Peace, Justice and the Ultimate Crime

After reading through the latest UN report on global climate change, I have good news and bad news. The good news is that there is a way we humans can maybe manage to survive climate change. The bad news is, if we don’t implement, within the next decade or so, immediate, urgent and serious steps to ensure human survival in the near future, we’re toast. And the news gets worse. The ceiling for keeping absolute catastrophe at bay is a total rise in global warming of no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Period. The climactic phenomena that we have been witnessing in recent years—prolonged drought, vast wildfires, unprecedented flooding, record summer heat, record winter storms, much more frequent and much more powerful tropical storms, typhoons and hurricanes, much increased cyclone activity, etc.—are all the result of a single-degree increase in global temperature above pre-industrial levels. On our current course, in which a small group of countries is...

It would be fair to say that the life of Stephen Hawking was a constant, monumental and all-consuming challenge. And with that challenge came an enormous sense of urgency. It would be hard to find a more curious and scientifically probing mind than that of Hawking, and his desire to meet and surpass the challenges he set out for himself was overshadowed by a sword of Damocles that hung by a hair above his head throughout his entire life. At age twenty-one, doctors “gave” him three years to live. From then on, and for the next half-century, he took the years he desired, in spite of that death sentence, and made every one count in terms of his discoveries and of his gifts of knowledge to the world at large. By the time Hawking died this past week at the age of seventy-six, he was, literally, about as close as any human could get to being an immensely active brain housed in what had become an almost entirely inert package. But despite his nearly complete physical disability, h...

In reviewing the year that ended last night, there are two things that stand out in my mind as particularly significant for the world at large: the burgeoning refugee crisis and the environmental agreement that world leaders drafted at year’s end in Paris. One has been ongoing throughout the year (and decade) and is the direct consequence of the misery caused by constant war and violence, and it is now beginning to significantly affect the leader-nations in the West that, directly or indirectly, feed the source of the crisis—be it through proxy war interests, massive arms sales, political and/or material support for one belligerent or another, or simply through failure to seek a disinterested international humanitarian solution to the root cause of the problem.  The other is just beginning and is a manifestation of how world leaders are finally—very late in the game—waking up to the fact that their countries can no longer ignore the extreme damage that years of corrupt, self-int...