THE war in Ukraine has exposed once again a fundamental weakness in modern culture – the lack of collaboration bonding all civilisations together. With climate change acceleration, continuing warfare is a strong indicator that humanity may have started the final countdown to its extermination by end of the 21st century.
Two institutions in society are chiefly to blame: Politics and religion. They are one coin with two sides. Politics and religion began as twin pillars in the formation stages of every civilisation to build unity among the masses whose ancestors were hunter-gatherers living as independent tribes of no more than 500 persons each.
Politics and religion succeeded beyond expectations in fostering a sense of common nationhood and a spiritual lineage in place of blood lineage within the same civilisation. But human culture has greatly deteriorated since those early days when we were the species that excelled in forging mass cooperation, roping in a huge diversity of unrelated tribes to form agricultural communities, and thence civilisation.
We failed to extend collaboration beyond our own civilisation and religion to embrace all the other civilisations and religions. Politics and religion in the 21st century should be leading humanity into a time of global citizenship, wherein all the divisions that create war are removed. Instead, these two forces are laying the tripwires for warfare around the world, and Russia has tripped over one of these wires laid in the Ukraine. Thirty wars have been fought since 2001.
With humanity’s attention primarily focused on war, climate change is having an easy hand accelerating its speed and intensity. Climate change is like a passenger airplane that, after parking at the apron for a year, is moving on the taxiway at a slow speed of 20 knots or 37km/h. It then reaches the runway and accelerates to a speed of 257km/h, at which point it takes off to the clouds at a steep angle.
We are rowdy quarrelsome passengers carrying explosives and jostling at the aisles, as the plane speeds towards takeoff. Soon we will fall all over the place. In a message on March 21, United Nations Sec-Gen Antonio Guterres said the world is “sleepwalking to climate catastrophe”. Climate change should be top of the agenda, but it continues to trail far behind the love of war.
What lies behind the war in Ukraine? It is the fear of every nation that some other country will threaten its security and sovereignty. Hence, all nations arm themselves to the teeth. World military spending has doubled to about US$2 trillion (RM8.44 trillion) a year since 2000. The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, or Nato, accounted for US$1.2 trillion spending in 2021.
When your neighbours start buying arms, so will you. In America, the gun culture among rightwing white people has spurred African Americans and Asian Americans to buy rifles and pistols just in case they get shot at. Scale it up and you find nations reacting the same way to other nations.
Trees have a much better chance of surviving climate change than humans, as they excel in building whole-of-forest cooperative networks. Back in the mid-20th century, all foresters in Canada believed that to foster the growth of a robust pine timber industry, it was best to get rid of other trees such as alders to eliminate the competition for soil nutrients. The result was disastrous. Pines could not grow well by themselves.
But decades of scientific research into the 21st century showed that the diversity of plants in a forest was in no way like a competitive pitching of Russia versus America, and China versus Australia. Scientists discovered that collaboration between all plants in a forest led to healthy growth for all. Trees of different species traded photosynthetic carbon back and forth on a daily basis through a thick underground network of micorrhizal fungus.
Canadian professor of Forest Ecology Dr Suzanne Simard discovered through sustained research that birch trees gave more carbon to fir during summer, and fir in return gave more carbon to birch during spring and autumn. It was a dance of reciprocity. But trees were not just exchanging carbon; through a web of underground fungal mats, healthier trees were feeding amino acids and nitrogen to sicker trees so they could overcome their illnesses.
Interestingly, forest scientists discovered that mother trees not only sent nutrients to their offspring and relatives, but also to stranger trees and trees of other species so as to ensure the whole forest was healthy. Another vital discovery was that individual trees would sacrifice selfish benefits if such individualism threatened the forest community as a whole.
While the woodwide web of trees struggle to survive climate change, the worldwide web of humans struggle to survive each other’s predatory intentions. As columnist Eric Margolis wrote: “Defeat in Ukraine would fatally undermine the Russian Federation, which went to war to prevent Nato/US from taking over Ukraine, than breaking up what is left of Russia. That is Washington’s ambition before it turns on China” (theSun, March 28, 2022).
For a slice of illuminating history, the English language Ukrainian Weekly newspaper published in the US reported 14 years ago on Dec 28, 2008 that the US and Ukraine signed a “Charter on Strategic Partnership” in Washington nine days earlier on Dec 19, which included a pledge to “enhance security cooperation in order to strengthen Ukraine’s candidacy for Nato membership”.
One sentence in the Charter states that “our goal is to gain agreement on a structured plan to increase interoperability and coordination of capabilities between Nato and Ukraine”. Nato is an American-led military alliance that has expanded to the borders of Russia.
The Ukrainian Weekly reported that some journalists at a press briefing held later at the US State Department suggested that Russia could view some aspects of the Charter as “a provocative act” and “yet another American incursion into Russia’s historic sphere of influence”. The State Department dismissed their concern. But if you lay a tripwire and a bear trips on it, can you claim that you are blameless?
Yet on March 31, 2022 when the Solomon Islands (near Australia) inked a security pact with China, there was an immediate negative reaction from Australia and the US. Last September, these two nations, together with Britain, had created an Aukus security pact against China. Solomon Islands, having the good sense to avoid laying a tripwire, clarified the next day that there would be no Chinese military base.
For America to maintain world leadership, it must change its ways and pursue the mission of building a whole-of-humanity web of collaboration to win the war against climate change.
The writer champions interfaith harmony.
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