ENVIRONMENT
The world we live in poses several important challenges before us and dealing with climate change is an urgent concern. The strengthening of democratic institutions alone can enable us to tackle ecological concerns.
Bharat Dogra is a freelance journalist who has been involved with several social movements and initiatives. His recent book on survival issues and people’s response titled Planet in Peril has been published by Vitasta, Delhi.
Checking climate change adequately and eliminating weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) are two of the most important goals confronting humanity at this critical juncture of history. There are very difficult challenges. We simply have to eliminate WMDs to escape unimaginable horrors, but we still do not know how exactly we will achieve this. We also have to keep global warming to less than 1.50C to avoid unimaginable horrors, but we still do not know exactly how we will achieve this very difficult task. To achieve these objectives we’ll have to cover a lot of unchartered path where we’ll have to accept new challenges and find new democratic ways of achieving quick results.
Democracy has been a very important part of human progress, an aspect of civilizational progress over which there is wide consensus although progress of real democracy has been sabotaged by powerful interests in various ways, still on the whole democracy has been an important achievement of modern world history.
However sometimes there have been long delays in democratic decision making. Sometimes the process of democratic decision making has been badly distorted by the unfair intervention of powerful interests with their own narrow objectives.
We need to overcome these distortions and weaknesses in the next few years and strengthen democracy to cope with the most critical challenges of human history in the form of climate change and weapons of mass destruction.
As the youth are likely to play an increasingly important in the efforts to tackle the difficult challenges, one thing they should not forget is to keep a firm faith in democracy and democratic processes. Once some critical challenges have to be met in a short time-frame, then there is a temptation sometimes to ignore democratic processes and to opt for technocratic solutions and opt for non-democratic ways. This temptation should be avoided. This will not work and these technocratic solutions – like huge geo-engineering projects – are not what we need. These may end up creating more problems than they solve.
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It is much more likely that effective solutions will emerge from millions of small but sincere efforts made by ordinary people who are entrusted to contribute to the resolution of critical problems in highly motivated ways.
In addition, of course, very important governance reforms will have to be made as existing national and international governance systems have proved to be glaringly inadequate to finding solutions for the biggest problems. Whatever these reforms, providing adequate democratic space for increasing the participation of ordinary people in finding effective solutions will be essential.
A pre-requisite for an important role of people in resolving these critical problems is that detailed, truthful and well-reasoned information in simple form in local languages should reach all the people, particularly the youth. Based on this understanding, we can expect for much higher participation of people in resolving these issues. As they get increasingly engaged in intense thinking and discussions on such issues, millions of small solutions will emerge which together will make a very important contribution.
