Sustainable footprint

It all started with the philosophical, perhaps a selfish question. What will I leave for my future generation? May be more money and assets than my father did, may be fame/name (good or bad), and may be what.
I don’t have many things under my control, do I? Still I will fight it out with life for the betterment of my future generation, and this is supposed to be a sustainable development? Satisfying my present needs without depriving the needs of future generation. This is what every other human being does! Everybody wants to leave a footprint in this world.

But what is that we are actually leaving for our children and grandchildren? We never really have to worry about these questions any more; we unconsciously are leaving enough footprints for them to witness our existence in this world, like what?
Warmed up earth, devastated natural resources, polluted atmosphere and huge stack of landfills. Will you call this sustainable development?

We humans have grown together massively like never before in last two centuries. We developed countries together, controlled/killed diseases together. We did everything for our own comfort, but at what cost? We’ve started facing the world of limits.

We have melted so much of glaciers that 40% of world’s drinking water source is going to be obsolete in another half century.
We have burned enough fossil fuels to witness carbon-dioxide levels never seen in last 650,000 years.
We used our mother nature’s forest, oil, mineral deposits, how many of us have planted a single sapling?
We have more than 80,000 chemicals in production and use today; only about 15,000 chemicals have been analyzed for its safety to environment and humankind.

This is just a sneak peek of the entire picture we’ve painted so far; this is what we are leaving for the generations to come. This is the footprint we are leaving in this world.