Once upon a time... women

When I was a child, there was a cartoon series called Once Upon a time… Man. It was about the history of humanity, a fascinating storytelling about the planet and its inhabitants in a format designed for children. The same characters appeared in all chapters: the bad, the good and the smart guys. Later they made a spin-off about the human body, with the bad guys (virus and all agents of diseases) the good guys (healing mechanisms) and the smart ones, explaining the conflict and empowering the good ones. In any case, I was no more than five years old, and I still remember the last chapter of Once Upon a time…Man. I find that chapter on YouTube forty years later and I feel incredibly astonished of how I retained those images and how current they are...

Humanity has started a war between the "squares" and the "rounds": the destructive weapons are mainly waste and nuclear bombs, there are strategies to gain territories and impose power systems, there is a lot of warfare and little dialogue... finally the planet it is so overheated from human activity and nuclear destruction that only a few "intelligents" who were in space at the time of pressing the red button have managed to survive... In the year 2150 the exiles are waiting in space for the planet to become habitable and life to be reborn.

There are still people who believe that climate change and the consequent planet destruction is just an IPCC statement, a justification for the existence of environmentalists or a movement led by Greta Thurnberg. I have spent my childhood with those images of the last chapter in my mind and I know that climate change events are being experienced by many other since their early childhood. I have dedicated my working life as environmentalist in renewable energy projects, to find solutions that improve projects, throughout a better designed, more resilient and according to implementation standards respecting environmental and social safeguards. In short, to contribute and create more collaborative solutions that work effectively for most people.

Since I live in Africa, I feel that challenges are more significant, my contribution is more relevant, but the contest is also more difficult too. I work on policies, project implementation, monitoring and evaluation. This context also unleashes my creativity and my ability to innovate and find new ways to make things more effective with less “greenwashing,” something that in Western countries I was so used to seeing.

In any case, I feel that the current storytelling is made with the same stuff as it was with Once upon a time…Man: the events are still being made by the bad, the good and the intelligent guys (mainly in masculine still), and today, more than ever there is too much time and money wasted on projects and ideas that simply do not work or are not suitable for the majority. The world is changing faster than ever, and there is an urgent need to put that story behind us be focus in solutions that work for all of us.