Today, April 22, I am 4300 million years old and in such a long period I have never seen anything like this. But first let me introduce myself. My name is Earth or Mother Earth. I am a blue globe, which in practice is a gigantic condominium with hundreds of thousands of apartments inhabited by millions of species, including you the humans.

I can tell you that before Homo sapiens began to multiply at full speed on my floors, it was very easy for me to manage our great Blue Building, except during a few turbulent events. The rest, with very little effort, could maintain order in the condominium since its non-human inhabitants took care of it themselves.

No one can deny that if there is a supporter of diversity, that is me. What you call biodiversity was the guarantor of the balance of the system, such as the cleanliness, order and proper functioning of the Blue Building. It was a natural process that was wonderfully self-controlled so that no species would grow excessively or out of control at the expense of another.

But when you arrived, thanks to your intelligence, science, and skills, you were able to grow exponentially numerically and technologically above most other species, artificially breaking the established natural order. Thus, you evicted many species from their apartments, reducing their populations, in some cases to their extinction. In addition, you used enormous spaces in the gardens of the Blue Building to display your agriculture and livestock, taking away many animals and plants. It seems that some of you believe that you can live without biodiversity. Those who think like this are wrong, because without it there is no life. Each species has its function and if they begin to disappear in a cascade our building can collapse.

The Blue Building, although large, has limited dimensions. Basic services are beginning to fail, pipes are rusty, potable water is scarce, electricity goes out all the time, the walls show deterioration and the blue paint on the facade is turning gray. There is a lot of smoke in the surroundings, the gardens remain on fire, my airs are filling with carbon dioxide, while the apartments are heating up, the fish are depleting in my ponds, the trees are disappearing, and the deserts continue to grow.

Your population growth accelerated in an unusual way just 120 years ago. At the beginning of the 20th century there were about 1,500 million beings, but by 2000 they had quadrupled to 6,000 million. Something never seen before, and as if that were not enough, they have continued to grow and will soon reach 8,000 million people.

Should we decrease the population? No, that is not the issue. The issue is that they have to start respecting nature, deforesting forests rationally, limiting fishing in rivers and seas, occupying less space for agriculture, rationalizing consumption, recycling products, and drastically reducing the millions of tons of food that they are thrown away every year. Likewise with clothing and footwear, appliances, tools, electronic devices, they must take advantage of everything that may be useful to make, rebuild or recycle these objects. In short, you must learn to use the concepts of the circular economy and the sustainable economy to maintain order within the Blue building.

Sandor A. Gerendas-Kiss