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The challenges of our time have taken a specific direction. Some deny them altogether, while others put forward whimsical solutions. But it takes more than a Hollywood screenplay to be up to the task. Competere’s pragmatic approach to solving today’s problems starts from healthy and sustainable nutrition

OUR PROBLEM IS NOT A COMET

It’s not as much an idea as it is a resolution: with the new year, we must save the planet. Or at least start doing so. From the very beginning, Competere has strived to make this great illusion into a realistic and achievable objective. From dreams of a greener tomorrow and of a more equal world, to the transformations of the labor market, industrial automation, and a shifting geopolitical axe toward the Pacific Ocean. These and other challenges have the potential of radically affecting some or all of our day-to-day life. And the direction in which they are headed is clear. Trying to change their course or halting it completely means adopting a stance that is ahistorical and – to put it simply – Trumpian. On the opposite end, there is a world vision that is just as ideological and extremist that – put just as simply – can be chalked up to Greta Thumberg. The only thing playing in favor of the latter, although it may be just as deceptive and aggressive, is that it does not try to deny the course of history.

It will not a be a comet that will destroy us, as the film Don’t look up would have it while making the problem exogenous in nature. If anything, we will shatter against a wall that we built ourselves. And implementing some of the most fashionable proposals around today –  sensationalist, born out of resentment and indignation, and purely aimed at creating a consensus – would mean fostering an element of tension and a potential amplifier of inequality. We risk creating a new social conflict, not between the richer and the poorer, but between those who are sustainable and those who are not. A dichotomy that, unsurprisingly, mirrors the traditional one: the wealthy can afford to be green, the rest not so much.

A CLEVER PROPAGANDA IS NEEDED TO SWALLOW THE PILL

Is there a third way? Competere is on the search for an answer. Our work is delicate and detail-oriented. In our pragmatism, we are aware that saving the planet will take a bit more than one year. And, hopefully, more resources.

To tackle climate change, unpleasant measures must be taken, from a radical transformation of production dynamics, to a revision of consumer patterns and a containment of economic growth. Managing the needs of a booming world population will force us to question many of the agricultural practices and policies that have so far been employed by human societies across the world. When there will be 10 billions of us on Earth – which is inevitable, despite small pockets of the world where concerns of a declining population are valid – the issues of water and raw materials availability, space management, work organization, and anything else that plays into the coexistence of multitudes, will become crystal clear.

What is needed now is a clever propaganda, able to beautify what would otherwise be source of  protest and anger. Our platforms, like Sustainable Nutrition and Empowering Consumers, represent our contribution toward the prevention of a disaster whose warnings we keep issuing but not hearing.

Taking it out on the system, putting all responsibility for salvation of mankind onto the ruling elite’s shoulders, is useless. The notion that a few have been divinely assigned the duty and the ability to save the problems of the masses is outdated. Just like it is unacceptable of the ruling class to try and hide the secret of the philosopher stone, out of fear that someone might steal it or worse, reveal its powerlessness. Unless we want to crash, we should stop looking up.