Is the World Insane?

Hi !

I think everyone noticed that this summer was full of news, and that’s what we’re going to talk about today in this first “real” post of the blog Lost Among The Stars.

I therefore propose you, for this article to speak of the state of the world, and for this, we will evoke the main events that happened in the summer, to see how we can interpret them. I kept six events.
I prefer to tell you right now that these six subjects are neither the most rollicking nor exciting, but they are much more important, simply because they affect the whole world and our future… By the way, only one of them is positive. These six events are therefore the following : the Heat Wave that affected Europe, the Jebi typhoon in Japan at the end of the month of August, the war and combats that continue in Middle East and in Africa, the demonstrations and protestations against immigration in Germany, the cancellation of the TransMountain pipeline in Canada, and at last the resignation of the French Minister of Environment Nicolas Hulot. Nothing really enthralling, you could say, but think again, because even if we’ve less spoken about TransMountain than about the World Cup (I bet that nobody knows about this huge victory for the defenders of the environment and autochthon rights, whereas for the French second star…), these six subjects reveal a lot of informations on the state of our society.

From these six events, we will be able to evoke three topics in today’s post : the state of our planet, the geopolitical state of the world and the social state of our great old “Humanity”.

Until 2050, one summer out of four will be heatwaved. In fact, I don’t think so. I think we won’t have to wait for the year 2050. But that’s my own mind. We broke again a new temperature record, as much in France than globally. I cannot even imagine how we can still be talking to know if Global Warming is truly real or not, the answer is for me coming from itself.
This summer’s Heat Wave shows us how urgency is well real. It’s truly difficult for me to imagine living two months a year over 100°F… Because that’s indeed what we’re talking about, and it’s no longer possible to deny it. Even worse, this increase of the temperature (that the most pessimistic scientific forecasts assess to +9°F until 2100) is only one of the lot of consequences of climate change whose we are the responsible. We could quote the rise of the sea level and the ice melting (which of course come with the increase of the temperature), the extinction of 17 to 34% of the living species until 2050, the collapse of the commercial fisheries targeted by the UN for 2048, the decrease by 30% of the natural resources in thirty years, or the increase by 15% of the emissions linked to tourism between 2009 and 2013… And nevertheless, we keep producing each year four hundred million tons of chemical products, to release to the sea a third of the fish caught, to sell one million plastic bottles each second (yes, one million each second)… The list is long and if I wrote it whole, I would have to change of web hosting plan.
The only statistics I will add will allow me to make the transition to the two other parts : in fifty years, the number of natural disasters has been more than multiplied by three. One people leaves its home each second due to climate change. And hundred million more people will fall in poverty if nothing’s done. If you weren’t already convinced of the imperative need to act for the fight against climate change and for the environment, I hope that now you are.

I mentioned in the introduction the project of the TransMountain pipeline, which was supported by the government of Canada and its Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, but it has just been cancelled by the country’s Federal Court of Appeal. And for what’s about the resignation of Nicolas Hulot, I think that his words have widely been shared in the medias, I would just like to add that for me, the French government and Emmanuel Macron once for all abdicated in front of the lobbies, big companies and money.

The state of our environment isn’t really good and the state of the global geopolitics isn’t better. I think it’s often enough in the news. The fact remains that the conflicts continue, that the arms race keeps going, always faster, that the migration doesn’t really weakens, that populism and racism continues to become more important in Europe, that the great powers keep going to make money by selling weapons and by buying raw materials to developing countries. That the rich people become even more rich, and that the poor people even poorer. That we continue to live as tough nothing happened.

According to the news site foreignpolicy.com, there would currently be ten conflicts in the world. In North Korea, even if a lot of progress has been made in the last months, the tensions remains extremely strong and the denuclearization is more than uncertain. The rivalry between Saudi Arabia (supported by the US) and Iran (supported by Russia), associated to the war and the diseases which devastate Yemen (more than height million inhabitants are on the edge of famine, one million declared cases of cholera, three million of displaced people), to the fights that remains in Afghanistan and to the civil war in Syria between the supporters of Bashar el-Assad’s regime supported by Moscow, the Kurds, the international coalition and the Islamic State, we can say that the Middle East is going through a total war period. We can add to that the Sahel, where the terrorist groups are still numerous, the fights that make everyday tens of deaths in Democratic Republic of Congo and Venezuela, as well as the Ukrainian conflict, still not behind us. Finally, the world faced at the beginning of the year one of the worst humanitarian crisis of its history with the persecutions against Rohingyas in Myanmar, where 650,000 people had to run away.
If you want more informations about these ten conflicts, I let you read the original article here : https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/01/02/10-conflicts-to-watch-in-2018/
But I think you would have understand the idea and that even in 2018, wars continue to kill tens of thousands of people every year.

Bad news again, the social state of the humans isn’t good neither… The best proof of that is coming from Germany, as I already said it in the introduction.
Two years ago, the Chancellor Angela Merkel showed off a huge mankind by being the only European Leader to implement for her country a real migrant-welcome plan worthy of a European Nation. Since 2016, Germany hosted more than one million migrants, and the population was rather favorable.
But as everywhere in Europe, the anti-immigration protests became bigger and bigger, far right became always more important, and the result is there : Angela Merkel, weakened by her different political allies, will probably not have another choice than closing her boundaries too.
That reflects well the climb of the populist, nationalist and far right currents in Europe. Every new poll, they win more voices and elections.

For the rest of the world, we can see exactly the same facts, especially in the United States of America where Donald Trump was elected to the White House.

And of course, the inhabitants of poor countries don’t even have time to ask them these questions, being too busy trying to survive day by day, a task made even more difficult by OUR conflicts and OUR Global Warming. But it’s indeed them who will first suffer.

I hope not to have made your day too bad with all these desperate facts, that’s why I would like to conclude with a small sentence of hope, a quote from Nelson Mandela, who once said : “It always seems impossible until it’s done”.

See you soon,

Clément

Originally posted on LostAmongTheStars.tk on September 9th, 2018