The human will to survive is often uncritically taken for granted, which was of little consequence prior to the advent of the nuclear age in 1945. That the first atomic explosion was the event chosen by the scientific community agreed to signal the advent of the age of the Anthropocene is of added significance. The general understanding of the Anthropocene is that of human activity that is impactful on the basic equilibrium of the planetary ecosystem. Subsequent developments associated with the relationship between greenhouse gas emissions and global warming have confirmed the alarming extent of reckless human agency with respect to the ecological equilibrium of the planet.
The inverse effects of the Anthropocene have received less attention, that is, of the ecological backlash that imperils the survival of the human species. For the first time in world history the intentional activities of the human species endanger its own existence and future, as well as various global, regional, and local ecosystems that have collapsed or are collapsing. Of course, throughout world history species in particular locales have behaved in ways that brought about their collective destruction, and this certainly includes the human species. In the past, there have been waves of non-human extinction that have altered the biodiversity of the planet. {see Collapse; Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: The Unnatural History (2014)]. The scale of past threats to human existence were all at the sub-species level, affecting the destinies of imperiled society or civilization. [See Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2004)].
What is unique about the present historical conjunction of circumstances is that the dominant threats so far posed in this century are directed toward the species as a whole. This threat is compounded by the realities of human experience that have been organized so as to promote sub-species survival, especially, at the level of the territorial sovereign state. This fundamental organizational feature of world order in strongly reinforced by ideologies of nationalism that rely on sub-species optics of appraisal, and unreflectively solidify sub-species loyalty as the loftiest aspiration of a fragmented species. Extra-nationalist identities do exist, sometimes strongly, in the form or religious affiliation, civilizational sentiments of belonging, ethnic, ideological, and gender bonding of various sorts. What does not exist with sufficient strength to counter the tyranny of sub-species primacy are mechanisms of sufficient capability to protect the distinctly human interest in species survival or the global interest in essential forms of inter-species coexistence.
After the major wars of the prior century, there were let loose strong bio-political impulses on the part of publics and leaders of victorious powers to regulate and even institutionalize the human interest. The Just War Doctrine had earlier tried to give a religious and quasi-legal underpinning of universal justice to recourse to and conduct of war, but its interpretation was subordinated to the interpretive manipulations and geopolitical ambitions of leaders of sovereign states especially in the West, making clear that sub-species priorities prevail over international law whenever they clash. The historical disruptions of the major 20th century wars gave rise a widespread sense of human jeopardy in the West that led to the establishment of global institutions. The carnage of World War I led to the establishment of the League of Nations and the atom bomb imparted a sense of urgency after World War II to the prevention of a feared World War III. Yet the outcomes of these institutional strivings did not seriously challenge sub-species dominance, and provided convenient venues for global communication and cooperative arrangements that served the reciprocal and mutual interests of sovereign states while leaving global hierarchies intact. Despite the rhetoric of globalism, the heavy lifting of war prevention was self-consciously attached to the nationalist mechanisms of sub-species management of statist and alliance security systems that featured deterrence and crisis management. The UN has proved to be valuable in many contexts, despite being designed to fail when it came to the protection of species well-being as distinct from promoting the interests of one category of sub-species political actors, that is, dominant sovereign states. This deliberate dynamic is signaled in the case of the UN by giving the most dangerous states a generalized veto power that indirectly confers impunity and non-accountability. UN deference to geopolitics was also expressed by leaving funding under the control of the member governments, and by curtailing the authority of the chief executive officer, the Secretary General. This shortcoming of the UN was more telling than the earlier experience with the League as the atomic bomb forewarned of an unprecedented apocalyptic menace to the entire species, a new reality in human experience, perhaps not entirely new, given earlier experiences with pandemics that created political imaginaries of the end of the world and the acknowledged possibility that a giant meteor might crash into the planet changing its orbit and habitability.
Europe has experimented since after World War II with efforts to overcome the dangers of sub-species conflict at the level of the region, with mixed results. Its achievements include almost totally avoiding intra-regional warfare of the sort that had ravaged Europe for centuries, as well as defending Western Europe against real or imagined threats posed by feared Soviet aggression (a result achieved with the help of the American-led NATO alliance). Europe also established a common currency that allowed European economies to flourish over a period of seven decades, and also facilitated trade and travel with Europe. At the same time, regional identity never took root, and most Europeans continued to define themselves by reference to their country, a dynamic manifested most clearly by the BREXIT withdrawal of the United Kingdom from European Union membership despite the material benefits of belonging. Even if the EU manages to fulfill most of the dreams of its supporters it would still be a sub-species actor, perhaps with a more enlightened outlook, but still subject to the priorities and worldview associated with sub-species perspectives on the formation of global policy. If there were any doubts about this, they were removed in recent years by the hostile receptions accorded to migrants from combat zones in the Middle East and African countries most victimized by global warming.
