nature through cold and hot extremes. In these times when we tend to simplify debates, the ecological crisis is often only associated with climate and it is clear that the deterioration of the environment has very different margins. We must not forget, for example, those relating to land and vegetation. The concept of climate seems intangible and there is a risk of associating it with immutability.

Since the publication in 1972 of the report Las Fronteras del Desarrollo, known as the Meadows Report, has spent half a century of existence, and those defined therein are not strange in the current context: our production and consumption model cannot grow without limits, since nature is not able to assume. Moreover, taking into account what the Global Ecological Footprint Network footprintnetwork.org says, if we expand our model worldwide in Euskal Herria, we would be more or less out of the capacity to absorb land of what was produced and consumed from 9 May (calendar year).

All this information is known to most, unfortunately we are already used to catastrophic forecasts. So in front of them, we've built great speeches, like sustainable development or the green economy. Sustainability is sometimes seen as a second last name for economic growth, as an element to be considered by the economic system. In economics and business studies, we once learned them as outsourcing, meaning that the economic system had imperfections. But the truth is that the ecological system is the main framework, without it there would be nothing else, not existence itself.

Historical events have shown that economic growth in itself is not sustainable, environmentally or socially. But it's still curiously shown as a positive headline in the early lines of the news. Those of us who live in so-called rich lands seem to have the highest consumption rate on the planet. In some cases, moreover, our growth depends on low-cost production processes and over-extraction processes in impoverished countries.
Many focus and expect on new technologies, new ways of making them greener, but will technological development suffice to deal with this crisis? Will a circular economy that has more echo each day take us out of the whirlwind? Are they not empty words full of nice appearances? It is possible that all these movements contribute to the reduction of the ecological footprint, but, as Yayo Herrero, an eco-feminist researcher and militant, says, the slowdown in the rich lands of the North is not an opportunity, but an inevitable fact.