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The Earth’s habitability is dramatically
deteriorating... and the richest and most powerful countries still continue to
take actions in the wrong direction.
The neoliberal plutocratic governance has rejected democratic multilateralism, especially since the end of the 1980s. President Reagan created the G6 shortly after Nelson Mandela and Mikhail Gorbachev had built in a very short period of time new and unexpected furrows that were bound to contain the seeds of a new era, in which the reason of power would finally be replaced by the power of reason...
After a few years of containment, thanks to the presence of highly notorious European leaders, the G7 was created (adding Canada), then the G8 (adding the Russian Federation)... and, finally, with the 2007 financial crisis, the decision was taken to expand to 20 the number of countries “in command” -despite the fact that the United Nations included 193 countries!-. But as Prof. Juan Antonio Carrillo had already warned -with great lucidity and anticipation- regardless of the number placed after the letter G, the lead will always be in the hands of the United States whose Republican Party has rejected multilateralism since 1919 (League of Nations)... with the huge and extremely dangerous inconsistency represented by the fact that the President who created the League of Nations never belonged to it.
The increasingly urgent “warnings” from the international scientific community, concerning the global danger posed by a lifestyle that has harmful effects on the Earth’s habitability, have been quite numerous but also totally ignored. In the 1960s, the UNESCO -that had already founded the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and the International Geological and Hydrological Programmes- placed special emphasis on the role of the oceans, and launched the major “Man and the Biosphere” Programme. In 1972, Aurelio Peccei founded the Club of Rome and introduced “the limits of growth” for consideration by all Member States. In 1979, the United States Academy of Sciences warned that the CO2 emissions were not only increasing but also the recapturing capacity by the sea phytoplankton was decreasing. And silence was the general reaction. And the Exxon Mobile Foundation was created to de-emphasize this fact with the help of pseudo scientists.
In 1992, the Summit of the Earth took place in Rio Janeiro with the leadership of Maurice Strong, and the Agenda 21 was presented to the world. There was no reaction. Ten years later when the Charter of the Earth, which is an excellent guide for action at all levels, already existed since 2000, the Earth Summit was held in Johannesburg... However, the neoliberal governance continued to ignore the wise recommendations from the experts... up to 2015 when, thanks to Barack Obama, the Paris Agreements on Climate Change were signed, as well as the United Nations Resolution on the 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals.
This sweet autumn break was followed by a cold and unusual winter with the arrival of Donald Trump in the White House: “I do not intend to implement neither the Paris Agreements nor the 2030 Agenda”. And the rest of the world remained silent, as also did the European Union, which used to be an example of democracy, human rights and solidarity...
We are now six years behind schedule, but during his term Joe Biden may achieve the tough transition to the new era, represented by the Anthropocene, if we all have the capacity -now that women and young people have a leading role- to put into practice the lessons learned during the COVID-19 confinement: the awareness that we will only be safe if everybody is safe; that global threats require globally agreed actions; that we cannot keep investing every day thousands of millions in weapons and military expenditure while thousands of human beings are dying of hunger and extreme poverty; that the supreme duty of current generations is to leave behind a habitable Earth for future generations, allowing them -despite the irreversible damage already caused- to keep under control the indispensable conditions of a dignified life; that, once they become aware of reality, “the peoples” will choose a lifestyle in compliance with the specific patterns that have been scientifically established.
If we want the cross-eyed and short-sighted people who still are in favour of a neoliberal governance to finally become reasonable and realize that the time has come for radical changes, it is imperative for citizens to become aware of what is really happening and stop being impassive witnesses to become active participants. Until just a few decades ago, “We the peoples” -as we were so brilliantly referred to at the beginning of the Charter of the United Nations- could not express ourselves. Now, thanks largely to digital technology, we have a voice of our own. And we are all equal in dignity, without distinction of any kind, such as gender, ethnicity, belief, ideology... We may now through public outcry, either in the streets or the cyberspace, express what must be done to avoid our intergenerational legacy from being a deteriorated habitability. Restating the words of the Charter of the United Nations in its first paragraph, we may finally proclaim that “We, the peoples, are determined to save succeeding generations from the horror of living under unhealthy and extreme conditions...”
News such as a temperature of 50 degrees centigrade in Canada and the northern region of the United States have a huge mobilising power; we must take action at once today, and swiftly an firmly implement the SDGs, following the advice of the scientific community.
I remember how strongly we were warned about the risk entailed by the melting of the Arctic ocean, not only due to the permafrost “reflection“, but also to the release of methane which is much more harmful than CO2… The same media that say nothing today about the official visit of the UN Secretary General have remained silent or have given very little importance to the progressive disappearance of the Arctic or the presence of cracks in Antarctica... They do not want the excellent and pressing proposals of the Secretary General... nor the confidence in multilateralism expressed by the Prime Minister and Head of State to tarnish the exciting announcements of recovery, “normalization” and reinstatement of market-based governance. The UN has warned about a great heat wave... Let us, citizens of the world, remain aware, watchful and ready to take all required actions so that our descendants do not have to resort to this terrible sentence by Albert Camus which has had so much influence in my life: “I despise them because they could have done so much and dared so little”.
