Buy this book on Amazon: A Short History of the World
In the 20th century we climbed the highest mountains, visited the extremes of the earth, and even landed a machine on another planet. What we have achieved as a species is quite spectacular. In many ways we currently live in the best of times; we have unlimited and cheap energy at our disposal, we have access to medicine unparalleled in human history, we can visit any part of the planet within 24 hours, and falling costs of computing and communications have contributed to bringing barriers down around the world in every shape and form. In theory, we should be at the pinnacle of our existence.
Paradoxically however, the last century also witnessed the worst wars in history and even with our best minds we are still unable to free the vast majority of the world’s population from the ‘poverty trap’. Despite all the advances in science, education and communications, modern-day slavery in the form of human trafficking continues to blight the world in which we live and is becoming one of the fastest growing criminal activities. According to a UN report from 2003, an estimated 2.5 million people were in forced labour that year, of which 1.2 million were children being trafficked for commercial gain.116 Our endless hankering after material wealth and possessions has led to an explosion of debt and to a crisis in our financial system. We are no closer to the perfect political system than the ancient Greeks were.
The resurgence of Islamic militancy threatens the very basis upon which modern Western society was built: freedom of expression, democracy and the rule of law. It also threatens the supply of oil, much of which lies in the Islamic countries of Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq and Kuwait. If this supply is threatened, the West, and its trading partners, will suffer the consequences, and the result will be further instability and conflict.
Yet there is a much larger threat to global prosperity and world peace than a rough economy or an unstable oil supply, as serious as they are. This threat is climate change. Despite clear evidence of the consequences of doing so, we pollute the fragile climate in which we live, inadvertently destroying the environmental resources upon which we, as a species, depend. In an endless drive for profit, we destroy the forests which are needed to produce oxygen and reduce carbon dioxide – a large contributor to the heating of our planet – and through our addiction to hydrocarbons, we continue to pollute the air we breathe and the water we drink.
Many previous societies have collapsed from over-exploiting their own resources. This is exactly what we are doing now, but on a much larger, global scale. We know the problems that we are storing up for ourselves, but our constant short-term approach and lack of political will to make unpopular decisions mean that we do nothing about it. We live in a state of denial.
We may be immensely adaptable as a species, but with the world’s population now at seven billion and growing, it is becoming more and more likely that competition over resources such as water will increase to a critical point. Unless we begin to think in the long term over the short term, and do something to preserve our valuable resources, we will end up fighting over them, and then the future is very likely to consist of intolerance, warfare, starvation and genocide, as it has done in the past.