Prominent American thinker Noam Chomsky warns that the world is facing four major crises at a time these days. Identifying crises as, serious threats of Nuclear war, environmental catastrophe, deterioration of democracy worldwide, and COVID-19.
While describing these threats, Noam Chomsky narrated through a video link dialogue arranged by Habib University said that bring together eminent scientists and political analysts and try to encapsulate their conception of the world security situation by a clock, called the Doom’s Day Clock.
Last January the analysts abandoned minutes, they moved to seconds, a hundred seconds to midnight. They mentioned three crucial issues: one, of course, the threat of nuclear war, which is in fact, is growing, according to some senior analysts, like William Perry, it is greater than it has ever been in the past 75 years.
Second, the threat of environmental catastrophe, which is severe and increasing, and if we do not deal with it soon, we will likely reach the irreversible tipping point and it is just a matter of waiting not very long till organized human society becomes impossible.
One of the first regions to suffer severely from the ongoing catastrophe is in fact, South Asia. It is already in a severe environmental crisis with drought, shortage of water, glaciers melting, sources of the many rivers declining and if matters continue on its present course it will literally not be habitable by human beings within not very long.
Bangladesh is a coastal threat, hundreds of millions of people, nobody knows what will happen to them as the seas continue to rise. These are the first two, and no area of the world will be spared, that’s clear.
The third severe crisis that the clock measured was the deterioration of democracy worldwide. At first, it doesn’t seem that it belongs at the level of the other but it actually does. And the reason is unless there is an engaged informed public committed to dealing with the crises that we face there is no chance of dealing with it, autocrats and demagogues won’t do it. It has to be engaged, informed in a vibrant democracy.
So, these are the three major crises they identified. This work came out just before the pandemic hit, the fourth major crisis.
