The Urgency of a Literate Population: How Knowledge and Nature Shape the Destiny of a Society

When we look at a social map of any country on planet Earth, we see a division that goes far beyond income: it is an environmental, cognitive, and spiritual division.

People with higher levels of education, greater access to information, and a stronger culture of well-being tend to live in leafy neighborhoods with flowers, trees, gardens, air circulation, and contact with natural and organic products. These environments enhance mental health, creativity, spirituality, and cognitive ability. Conversely, people with less access to education and lower literacy levels inhabit arid places, devoid of trees and plants, marked by concrete, noise, extreme heat, and a lack of green spaces. These are regions where the diet consists almost exclusively of ultra-processed products, where physical exercise is almost nonexistent, and where there is greater adherence to dogmatic, fanatical, or victimizing religious discourses. These environments not only reflect inequality: they produce it.

Modern science demonstrates that green spaces are not a luxury: they are cognitive infrastructure. A review of over two hundred studies compiled by researchers at USP (University of São Paulo) showed that 94% of them found positive effects from contact with nature: reduced anxiety, stress, irritation, and mental fatigue; improved mood, cognitive clarity, and even cardiovascular health; as well as increased interest in potentially evolutionary studies.

Research from the Urban Mind Project (King's College London) confirms that even small fragments of urban nature—a tree by the window, birdsong, a nearby park—reduce loneliness, increase focus, and decrease mental load. In children, the effects are even more impressive: European studies have revealed that schools surrounded by green spaces show a statistically significant increase in children's IQ, especially among children with lower initial performance. In other words: green spaces literally teach literacy.

Meanwhile, maps of cities like London, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Paris, New York, and Hong Kong show a consistent pattern: areas with higher income and education levels concentrate vegetation, recreational areas, parks, and lakes; poorer areas have almost no trees, well-maintained squares, or public spaces for rest or socializing.

Recent research in urban modeling reinforces that socioeconomically vulnerable neighborhoods rarely reach even 30% tree cover, the minimum limit for thermal comfort and psychological well-being. Meanwhile, public health studies conducted in Asia demonstrate that the combination of education and contact with green spaces reduces cerebrovascular diseases and improves longevity. Even more revealing: when education levels are low and the environment is arid, the risk of chronic illness skyrockets.

This relationship is profound and not a coincidence. Dry, hot, gray, and nature-free environments generate emotional overload, chronic stress, irritability, a feeling of entrapment, and mental fatigue; conditions that facilitate the action of forces that depend on emotionally fragile people susceptible to manipulation. Cognitive exhaustion diminishes the capacity for critical thinking, reduces motivation, weakens autonomy, and increases vulnerability to simplistic discourses. It is precisely in these environments that communities emerge marked by dogmatic religiosity, aversion to change, emotional dependence on the State, and adherence to victimizing narratives that reinforce passivity.

The less access to knowledge an individual has, the more incapable they feel of charting their own course and, consequently, the more they rely on external structures, leaders, institutions, or systems that assume the role of "absolute authority."

On the other end of the spectrum, populations with access to quality education and critical information develop autonomy, deeper spirituality (and not just religiosity), healthy habits, environmental awareness, a sense of purpose, and financial independence. They live in places with more trees because they understand their importance and demand public policies to ensure that these spaces exist and are maintained. Wooded environments are not just a reflection of a more conscious culture, but fertile ground for the development of autonomy. In these regions, people walk, breathe better air, consume natural foods, read more, meditate more, think more clearly, and, above all, do not depend on the State to survive. Nature, knowledge, and well-being are not separate worlds: they are gears in the same machine.

And here is the most sensitive and most neglected point: if no structural action is taken, this gap between those who live autonomously and those who live without autonomy will not only continue to exist, but will expand exponentially. We are facing a phenomenon that is not only social, but civilizational. The current inertia creates two distinct populations coexisting on the same planet, with such different levels of consciousness, health, income, cognition, and sense of purpose that, in a few decades, it will be as if we had two planets within one. One planet that lives, creates, and evolves; another that gets sick, repeats, submits, and depends. A humanity divided not by biology, but by information.

The urgency is clear: without full literacy—technical, emotional, cognitive, and spiritual—a society does not evolve. A deficit of information produces unhealthy environments, and unhealthy environments produce weary minds. This is not just about public policy: it's about civilizational survival. We need a literate, critical population, connected to nature, financially independent, capable of distinguishing spirituality from fanaticism, capable of nourishing their own bodies and minds, and capable of building a life that doesn't depend on external forces to dictate who they are.

The equation is straightforward:

More knowledge → more nature → more health → more awareness → more money → more freedom.

Less knowledge → less nature → more disease → less awareness → less money → more dependence.

This cycle needs to be broken. Educating the mind and reforesting the land are, today, two of the most revolutionary acts a society can perform. Without them, there is no sustainable, free, or lucid future. Before discussing the advancement of artificial intelligence, we need to fulfill and deliver the most basic and urgent lesson: raising the level of education of the population and rebuilding the cognitive health of the planet.