The Earth is the only home we have. Instead of caring for our planet like our lives depend on it, we have exploited its air, water and land resources to the point of near exhaustion. A big part of the problem has been the way we treat women. For the last 12,000 years, since the beginnings of agriculture and permanent settlements, women have been largely relegated by men to the role of child birthing and rearing. Human society has been built on a foundation of male dominance. Women have suffered greatly because of it.
In Europe and America, things began to change for women in the late 19th century. In the U.S., women fought for and won the right to vote less than a hundred years ago. Even now, equal rights are not guaranteed under the law, though the trends in the U.S. and the developed nations of the world have given women unprecedented access to education and opportunity.
Now, in the early part of the 21st century, we find human numbers expanded to nearly 7.7 billion as of this writing, with projections of 10-12 billion by the end of this century. That simply doesn’t compute. There is not enough food, fresh water, forests, fish in the sea or anything else to sustain that number of humans. Even now, humans are pushing the planet’s ability to provide to the brink. We have human induced climate change, deforestation, water resource exhaustion. We are caught up in a perfect storm of global scale challenges for which we alone are responsible.
So, what to do?
The solution begins with a level playing field on which we encourage equality in sacrifice and equality in reward. An equal place at the table for all. That’s what a sustainable future will be built on. Woman must have an equal place at the table. Equal opportunity in education and employment, equal pay, equal opportunity with men in all ways: that is how we build a society that can overcome the array of planetary scale challenges for which we humans bear total responsibility.
It starts with a level playing field and equality for women. To fully achieve that, much remains to be done.
The link below tells the story…
http://www.unwomen.org/en/digital-library/multimedia/2015/12/infographic-human-rights-women