Did you have a look upstream? (cartoon #21)

🛖 The residents who live in the village Downstream 🛶 had built their community beside a river. Many years ago, they began to notice that growing numbers of drowning people were caught in the river’s swift current. So they went to work inventing ever more elaborate technologies to save them.

🏥 Talk to the people of Downstream today, and they’ll speak with great pride about the hospital by the edge of the water, the fleet of rescue boats 🛟 ready for service, or the large number of dedicated lifeguards ready to risk their lives to save victims from the raging waters.

🦸‍♂️ So preoccupied were these heroic villagers with rescue and treatment that they never thought to look upstream to find out why people were falling in the river in the first place.

We, humans, are so incredibly good at fixing problems! So smart, so creative!… But sometimes, we enjoy it so much that we forget to look upstream at the root causes of a problem that could be avoided in the first place. Watch our video on the root causes of unsustainability (also on Youtube).

Find all our sustainability cartoons here.