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The very first time environmental issues alarmed me, I was a middle school student attending Saint Phillips and James, a Catholic school in the Wakefield area of the Bronx. During a lesson on the solar system, my teacher decided to go off-script, straying from the curriculum—he foreshadowed a distant future, featuring an opaque and uninhabitable Earth.
Evidence suggests that we have done a considerable amount of damage to Earth’s infrastructure, yet I believe we can still make amends. An uninhabitable Earth is not inevitable. In Ron Gonen’s book, “The Waste-Free World: How the Circular Economy Will Take Less, Make More and Save the Planet,” he lambastes the linear economy, describing it as “wasteful and environmentally catastrophic,” but he doesn’t stop there.