In the aftermath of World War I, the horror of that conflict gave rise to a slogan that quickly turned into a bitter irony. "The war to end all wars" was only a prelude to more of the same, if not worse, with the arrival of World War II. Now there's reason to resurrect the phrase, not as applied to the so-called war on terror but to global warming. If the war against climate change is to be won, it will require an era of unprecedented cooperation and the dropping of national boundaries. Some might say it would require a change in human nature itself. Conventional war isn't compatible with any of these things and must come to an end.
In the general celebration of Al Gore's Nobel Peace Prize, few commentators noticed that his acceptance speech was pessimistic. He pointed out that no significant change in pollution has occurred yet, with more than seventy million tons of toxic emissions being released into the atmosphere every day. Gore compared the current inertia to the period between the two world wars when too many world leaders ignored the threat of Nazism and assiduously pursued policies of timidity that would prove to be defeatist and self-destructive in the end.
So far, the parallel to World War II is holding true in frightening ways. The threat against us is obvious, it isn't going away, and yet lack of leadership and wishful thinking prevail. Only on the brink of disaster did the Allies unite to fight back against Fascism. Global warming hasn't reached that stage. The recent Bali conference on climate change ended with little more than an agreement to set a future agenda. The United States jockeyed to protect the interest of our corporate polluters, following the Bush agenda that favors total non-regulation of businesses and turning a blind eye to the destructive practice that corporations want to pursue. It's easy enough to condemn their head-in-the-sand attitude, but the situation is now so alarming that the Democrats aren't in a position to create the necessary change, either. The Democratic candidates for President say all the right things about climate change in front of the cameras, yet in essence they are fiddling with their makeup while Rome burns.
The time-wasters on every front didn't count on the pace of global warming speeding up, but it has, as recent scientific reports about melting Arctic ice prove. Activists who advise cutting greenhouse emissions by fifty percent are probably too conservative. That measure wouldn't lower the planet's temperature or remove greenhouse gases already present in the upper atmosphere. What is needed is an all-out pursuit of technologies to do both. Scientists inform us that such technologies could be developed or may be here already in nascent form.
But the real issue runs deeper still. The entire system of nationalism is a fatal holdover from a time that is gone forever. We are being forced to think beyond national boundaries, and yet human nature isn't equipped for that -- not so far, at least. Two things that nations are very good at -- military action against their enemies and fierce trade competition -- head the list of destructive habits killing the planet. Militarism diverts money away from the trillions needed to reverse climate change. Trade competition entices corporations into polluting in the name of profits. Both traits put up barriers between countries at a time when dropping all barriers is the only way we can hope to win. There is no viable strategy except a zero pollution global economy, or the closest we can come to that ideal.
In short, the next world war is upon us, and it's the strangest conflict humans will ever fight, because the enemy is our own mindset and the outmoded habits it has engendered. Pessimists point out that human history has never been free of aggression and competition. But one can point out with equal truth that human history has never been devoid of adaptation, either. Aggression and competition can co-exist with cooperation (as shown by the joint effort between the Soviet Union and the U.S. to eradicate smallpox from the world, a venture that succeeded during a period of hostility between the two superpowers.) Now we need to take the next step and make cooperation dominant. Already a significant number of people wake up every morning without the urge to kill an enemy, and they are the front-line warriors in this new conflict, not the traditional militarists and nationalists. Over the next decade the world will watch and wait to see if these new warriors prevail, as surely they must.
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