We can save the world
HOW LONG UNTIL HUMANKIND COLLAPSES?
Five thousand years or five decades? The answer is in our hands. Human civilization could never collapse. But how?
S u s t a i n a b i l i t y.
While the term is broad, it is supposed to be taken as such, because I truly believe that you can make anything sustainable.
As an example I will pick two topics that are not polemic at all. I’m not talking about climate change or politics (yet). I will talk about Chocolate and Scandinavia.
First, I love Chocolate. Chocolate will never break my heart, never. I trust Chocolate, and it deserves an uppercase C for each time I mention it in this post. Secondly, I’ll talk about Scandinavia.
What do you know about Scandinavia? Can you name three cities in Denmark? Can you name a Swedish athlete other than Zlatan Ibrahimovic? WHICH DAMN COUNTRIES ARE PART OF IT? Is Finland part of it or not? What about Iceland? Faroe Islands? Isn’t that a Lord of the Rings setting?
Well, four years ago all I knew about Scandinavia was where it was located on the globe.But it all changed when I moved to Santa Barbara, California (I hope one day you’ll get the irony)
So, as I started my adventure in City College it took me half a day to notice one thing. This place is incredibly full of Scandinavians. Yes, Santa Barbara is a small Stockholm, but with good weather. My roommate was from Sweden. Every class I took had at least three Swedes in it. I’ve attended several parties in which I was the non-scandinavian in there.
So I assumed that everyone in Sweden is a millionaire. Otherwise how can an entire country afford to study abroad? Spoiler alert, they all had student debts. But I’ll get there another day. It’s time to relate Scandinavia with Chocolate and sustainability.
There was this girl from Sweden (surprise) and I was telling her just as I tell everyone else about how much I love Chocolate. I had so many bars in my room. So I sent the girl a snapchat. Because I couldn’t only say how much I love Chocolate, I needed to show it. And she replied with a snapchat of a chocolate bar that I have never seen before. Its package was shinier than a Golden Ticket to Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. It was called Marabou. It is still called Marabou. And the worst thing is, it is extremely hard to find it in California.
I NEEDED IT. But how do I get one of those shiny things?
Well, luckily (or maybe the universe was working in my favor), my swedish roommate was in Sweden for Spring Break. So I asked him — Kompis (Swedish for buddy), can you bring me a couple of this Marabou chocolate? A milk bar and another one with nuts. — And he did so.
A few days passed and he arrived with the bars. Then, I calmly sat down in my room and invited a friend to share the bar with.
IT WAS A GAME CHANGER.
It was just an ordinary and simple Chocolate bar. But that’s exactly how I like things to be — simple and ordinary. It was perfect. It was LAGOM, an untranslatable swedish word that I could explain it to you, but I’d rather you to google on your own. But the time the first bar was over it was already my new favorite chocolate.
How did I spend 19 years of my life without that piece of heaven? Well, I’m not sure heaven is the appropriate word anymore. Why? Well, I started reading about Marabou — where can I buy it? How many different flavors do they have it? When was it founded?
BUT
It’s the internet. And the internet can be really mean sometimes, and the internet told me how environmentally evil Marabou was.
SHOCK
What do I do? Do I give up on Marabou? I barely met it and now I have to go back to all those other Chocolate brands that are still amazingly good but not as simple as Marabou. What do I do?
I shared my thoughts with my neighbors about how morally correct it was of me of keep chasing these shiny Marabou bars. Well, it turns out that the Chocolate industry as whole is extremely bad for the environment. The amount of palm oil that these brands use to produce their Chocolate is generating massive amounts of deforestation.
But that is not the end of the world. Not all Chocolate is bad. There is a lot of environmentally friendly chocolate out there.
We can live in a perfect world with Chocolate and be environmentally friendly at the same time. We MUST live in an environmentally friendly world. But in order to do so, we need to CHANGE. Change habits, ideals, and moral values. Otherwise, the clock is ticking and we don’t have much longer.
Next week I’ll tell you more about sustainability and how to save humankind, but in the meantime I want you to reflect.
What is it that you love but you are willing to give up for a better world?
