Nothing is more profitable than catastrophe. Natural disasters increase cement demand, shortage feeds financial speculation and wars place steroids in supply chains. If a bank goes bankrupt, there are plenty of buyers of their remains at a good end price. If the burning jungle, there are those who have the machinery for sowing monocultures. Maybe we have not been able to read it, but ruin is just another investment opportunity.
One of many critical problems that our time has is not the shortage of resources, but the clumsy way in which we manage them. We inhabit a finite planet dominated by a system that demands infinite growth.
The equation is unsustainable, but we have found infinite ways to ignore it. With each crisis, we convince ourselves that the problem is conjunctural, a bump that can be solved more efficiently, more technology, more growth (the concept of the moment). We resist admitting that the fracture is not in the details, but in the structure of the model.
The extraction without mineral brake, deforestation to Mansalva, ocean overexploitation is not accidents, but the logical consequence of a system that has turned life into merchandise. Biodiversity now has a price, clean air has become a luxury and water is marketed with the same naturalness with which private goods are sold.
Thus, while scientific reports warn about ecological collapse, markets find ways to speculate with the crisis: carbon bonds, pollution rights, “green” energy financed by companies that commit echocidia. In this game, sustainability is just another business model.
How to stop this inertia? In principle, it would be relevant to admit that there are no easy solutions within the same model that has led us to this paradox. The idea of a “sustainable capitalism” seems more an oxymoron sewing if we consider that the system depends on continuous predation. It is not enough to consume recyclable products or buy less plastic if the generalized logic continues to reward extractivism and accumulation.
Perhaps there is something deeper in all this: why not seek a cultural transformation that modifies the notions of success, progress and well -being? Perhaps one of the background searches are social organizations that stop measuring their development based on GDP and begin to be evaluated based on the health of their ecosystems and collective well -being.
While the world is designed to make the profit more important than life, we will be trapped in a recyclable crisis wheel. I do not know if we will have the courage to change before the emergency forces us to do so. Because, until now, the disaster remains the best business.
About the author:
Contact:
*Eduardo Navarrete is a specialist in futures studies, journalist, photographer and head of content in UX Marketing.
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eduardo-navarrete
Mail: (email protected)
Instagram: @elnavarrete
Follow business information and today in Forbes Mexico
