"The 20th century was the century of the big, the distant and the fast. If the 21st century is to have a human face, it must be a century characterized by the small, the near and the slow," said María Novo, president of the Slow People Association and UNESCO professor of Environmental Education and Sustainable Development at UNED, during the second conference of the 2014 Forun Congress.

During the session, which was attended by a hundred students and professors from the University, he spoke of the importance of reflecting on the relationship between time and ecological sustainability, social and political sustainability, and personal sustainability: "Time is a non-renewable resource: we spend our lives thinking about how to use our money, which in the end is a renewable resource, and yet we often make frivolous use of time, which is a resource that cannot be recovered".

On the problem of ecological sustainability, among other things, he explained that human beings, like any other species, have an impact on nature through their actions, "the problem is that we destroy nature faster than it takes to regenerate. If we continue at this rate of resource extraction and pollution, in the first twenty years of the 21st century we will have consumed as many resources as in the entire 20th century".

The world as a big factory

In the area of social and political sustainability, María Novo stressed that happiness is a word that is not in fashion, "productivity is in fashion". "Increasingly," she said, "a "chinization of the world" is taking place, China is seen as a great factory and the world tends to that, to impose a productivism at all costs. "Therefore, there is a risk in our societies: to forget that the richness of life is to live to live," he said.

With regard to personal sustainability, he emphasized that the ends of the market usurp the ends of our own lives: "The human being has become a machine at the service of the market and the well-being of people has taken second place. He added: "If we want to move towards global sustainability, each person is challenged to take ownership of his or her own time (...) The challenge is to build a new normality in which normality is not running around, stress and being busy".