Climate change and a tipping point for humanity

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Climate change: We do not own or have an estate on this planet we inhabit. We just keep it in trust for our children, who will do the same for theirs.
Image Credit: Provided

It was a massive undertaking to undertake, even measured by New York Times standards, recognized as “the go-to newspaper” and one of the world’s largest and most influential publications.

And here it is – no less than 193 poignant articles, from 193 countries (representing all member states of the United Nations), by 193 reporters, drawing on every journalistic tool at their disposal, focused on how climate change – decidedly the deadliest threat facing humanity today – is already reshaping our world.

Posted online Monday in a bundle under the headline “Postcards of a world on fire,” the articles conjure up hellish images of a coming apocalypse where “economies are crushed and lives ruined, cities are engulfed in dust. and human history is drowned by the sea. ”.

At first glance, the scientific community also seems to believe that this doomsday scenario is imminent, with its members already busy, as reports said last week, building a vault, roughly the size of a bus, on the Australian island. of Tasmania that will trace the Earth’s global warming patterns and record the missteps of humanity that ultimately destroyed it as a species – a safe that effectively plays the same role as a logger flight, known as the Black Box, which records the misstep made in the last moments of a plane before it crashes.

No science fiction

Science fiction? No, scientific fact. And because it’s a scientific fact, let’s hope that this particular Black Box will never be opened one day by a surviving remnant of our fellow human beings.

Dear friends, climate change, which is, to repeat, the deadliest existential threat humanity faces in our time, will soon reach – if it hasn’t already, as some experts claim. – the tipping point beyond which it could become irreversible.

Look, throughout the history of mankind, we, along with our philosophers, poets, ethicists and other sages have pondered the consequences of issues like war, poverty, inequality, moral values, revolution and the rest. But our generation is the first in history to address the issue of impending destruction by global warming. It’s new. It’s strange. But above all it’s scary.

And if the prospect of man’s actual or potential annihilation doesn’t scare us, it’s hard to say what would. You see, ours is not only a generation thinking about a problem it had never thought about before in human history, but it’s also a busy generation (yes, that’s the word just) to find ways to save the human race, as well as other living beings. species that inhabit this planet, both fragile and beautiful, of our own, of extinction.

Indeed, only our generation determines if we survive or if we perish, because it will be too late for the generation of our children to afford the luxury of meditating. It is a task, you have to admit, of unimaginable gravity.

And, yes, our children know that.

Humanity is doomed

Young people all over the world, it seems, seem to be aware of this horrible truth. Last Thursday, for example, a study published in the scientific journal The Lancet Planetary Health, found that 74% of the world’s citizens under the age of 25 think their governments are failing them when it comes to aggressively addressing the disease. problem and 56% felt that “humanity was doomed”.

The most famous figure of this age group, the young Swedish activist Greta Thurberg, has not mince words and recently left no doubt about her position on the question of the collective responsibility of her generation of s’ Express. She said (or did she shout?): “Adults keep saying they owe young people, to give them hope. But I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to have hope. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear that I feel every day. I want you to take action. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act like the house is on fire – because it is ”.

I’m saying climate change is an issue that ultimately has to do with the organic link that binds humanity to nature or, if you will, the social system to the ecosystem.

Man does not – like Western man, who wants to “tame” nature, “conquer” space and “kill” time “, imagine – to have a domain on Earth. Rather, humans are from and from Earth and on Earth they will return when it is their time. Man is never and can at no time along his evolutionary continuum become “dominant” over him or “master” of it.

We do not own or have any domain on this planet we inhabit. We just keep it in trust for our children, who will do the same for theirs.

“We do not inherit the land from our ancestors,” says a Native American proverb. “We borrow it from our children.”

If we have indeed borrowed our bounty from our children, then it is not honorable to pass our debt on to them.

– Fawaz Turki is a Washington-based journalist, scholar and author. He is the author of The Disinherited: Diary of a Palestinian Exile

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