The world and its Interconnected Crises: What’s Ongoing and What’s Next?
Submitted by Anonymous on Sun, 01/10/2010 - 11:30
The world and its Interconnected Crises: What’s Ongoing and What’s Next?
J. T. Trevors and M. H. Saier
As we enter the next decade it is often wise to reflect on the past and present world situation to gain a better view of what’s ongoing, and what’s next for humanity in our singular, common, shared biosphere. The following list captures most of the priority current and ongoing world crises.
- Unmanaged human population growth
- Global climate change (a.k.a. global pollution)
- World crises in agriculture, food safety, security and food reserves
- Human hunger and poverty
- World crises in education
- World crises in water
- Pandemics
- Ongoing oil, energy, consumption crisis
- World financial crisis and debts
- World crises in universal basic human rights and freedoms
- Conflicts/disputes/wars
- Human migrations
- Leadership crisis
- Species extinction and loss of biodiversity and habitats
- Lack of universal public health standards and infrastructure
- Terrorism
- Earthquakes
It is interesting that they are all interconnected at multiple levels of organization, occur at local, national and global levels, involve complex human relationships, involve complex human-made systems of data, information, knowledge and monetary activities, have been ongoing for many years, are extremely difficult to solve at the national and international levels of organization, are in the news on an almost daily basis, cause immense human suffering and death for at least a billion humans or maybe more, and are not solvable in the immediate short term, even though they needed to be solved decades ago during the cold war and nuclear arms race. They also have another common factor- they generally all consume energy and generate immense global pollution. Interestingly, if you solve problem number one-unmanaged human population growth, the other problems become much easier to solve at all levels of government. The above list is not all inclusive but it captures the main challenges/crises confronting humanity.
Let’s turn our attention to more positive global, humanitarian, scientific, engineering, economic and human rights accomplishments during the last decade, as opposed to the list of immense crises facing humanity. We have been thinking about this for some time and the list is rather short and not all encompassing. The forward positive change delivered in the last decade may include- more space exploration, more advanced GPS devices, increased recognition of indigenous human rights, more advanced use of the internet, more genomics research and some patchwork successes in improving human rights, quality of life and conflict resolution. The list is not impressive nor where any quantum leaps of knowledge forthcoming. This is at a time when more research and education are being conducted than at any other time in human history. Where are the significant humanitarian and scientific breakthroughs at the global level of organization? Some will argue all the small advances when summed are a collective advance. This is partly correct, but often does not lead to a quantum advance for humanity. Sometimes, progress is slow and incremental. This often works except when there is insufficient time to enact the correct solutions and about 7 billion humans on the planet producing too much global pollution, especially in developed countries and some rapidly developing countries. Remember, pollution is the number one cause of pollution.
Technology will not rush to the rescue in time to advert more humans suffering and death as our global climate warms and more humans require more resources, food, and generate more pollution. Nature took a billion years to generate the oil in the Earth, and humans will consume most of it in a 2-century wasteful binge that is drawing to a close. The dreaded list of crises should have been solved years ago. Instead, we are confronted with increasingly complex and interconnected crises that require virtually total international cooperation and sharing of resources, knowledge and wealth.
J. T. Trevors
School of Environmental Sciences, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, Canada, N1G 2W1
E-mail: jtrevors@uoguelph.ca
M. H. Saier
Division of Biological Sciences, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093-0116, USA
E-mail: msaier@ucsd.edu
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