Act with the intention to leave your surroundings unchanged or better than when you found them. A simple way of viewing this is to imagine your grandchildren will have better lives than you because of your legacy.
Try and consider the long-term consequences of your behaviour or actions. Seemingly harmless events done in the present may have detrimental long-term consequences.
This sounds relatively easy, but is actually very difficult. One of the hardest things for us to do is to look far ahead, even though we are capable of it. Sometimes only necessity forces us to do this. However if we wait until this happens, because a situation has become so bad or becomes so obvious, it is often too late.
It is difficult to see and agree on what real problems are. We may not see the wood for the trees , or we may deny a problem exists because we are afraid of the consequences. This happens in our personal lives, but is especially serious on a macro level, when people vote for parties with unrealistic visions, or in the case of global warming, or our human population problem.
Some issues that manifest later are very complex. It is very hard to make decisions now for something that is likely to manifest itself in the future. We are also never sure of the future, so events may occur and the abalia solves itself. It is much easier for us to see solutions to a problem in an emotional or simplistic way, than to examine the abalia deeply. Diabetes and climate change are two examples of abalia that manifest much later.
Sometimes we cannot agree that a problem actually exists. If we do acknowledge it, we often disagree on the cause. Dialogue is required to be able to solve this, along with reliable and transparent data, good teamwork, and finally good decision making.
There are huge companies and industries today that have done remarkably well for themselves. They must have highly efficient command structures and great teams of decision makers. However, many of those executives would not agree that the state of our world today is extremely fragile. They would not agree that the warning signs are actually so.
Many issues are highly complex, and we are not very good at examining these. That is why we need to also learn how we have evolved and how our brain works. Knowing this will help us be aware of cognitive traps we may fall into and delusions we may have. We should then be able to adjust for our likely failings when predicting the future and making decisions that are meant to impact us in the future.
When abalia are complex, the easiest way for us to deal with them is to ignore them or simplify the issues. We may whittle it down to a yes or no solution, often based on morality. We must tread carefully and make the effort to analyse issues with foresight, before making conclusions.