Even if nuclearism as security posture and near catastrophe didn’t tip the balance in the direction of species due to its abstract character and the coherence of the sub-species regimes set up to exert allegedly rational control under geopolitical auspices, I would have supposed that climate change would do the necessary job of reconstructing in globalist directions the way we think, feel, and act. [See Martin J. Sherwin, Gambling with Armageddon: Nuclear Roulette from Hiroshima to the Cuban Missile Crisis (2020)] Unlike recourse to nuclear war, which stimulated a genre of dystopian literature and scenarios of doom, the climate change threats were confirmed as virtual certainties by a strong consensus prevailing among those climate experts, and presented to the world by a host of reliable interpreters, including the UN Panel on Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) [See especially dire warnings, Sixth Assessment Report 2021: The Physical Basis (on climate system and climate change)]. In other words the knowledge paradigm that was associated with modernity, which was supposedly based on science, rationality, empirical observation, data, and experimental validation, would have led to transformative energies that gave emergency backing to a species-scale imperative to transcend national interests in favor of human and global interests.[Naomi Oreskes & Erik W. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (2004)] Yet despite the evidence, the sub-species framework for problem-solving remains unchallenged except by civil society activists. [Robert C. Johansen, Where the Evidence Leads: A Realistic Strategy for Peace and Human Security (2021)]
There is a widespread recognition that the COP-26 Glasgow Climate Change Summit was a major disappointment. Not only was the sub-species architecture entrusted with responding to the multiple challenges, but disparities of national circumstances precluded meaningful levels of sub-species cooperative arrangements and left the commitments that were made in the aspirational language of pledges and voluntary undertakings.. Entrenched interests exerted far too much influence, as did embedded notions of ‘political realism,’ which continued to link security of people to governmental protection against military threats and geopolitical rivalry and paid far too little attention to the critical challenge of a looming bio-ecological-ethical-political-spiritual crisis that cannot be overcome without the emergence of robust collective will of the human species to survive, which implies a radical transformation of what makes life worth living for most human inhabitants of the planet.
Global Justice in the 21st Century 
Indeed, we all have to be alarmed! See also:
„Additional Comment: Climate Crisis and New Cold War“: https://wipokuli.wordpress.com/2021/11/05/additional-comment-climate-crisis-and-new-cold-war-zusatz-kommentar-klimakrise-und-neuer-kalter-krieg/
Cordial regards
The onus is on the American people to win major changes in U.S. foreign policy which has continued to be most belligerent of the powers and whose military and nuclear arsenal and forever wars have gobbled up precious natural resources and accelerated use of fossil fuels. This, by the next presidential election. Foreign Affairs, the bi-monthly publication read by government employees and scholars of various think tanks recently published an essay by Stewart M. Patrick, “The International Order Isn’t Ready for the Climate Crisis (The Case for a New Planetary Politics”) which I hope will be heeded. What is frightening is that the U.S. elite got everything it wanted (collapse of the Soviet Union and dismantlement of its version of state socialism; transition by China to state capitalism; near-destruction of the Arab world; neoliberalism and unfettered unregulated trade imposed on the Global South which mainly benefited U.S. corporate interests) and that still wasn’t enough!
The ascendant Trumpian fascist movement, allied with White Christian nationalism which denies climate change, plays “victim” and seeks to mobilize an angry anti-science base and entrench its dangerous sense of entitlement to what’s left of the planet’s land, minerals and bio-diversity. Corporate interests, with the support of wealthy Western governments are now going as far as to invest in walls to keep out migrants fleeing war and climate-fueled crises (“The Global Climate Wall: Wealthy Nations Prioritize Militarizing Borders Over Climate Action, http://www.democracynow.org/2021/11/10/global_climate_wall). Yanique Joseph, Haitian Renaissance Institute, New Haven.
Depressingly perceptive. I too was struck by Patrick’s article and the Lieven report prepared under the
auspices of the Quincy Institute. Hope you flourish on a personal level, despite all–warm greetings, Richard
Thank you. The first, last, and only article I shall ever read from the Breitbart News decried the “criminality” of those who were providing wire-cutters to desperate migrants, so that they could get through the fences and on their way….such is the innate compassion of the Trumpians.
Dear Professor Falk – it’s not the Christianity. It’s Christian Religion, and religion is cults/sects. It’s not the Faith of “white Christians”. So, it is cults/sects – the religion, and everybody’s children is/ are a victim – a real victim is the child. In generally, societies get really bad/nasty when they don’t realize what it is happening to the mother and to the child (within that society). If one want to take care of their society – they should take care of the child. That’s how real fix comes to, and it comes to the societies, and to the world. Now, neither woman or the child is going to change anyone’s mind – nor the conscience within of a society. The conscience never changes outside of direct work of God Himself. The Scriptures do note that there will be strong delusion, believes in all kind of lies. Why is it that all unrighteousness shall be damned. This is why: they take pleasure in unrighteousness, and they shall be damned in it.
Thank you. K. F.
Reblogged this on muunyayo .
