Don’t read this article; it will only depress you 
Our 21st century has been very short of moments of promise, hope and constructive cooperation between governments.
After World War II, the world was able to come together to enshrine in the UN a new global approach to maintaining peace and stability for all. Global trade and cooperation grew, a European project brought once-warring enemies together as friends and neighbors, while the end of the Cold War brought a new hope of multilateralist construction for peace.
The 21st century, rung in with the tragic nihilism of 9/11, has seen a proliferation of wars, threats, hatred and anger, alongside runaway climate change and the devastating destruction of our environment. Hatred, violence, guns and inability to compromise have recently ravaged Ukraine and Gaza, as they have led in the past days to political assassination attempts.
Our entire planet lies in crisis, with Europe and the West running towards the extremes in political discourse, Asian countries racing to develop the most advanced technology-driven weaponry, Africa depleting the energies of its people as well as the riches that lie in its ground, and the planet developing a worsening fever of extreme natural disasters, unprecedented heat waves and a climate running wild.
As the North and South Poles — the essential refrigerators that keep our planet stable —shrink, not only are polar bears losing their natural habitat, but their numbers are plummeting as they starve to death, in a clear warning of what may be to come for all other species.
Global warming is also increasingly threatening to release viruses millions of years old from the ice and permafrost surrounding the globe’s polar regions. Meanwhile, we have all but forgotten about COVID-19, the trillions of dollars lost, and lessons learned. We remain essentially unprepared for the far-more devastating viruses we could soon unleash from the ice.
As we fallaciously sustain ourselves with the sugar-coated hope expressed at global conferences on our climate, we essentially continue to dig our own graves. Carbon emissions have been growing, as energy consumption continues to rise and alternative energies cannot keep up, resulting in our burning even more fossil fuel than before.
The 21st century has seen a proliferation of wars, threats, hatred and anger, alongside runaway climate change
The world’s insect populations have declined by 75 percent over the last 50 years, leading scientists to warn of the impending collapse of our entire agricultural and food systems, as they rely on bee and insect populations for pollination and regulation. Meanwhile our oceans are dying, with scientists warning that there could literally be no fish left in the sea within a matter of decades. We forget also that two-thirds of our oxygen does not come from trees and rainforests, but rather from algae and life in the oceans.
Our situation today is compounded by giant pharmaceutical and agrochemical companies seeking ever-greater riches by playing with nature and claiming they will develop ever-more sophisticated genetically modified crops and human vaccines that only lead us towards new vulnerabilities in crops and human immune systems.
In his Farewell Address of 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of the coming dangers of the “military-industrial complex” in American politics; we must now speak of the military-industrial-biotech-agrochemical complex threatening our futures.
Technologists keep on telling us that they will have answers to our future problems, seemingly absolving us from addressing the real challenges we face. We humans must be innovative to meet these challenges and offer hope, without succumbing to technological anesthesia. We must show the luckless generations born under this madness that we are able to learn from our mistakes and do something fast, for their sake and the sake of our planet.
I am sorry to report such views and I hope I am wrong.
• Hassan bin Youssef Yassin worked closely with Saudi Arabia’s petroleum ministers, Abdullah Tariki and Ahmed Zaki Yamani, from 1959-1967. He led the Saudi Information Office in Washington from 1972-1981 and served with the Arab League’s observer delegation to the UN from 1981-1983.
