Can humanity survive the 21st century?
Can humanity survive the 21st century?
Humans are facing the greatest test in the million-year ascent of our kind. But this isn’t a single challenge, like a famine or disease outbreak. It is a constellation of ten huge man-made threats, which are now coming together to imperil our existence.
Society often regards these risks –
ecological collapse, resource depletion, weapons of mass destruction, global warming, global poisoning, food insecurity, population and urban expansion, pandemic disease, dangerous new technologies and self-delusion – as separate issues. In reality, they are deeply intertwined: each affects the others. This means they cannot be dealt with one at a time, but must be solved in conjunction – and at species level.
Over recent years I have encountered many well-educated, well-informed people – scientists, grandparents and young people especially – who expressed the fear that we may be entering the end game of human history. That civilisation, and maybe even our species, will not survive the compound dangers we are accruing for ourselves.
However the greatest challenge may lie, not in the physical threats we face, but in our own minds. Our belief in non-material things like money, politics, religion and the human narrative often diverts and weakens our efforts to work together for survival. This has to change. Pope Francis, in his encyclical Laudato Si, demonstrated how religion can be re-dedicated to human survival – and it is essential that money, politics and the human narrative are similarly reinvented. Otherwise they will sabotage the very actions essential to our continuance.
(GG: And of course the obligatory hopium paragraph...)
There are also two extremely promising developments. The advent of a new human ability to ‘think as a species’ by sharing knowledge and values through the internet and social media is reshaping, for all time and for the better, our ability to co-operate around the planet. And the emergence of women as leaders in all walks of society is changing how humanity thinks about the future: women, as a rule, do not start wars, dig coal, ravage landscapes, empty the oceans, wipe out other species and knowingly poison their offspring. They think about the children and the grand children, and their needs – and they have already made a start on the population threat by reducing the human birth rate worldwide.
How much the two factors Cribb proposes - the Internet and women leaders - can act to change the actual behavior of our species depends on how much damage has already been done, what threats have not yet emerged, and how much time we have left before the rupture of a critical system.
Those two factors are also problematic in themselves. The internet is a double-edged sword - it makes resource extraction, human habitat expansion and the development of new technologies an order of magnitude more efficient, faster and larger.
Women leaders are not a sure-fire panacea either. Despite examples like Vigdís Finnbogadóttir and Mary Robinson, women like Margaret Thatcher, Golda Meir, Madeleine Albright, Angela Merkel, Isabel Peron, Condoleeza Rice and Hillary Clinton have demonstrated that women are not exempt from the influence of power simply by reason of their gender.
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