We can pay the ecological debt by changing economic models, and by giving up luxury consumption, setting aside selfishness and individualism, and thinking about the people and the planet Earth.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
We owe it to ourselves and to the next generation to conserve the environment so that we can bequeath our children a sustainable world that benefits all.
We have been maintaining a standard of living by putting things on the debt of the next generation.
If we pollute the air, water and soil that keep us alive and well, and destroy the biodiversity that allows natural systems to function, no amount of money will save us.
We are borrowing money from future generations. We are borrowing the carbon impact, the resource impact from future generations to get stuff cheap now. We have swept the dirt and dust from our society under the carpet - but this carpet is on other side of the planet.
The world owes an ecological debt to the African continent.
We have got to change our ethics and our financial system and our whole way of understanding the world. It has to be a world in which people live rather than die; a sustainable world. It could be great.
We must reduce all the emissions that are destroying the planet. However, that requires a change in lifestyle, a change in the economic model: We must go from capitalism to socialism.
This time, instead of moving oceans and healing planets, let's get our bills in order and pay down the debt so we control our own future.
We can pay our debts to the past by putting the future in debt to ourselves.
The human world is a long way from meeting the needs of the present, and it is borrowing massively from the future - not only by piling up money debt, but also by degrading the resources from which all real wealth ultimately comes.