13. DINOSAURS
“Everybody thinks it’s going to be different for them,” Janice said. “The dinosaurs thought so too.”
- Kathryn Davis, Duplex
Dinosaurs are awesome. They ruled the Earth from the start of the Triassic Period 250 million years ago to the end of the Cretaceous Period a mere 65 million years ago. Puny Homo sapiens, by comparison, has only been around for about the last 300,000 years1.
The largest terrestrial animals of all time were dinosaurs, like the massive Argentinosaurus, estimated to weigh almost 100 tons. Or the Spinosaurus, a towering 10 tons of teeth and terror. In fact, dinosaurs are so awesome that they still rule the earth today, at least for brief moments when a new Jurassic Park or World movie comes out and claims No.1 at the box office.
Fun fact: dinosaurs are also all dead, largely because they couldn’t adapt to rapid change2.
Today, the mighty legacy of the dinosaur is used as an insult. A person or thing is labeled a dinosaur to imply that it’s outdated, old, or obsolete. Back in their day though, dinosaurs were the best. Similarly, the basis of our current global political system, the nation-state, was also pretty awesome in its day. Granted, maybe not as interesting as a Tyrannosaurus Rex chomping Jeff Goldblum’s face off, but then again, the nation-state is still around and dinosaurs aren’t.
That said, dinosaurs may still win the longevity award because today’s political systems also seem unable to adapt to rapid change, in this case, climate change. To understand how this obstructs meaningful climate action, and opportunities for personal service to make a difference, we have to get into some history.
First enshrined in the 1648 Peace of Westphalia that ended the Thirty Years’ War3, the nation-state is based on two ideas. The first is the principle of state sovereignty, or the idea that each state has exclusive control over its own territory. The second idea is that states don’t mess around in another country’s domestic affairs4.
The Peace of Westphalia capped a brutal period in European history, including the Thirty Years’ War5, and it did so by advancing the idea of peaceful coexistence between states. While not always successful at preventing war and conflict, overall, the Peace of Westphalia provided enough stability for progress to take hold, setting the conditions for the Industrial Revolution. When European countries colonized the globe, these ideals spread to other continents6.
In the early Twentieth Century, the whole ‘peaceful state coexistence’ part of the Westphalian system failed spectacularly. This was otherwise known as the First World War. In the peace conferences that followed the end of the war, U.S. president Woodrow Wilson and several other world leaders proposed a more tangible solution: The League of Nations, an international organization dedicated to ensuring world peace.
In many ways, the League of Nations was a very bright idea in stopping war. Since states couldn’t be trusted to avoid war on their own, the League’s Covenant created a situation where a war-going state would be considered to have, ‘committed an act of war against all other Members of the League7.’ Unfortunately, this idea upset the Westphalian applecart since it meant states not only could interfere in the domestic affairs of others, but had to.
More than a few countries balked at the prospect of interference, including the United States which ended up not joining, despite being the lead architect of the idea8. This was like Superman pitching the Justice League and then remembering he couldn’t get time off from the Daily Planet. Ultimately, the League of Nations crashed and burned, and the Second World War was the final nail in its coffin.
From the ashes of World War II rose the United Nations. A collective forum marked by international cooperation and aimed at creating and maintaining peace and order, the UN was supposed to fix the failures of the League of Nations9. And, soon after the UN was formed, the United States and the Soviet Union became locked in a Cold War over whether liberal democracy or communism was the best political doctrine. These countries protected their own interests by using their Security Council veto powers to manipulate the UN10, undermining the organization’s potential. While the Cold War is over, the power of permanent Security Council members continues, often preventing the UN from taking any action11.
Although the UN has had some qualified successes, it has also continually been criticized over its inability to maintain international peace and security12, like its failure to do anything about the Syrian civil war. What’s more, the UN is routinely dogged by charges that its aim is to usurp national governments in favor of a tyrannical ‘World Government13.’ As a result, the UN lurches from crisis to crisis, doing some good now and then when everyone can agree, but never maximizing its potential.
Ultimately, today’s world is still one in which every state looks out for their own interests first and foremost. Which was fine, perhaps, until climate change appeared, a wicked problem that does not respect national borders and which will require individual states to take disproportionate actions to solve. In this scenario, politics obstructs meaningful climate action, leaving citizens to pick up the slack through personal service and engagement, such as the Youth Climate Lab, which looks at how to shift skills, policies and finance to empower young climate leaders.
To be clear, it’s not obvious that a UN with more authority would create some sort of magical solution to climate change, nor that it would long survive. In all likelihood, a dramatic change in the international political system at this point would lead to unending arguments, debate, and conflicts between states over shared limits to authority, accountability, and resources, causing the whole effort to be paralyzed at best, or collapse at worst.
Still, it’s increasingly clear the current political system is not working when it comes to promoting meaningful climate change action. Amid abysmal expectations for the 2021 UN Climate Change Conference, even Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II of England said she was irritated at world leaders who “talk but don’t do14.” That’s why one of the most basic things anyone in a democracy can do to serve their communities is to vote, and helping young people understand how, when, and why to vote is what motivates organizations like the nonpartisan youth-led, 18by Vote15.
