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Author: Elisa Condez
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Hello!
Welcome to Espaço Terra/The Earth Place.
I am Elisa and this is a place (ours and yours) where we want to talk about sustainability..
But how did we get here?
To explain to you, I have to go back many years.
The first profession I remember wanting, being 4 ou 5 years old, was a paleontologist, simply because I had a dinosaur book – I know, no one ever heard a child saying she wants to be a paleontologist. However, as taking care of extinct animals would lose all the fun, I chose to be a veterinarian instead. Let’s say that everyone in my family always recognized my love for animals and my preoccupation with the planet. I was fascinated by theBBC wildlife serieson Sundays before lunchtime, narrated by the unmistakable voices of Sir David Attenborough or Eduardo Rêgo..
On the other side, school has a lot to blame when it comes to my environmental concerns – and for that, to all the schools I attended and the teachers that helped pave my path, I am deeply thankful. I remember one day I got home from school and demanded that we started separating the trash for recycling, because I had been taught in school that we should do it in order to protect the planet. My concerns grew with age, as I realized, in the Physics and Chemistry and Biology classes, that the future seemed to be very dark: the imminent extinction of species, the water scarcity, the ozone depletion, the fossil fuel consumption and global warming, etc. At the time, all of this seemed extremely scary to me, even though I didn’t understand the complete magnitude of the problem. I was even more terrified when my aunt showed me the documentary“An Inconvenient Truth" from Al Gore, when I was about 12 or 13 years old.
I decided then that, when I grew up, I wanted to save endangered species from extinction.
However, when I was about to apply for university, for reasons only now I beggin to understand, I made a choice nothing but inconsistent with my dreams until then: I chose to study Medicine. And for 9 years I thought that my path was settled and well resolved.
I finished my university course, started working as a doctor. I lived the COVID-19 pandemic on the frontlines and that made me feel really useful. I know I like and work well in situations of crisis.
Nonetheless, in the beginning of 2021, work related stress, the absurd demands of a medical internship, all mixed up with pandemic fatigue, have led me to an impassable road: the one of burnout. Despite my academic training, I didn’t recognize it at first and I needed to seek help from a mental health professional in order to deal with it.
It was when I found out I was not well resolved.
I was going through an emotional turmoil when I went on vacation to Iceland, where I spent 3 weeks, completely submerged in the most raw nature, between an erupting volcano, melting glaciers… every single part of it took my breath away. And I don’t know what it was, if it was Iceland, or the book I was reading, or therapy, or a lot of things combined, but during this trip a sudden thought came to my mind: that I was not in the “right place” nor doing the “right thing”. I had never reflected on the unexpected decision I took when I was 18 and only then was I realizing that I had made a wrong choice and couldn’t be more unhappy.
My environmental concerns never really went away. In fact they even intensified during my university years, motivated by the worsening of climate crisis and inspired by climate activists like Greta Thunberg. In 2017, I was still in college when I decided to start adopting more sustainable life habits – I think the very first thing that I bought was a bamboo toothbrush. Since then, it has been a change at a time and could I never stop.
I always tried to show others that it is possible to change our daily habits.
I was mocked by my work peers for drinking coffee from a reusable cup, but I never let that demoralize me. Actually, it had the opposite effect, because some months later some of those colleagues started to use their own reusable coffee cups.
It was during the pandemic that I moved in with Cristian, my partner in this adventure, and we decided to implement a more sustainable lifestyle since the beginning. A little change at a time and, without noticing, there was a big difference in our house and our lives.
Today I may not know what I will BE when I grow up, mas I do know what I want to DO: save the planet. I know, nothing could be more cliché and utopian, but it has always been, is and probably will be my driving force.
The ideas came to me like a cascade and, from them this was born:
In Espaço Terra our main goal is to educate for sustainability.
by speaking about the climate crisis and the solutions to it, showing that it is possible to fight it with our individual action, through little (big) changes in our daily lives. Naturally these changes imply a more sustainable consumption with the least possible impact on the planet. Therefore, this will not only be a place to learn, but also an online store, where you will be able to find more sustainable choices for your daily lives.
We believe we can leave the world a little better than we found it (it’s obvious I’m a scout, isn’t it?). But we need one another, because it is only by learning, changing and evolving together that we can hope to save the only home we have: our Earth.
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