Thanks Prof Falk—wide-ranging and deeply insightful as usual. There’s another critique based on ‘sub-species’ exceptionalism—namely, the often unanalysed assumption of dominance by the human species over all other sentient beings (including repression/denial by many of the reality of their everyday subjection and mistreatment). Peter Singer called it ‘species-ism’. Many complex tensions and debates here of course. Thanks again for your post, and warm regards, Stephen.
Thanks Richard—insightful as usual. I’d also raise, in this context, many humans’ assumed dominion over all other sentient beings (Peter Singer termed it ‘species-ism’). Can humans muster a more humane approach when many repress/deny the everyday mistreatment of animals? I acknowledge of course the many tensions and complex debates here. But I do think our often ‘inhumane’ view of non-human sentient beings causes psychic harm that most likely narrows the horizons of possibility and the will and authentic commitment to not only survive but reduce suffering in the world. Thanks again for your post, and warm regards from Stephen.
Thanks, Stephen, for insightful comment with which I completely agree, and fault myself for not including, but will rectify in sequel post. I hope you are doing well in all respects in this difficult period. With my greetings, Richard
https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/29/americas/xenobots-self-replicating-robots-scn/index.html?utm_source=fbCNNi&utm_medium=social&utm_content=2021-11-30T03%3A00%3A55&utm_term=link&fbclid=IwAR2R_RwiaeRmHfHWI-m_L4ngTgRScbUxpu6Qss5aYiXvcGSpiOfr74GSIpY
Dear Professor Falk,
I am afraid that this is a new and man-made species.
This is a new species.
Thank you,
Kata Fisher
Dear Professor Falk, I had frustration that there is a case of the new virus in California. I wished that that monster can just decompose itself and be gone. I did not understand it. I was thinking “ can the virus decompose itself. So, can instead of to mutate – just decompose itself. Can it be cause to decompose itself, and not to mutate. Decomposing will be a natural process – but to the virus. Instead – it causes decomposing if it’s habitat. I would love to thinks some more on that. Thank you, Kata Fisher
Dear Professor Falk, Last night I did not sleep so well. I did not sleep well a day before – but last Night, I had a mind flash of a girl in pink that looked like adult – but she was in her age like toddler – and she was looking at me and chewing a gum. Then, I looked and it was something like a thing that holds the something like a melted LEGO squares. That looked the same color as the color of the chewing gum. However, the shape was different. And that was it. Just now I saw that girl again in a mind flash siting on something like motor that was just a square. The girl became the part of the whole, and that was it. Then, God told
Me – that’s your monster. That’s the Bella. Bella means beautiful. I call almost everything Bella. I realize from before that the child was actually looking like having the Down syndrome. A mutating syndrome?
I am starting to worry about my youngest kid, now really really worry. I do not know what bewitched her – but she thinks and wants to go into the Airforce after her teacher told her that she should do that. She is all over that. I know that she is bewitched about that, and she shall not do that. I do not know what to do about it. I know if she does that, she will take part in the killing – one way or the other, she will end up doing that. I mean, just by pursuing that. She will be the part of the whole killing mashing. I feel like cold suppressing death in my whole front chest. I just know that she is in prosit of death. It’s the femen thing in a very, very bad/nasty place.
Dear Professor Falk, I hear, “Do not steal my genetic code, and do not use it for your wicked purpose – you sub-humans.”
Dear Professor Falk,
She was told that by a woman – the teacher was a woman. That was a main reason I am having for this disagreement. I as a woman do not agree what she suggested to my child. I already, as woman have discerned that, and I do not like that. I believe that she is in a grave bewitchment, and that she is on a wrong path for a young kid.
The youngest two girls are going to Germany day or two after Christmas. I believe that best thing for them is to stay there, in order to avoid harm to them self’s and others. In the end – that is exactly what will be for them. They should just stay in protective custody there. Thank you, Kata Fisher
Dear Professor Falk, I do not know how to communicate to you: can you authorize announcing of UN Probe, and you will know which one/s. It may be silly to you, and you think “by what authority can I do that?” and I tell you,”by what authority do they disrupt and dissolve?” It’s about yours (by God) appointed place at UN and about unlawful disruption and dissolving of it.
Now, I am thinking about Hillel and what he has done to your active UN appointing. What are those kids really doing and thinking there that they are doing? I am sorry – but that has to be discerned – really, really discerned by real grown-ups: what they do think and do. They need to figure out that. I am not kidding about that.
Good lead up to current climate change concerns but no mention of the pandemic which affecting the entire human species and will require a global response
Dear Professor Falk, could it be that some special human species are more at risk then others? And Why? Would Fauci, and Wuhan international research laboratory know that? And why? Thank you. K. F.
An interesting speculation, but I have no specific information that leads beyond your questions?
The web-link that I had – somehow was gone? I looked at Switzerland’s cases, and one interesting note – as I do not know how to process/ interpret this: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-cases-per-capita-chart-countries-2020-3%3famp