Still, it might not be enough, because while people like to think they’ll do what’s right when the time comes, the truth is, they often don’t.
On one of my first missions in Afghanistan, my radio died while we were securing the crash site of a C-130 transport plane. It died because I hadn’t taken the time to do proper maintenance. I’d told myself I had other responsibilities and the radio would be fine and then it quit and my platoon second-in-command had to give me his while he carried around the extra twenty pounds of my dead weight radio along with the fifty or so more pounds of ammunition and armor and food and water we all already carried in the near-forty degrees Celsius heat. I let my personal comfort interfere with doing what was right for the bigger group, and someone else suffered for my selfishness.
As with many things, individual traits can manifest in international relations, including selfishness. To make a long story short, current political systems carry a lot of historical baggage which obstructs solutions to climate change because any plan requires collective action on a scale unheard of in human history. Solutions, real ones, not ones based on imaginary technology not yet invented, will require countries to consider the needs of others first. Too bad the current international political system doesn’t even seem able to stop millions of people from starving in South Sudan16 or the Congo17, much less keep global temperatures from rising a degree or two.
In the case of climate change, there’s additional baggage baked into the political equation in the form of state inequality. Developed countries, like the United States, the United Kingdom, and China, are responsible for most of the emissions behind climate change18. But the impacts of rising temperatures will be most felt in developing countries, at least initially. What’s more, some of the most affected countries are often least able to make a difference. As Yuval Noah Harari points out, the island nation of Kiribati could become emissions neutral and still disappear beneath rising sea levels19.
The result of all these factors is that countries who are most responsible for climate change and best able to do something about it often have the least incentive to do anything. Acting may be morally right, but for these countries, paying their climate debts is an economic and political hard sell20. Plus, since the principle of national sovereignty means countries can’t get up in another country’s internal politics, feet draggers can keep doing nothing for about as long as they want.
What this means in the near to short term, is that there is a need for citizens to become engaged. There always is, but especially at this moment there is no shortage of opportunities to help communities and greater society become more resilient in the face of climate change. Because until the world’s political leaders are able to agree on meaningful climate action – and actually do what they say – that onus will continue to fall on individuals, such as those who organized Mock COP26, an effort by youth activists to show world leaders how to develop ambitious, realistic climate policies.
Ethan Siegel, “What Was It Like When The First Humans Arose On Earth?” Forbes.com, May 15, 2019, https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/05/15/what-was-it-like-when-the-first-humans-arose-on-earth/#5b04c3a86997, accessed Mar 10, 2020.
Imperial College London, “Asteroid killed off the dinosaurs, says international scientific panel,” Science Daily, March 4, 2010, https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/03/100304142242.htm, accessed 10 Nov 2020.
Evans, G. and Newnham, J. (1990). The Dictionary of World Politics: A reference Guide to Concepts, Ideas, and Institutions. Hemel, Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, p 420.
Brown, S. (1992). International Relations in a Changing Global System: Toward a Theory of the World Polity. Boulder, CO: Westview. p. 74.
Clodfelter, M. (2017). Warfare and Armed Conflicts: A Statistical Encyclopedia of Casualty and Other Figures, 1492-2015. McFarland? p. 40.
Kissinger, H. (2014). “Introduction and Chapter 1.” World Order: Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History.
The Covenant of the League of Nations, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/leagcov.asp, accessed 11 Mar 20.
Thomas J. Knock, To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order, Princeton, Princeton University Press: 1995, p. 263.
Qizhi He, “The United Nations, fragmenting states, and the need for enlarged peacekeeping,” in The United Nations at Age Fifty: A Legal Perspective, ed. Christian Tomuschat, The Hague, Kluwer Law Internation: 1995, p 78.
Ibid., p 81.
UN Security Council Working Methods, ‘The Veto,’ Security Council Report, 16 December 2020, https://www.securitycouncilreport.org/un-security-council-working-methods/the-veto.php, accessed 12 Mar 20.
McKenzie, D. “Forever adaptable: The United Nations system at 70,” International Journal, 70(3), 2015, 489-498, p 489.
Maessen, Jurriaan, “Legitimizing Global Tyranny: Moving Towards World Government,” Global Research, 21 May 2012, https://www.globalresearch.ca/legitimizing-global-tyranny-moving-towards-world-government/30961, accessed 11 Mar 20.
Nadeem Badshah, ‘Queen ‘irritated’ by world leaders talking not doing on climate crisis,’ The Guardian, October 14, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/oct/14/queen-irritated-by-world-leaders-talking-not-doing-on-climate-change, accessed October 18, 2021.
18by Vote, ‘About Us,’ 18BY.VOTE, https://18byvote.org/about/#mission, accessed 3 Jun 2023.
World Food Programme, South Sudan, https://www.wfp.org/countries/south-sudan, accessed 3 Jun 2023.
World Food Programme, Democratic Republic of the Congo, https://www.wfp.org/countries/democratic-republic-congo, accessed 12 Mar 2022.
Das Gupta, M., (2014), “Population, Poverty, and Climate Change,” The World Bank Research Observer, 29(1), 83-108, p. 84.
Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, New York, Penguin Random House: 2018.
Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs The Climate, Toronto, Knopf Canada, 2014.