Later this month, the most devastating and indiscriminate weapons on Earth will be banned. But how hale and healthy will the ‘newborn’ be, and what might it grow up to achieve? Read on.
<- The First Session of the United Nations General Assembly opened on 10 January 1946 at Central Hall in London. UN Photo.Also by Sean Howard: Taking the nuclear bomb cloud off the table
“There is no wealth but life,” the 19th-century Victorian art critic and ecologist John Ruskin wrote. For Ruskin, anything that harmed the natural world, even in the name of human progress, was unnatural and inhuman. The apparent ‘wealth’ created by industrialization was in truth its toxic opposite, a fatal decay – even then consuming the land, sky, and waters – he termed ‘illth.’
COVID-19 is a grim example of ‘illth’ in action, destroying the biodiversity essential for human well-being. As primatologist Jane Goodall observed in June: “Our disrespect for wild animals and for farmed animals has created this situation where disease can spill over to infect human beings. If we do not do things differently, we are finished.”
There are, alas, two ways we may soon be doomed: by global warming, or nuclear war, itself an act of ‘ecocide’. As sophisticated modelling has shown, even a ‘limited’ exchange, involving far less than one per cent of the 14,000 warheads on Earth, would loft sufficient soot from incinerated cities to block enough sunlight to trigger mass extinctions and global famine.