One Apple A Day #1061
Yesterday I read an article in an Italian newspaper about India's pledge to reach carbon neutrality by 2070. Considering that the EU and US aim to achieve the same goal by 2050, India's commitment may seem weak.
Yet, if we take a broader perspective, we can see that the problem is way more complex. India is also one of the most populated countries in the world, with a still developing economy and widespread poverty among the population. You can't just focus on CO2 without considering the big picture. Plus, in the last decades, rich countries - to lower production costs - have reduced the emission of CO2 by moving their production to countries with more relaxed laws on pollution.
All of this made me think about how often we try to solve the local problem, forgetting that everything is interconnected.
I don't mean just geographically locally but also local to an industry or parts of society. In a way, I understand that. It's way easier to focus on one thing at a time because the complexity of the whole can be daunting.
However, I believe that only if we think globally and holistic, we have a chance to find a way forward that will be more than the solution to a problem. It will be a vision for a new reality. Then, the solution must be implemented locally because it's at that level that things happen.
As in the image above, I feel we should start from a local problem, expand our vision and look at it from a global perspective to find the way forward and then manifest it at the local level.
And the "local" to which we apply the solution may be different from where we started.
A bit like when I went to an osteopath, and he solved my neck pain by fixing my pelvis.