It’s Time To Be Family
There has never been a time in history when global cooperation was more urgent and conditions for united action more favorable than now. One serious reason why unity is so critical now is because humanity is facing the worst environmental crisis since the Younger Dryas. We have created a comfortable world at the cost of sustainability. The average atmospheric temperature has increased by about 10C since the Industrial Revolution. If the trend continues, the consequences will be dire. The impact of global warming is already being felt all over the world. In the summer of 2021, Lytton, a town in British Columbia on the Pacific coast of Canada, recorded a temperature of 49.50 Celsius, which one normally expects in the Sahara Desert. The heatwave killed hundreds of people along the Pacific coast and set off multiple destructive wildfires. The number of such fires in Canada and several other countries has increased since then.
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In many places, climate change has already made permanent impacts. The region extending from the Middle East through sub-Saharan Africa to the Atlantic coast has been experiencing extreme aridity and desertification. Here, rainfall has dropped so low that less than 40 percent of the population has dependable access to drinkable water. In 2021, the same year the Pacific coast drew the world’s attention for the heatwave, Madagascar Island off the coast of Africa entered the 6th year of continuous drought that has pushed over a million people into starvation.
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In Jordan, where researchers from Stanford University have studied this crisis, the average per capita water availability per day is only 40 liters, which is less than a third of Europe’s. According to the World Economic Forum, over 70 percent of the region’s GDP is highly vulnerable to the water crisis, compared with just 22 percent of the world’s population. The rest of the world has no reason to relax either. The World Health Organization estimates that half of humanity may face a water crisis by 2025, and the United Nations anticipates that water scarcity could displace 700 million people by 2030.
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While the sub-Saharan region is facing water shortages, the same climatic phenomenon has been melting the Polar ice caps and mountain glaciers, causing sea level rise and submersion of low-lying areas worldwide. Mountain glaciers have a very special role in sustaining life. They serve as water towers feeding major rivers, like the Yangtze, the Mekong, the Brahmaputra, and the Indus. If the glaciers are gone, the rivers will dry up, and millions of hectares of farmlands will turn into deserts. Climate change disproportionately affects economically poorer regions that are also facing a fast-growing population. In an interconnected world, local problems quickly become global. One example of this is the mass migration—most visible in the Mediterranean region. But not all people can leave their homeland, so the Middle East and Africa are becoming a hotbed of political violence and terrorism. The ideological roots of terrorism are well known; what is often overlooked is that terrorist ideologies thrive where hope has disappeared.
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Global problems like climate change, terrorism, and poverty can be addressed, but they require a concerted international response. Such a level of unity is sadly missing. The situation frustrates many knowledgeable people who might have contributed toward finding solutions. Frans Timmermans, who heads the European Union’s environmental program, told the New Statesman’s Megan Gibson on the eve of the UN conference on climate change held in Glasgow in 2021, “The planet is probably going to be okay, but we won’t.” Some find escape in scientific fantasy, like the search for a habitable planet. Half a dozen potential “exoplanets” have been tentatively identified. Dr. Christopher E. Mason of the Weill Cornell Medical Center proposes a 500-year program to transfer human life to one of those destinations.[1] The project’s unusually long timeframe has been explained by the need to engineer the human genome so it may withstand the extreme space environment during the journey to its new habitat. Such ideas grab media attention and may even draw funding from the super billionaires who are investing in space flights. For the majority of the world’s 8 billion inhabitants, there is little consolation in knowing that plans are underway to send their frozen sperms and eggs to a faraway solar system.
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We do not need to look away to the sky because the world has the technology and money to deal with the situation. There is even a consensus that something must be done, but not the readiness to pay for the cost. People still react more to a rise in gasoline price than to the dangers of carbon emissions. What is needed is a shared, comprehensive vision for the future, connecting the environment with the economy, society, and personal well-being. It is not an easy task, and who will do it? Centuries of state control have conditioned us to expect that governments will. But the reality is that governments’ priorities are different. They respond faster when there are military threats.
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The institution of state was created with the objective of defending communities against enemies, which is why they are so prone to see the world in military terms. As the saying goes, if one has a hammer in hand, everything seems to be a nail. The combined global expenditure on the military exceeds 2 trillion dollars—nearly 15 times the amount spent on foreign aid. According to some reports, the total cost of wars in the Middle East since 9/11 has been over 3 trillion dollars. Imagine what might have been achieved if that amount had been invested in the environment and poverty alleviation.
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Like alpha males in a herd, rich states want to dominate. The dominant theme in international relations is power play. As Michael McFaul wrote in The Washington Post:
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In the United States, the dominant analytic framework for explaining international relations today is realism. This theory assumes that all countries are the same: unitary actors seeking to maximize their power or security through rational calculations in an anarchic world. The only thing that matters in the world is power—both the power of individual countries and the balance of power among them.[2]
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Great powers need great enemies, so disagreements are easily escalated into conflicts. As Harvard University professor Stephen M. Walt argued in an article in Foreign Policy magazine, often “the root causes of the disagreement are not well understood, and the level of animosity is greater than it should be”.[3] Yet, history’s unambiguous lesson is that war does not solve any problems.
Today’s challenge is to reduce conflicts and build a new world. States replaced ancient village societies when the latter could no longer solve the major problems of the time. Likewise, new institutions are needed to face today’s challenging issues. The need was first recognized nearly a century ago in the creation of the League of Nations and later the United Nations. However, these institutions are associations of states and, therefore, unable to overcome the problem of inter-state conflicts and create a more cooperative world. The European Union is a better model, but it could be made even better if people had a stronger voice in its policy-making. State institutions also suffer from the dominance of vested interests. Even in the best of modern democracies, the balance of power has shifted in favor of the rich and powerful, as studies by Robert Dahl, Larry Bartels, and others demonstrate.[4]
History’s major transitions and achievements resulted from people’s actions. As the political scientist Donald J. Puchala recognized, “the history of relations among peoples has been of much broader human consequence” than interaction among the states.[5] While states fought wars, people created cultures, developed ideas, and spread civilization. Today, people around the world need to raise the banner of unity and peace so that our collective resources are spent for the benefit of all.
Amidst a new wave of polarization splitting the world, we can still hope that the future will turn out to be more peaceful, secure, and prosperous because history’s most significant long-term trend is the gradual unification of humanity. The humankind was once divided into a million small, isolated groups. Now, there are just a couple of hundred state societies that look more similar than different. The great seers of the past had a sense of this truth. About twenty-five hundred years ago, the authors of the Upanishad proclaimed Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam (the world is one family). The Bible emphasizes the same idea by describing humankind as children of Adam and Eve. The ancient teachers did not just anticipate we are one species. They urged that we act as a family. We are now in an era when that goal can be achieved.
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End Notes"
[1] Simon Ings; “Engineering humanity for life after Earth”; The New Scientist; 12 May 2021
[2] Michael McFaul; “Vladimir Putin does not think like we do”; The Washington Post; January 26, 2022
[3] Stephen M. Walt; “The Geopolitics of Empathy - How our understanding—or misunderstanding—of other countries’ perspectives shapes global order”; Foreign Policy; June 27, 2021
[4] Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, James A. Robinson, and Pierre Yared; “Income and Democracy”; American Economic Review; 2008, 98:3, 808–842 http://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/aer.98.3.808
[5] Brett Bowden; “Politics in a World of Civilizations: Long-term Perspectives on Relations between Peoples”; Human Figurations; Volume 1, Issue 2, July 2012; http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.11217607.0001.204