How close are we to the apocalypse, human culture, democracy, wisdom, thrown back in time and reduced to the mind of Neanderthals? Remember them, 40 000 years ago? Or back to the days of the dinosaurs, 233 million years gone by, yet unforgotten, thanks to Hollywood.
Some of the golden Buddhas seemed to smile; many of the 2200 pagodas and temples surviving in the ancient city were fighting the damage of time and earthquakes. The road we took from historic Bagan to Mandalay, 178 kilometers away had more holes than a Swiss cheese, and the driver was as reluctant as a Trappist monk to answer my questions. When I noticed a group of destitute, drawn looking men, pale faces and hollow cheeks, cutting trees and moving giant rocks by hand towards trucks on the side of the narrow road, I asked the driver a rather naïve question: “Are these men criminal or political prisoners?”
Catastrophic Consequences
Increasing wildfires, a sign of climate change, are reducing forests to ashes. This year alone, 43 billion metric tons of CO2 will be emitted into the atmosphere from forest fires. The world lost about 10 million hectares of forests per year between 2015 and 2020, according to the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), in its 2021 report Ecosystem Restoration for people, nature and climate. Each year an average of 122 million hectares of forests are affected by fires, pests, diseases, invasive species, drought, and adverse weather events. “The past decade was the hottest in human history”, confirmed UNEP scientists, adding that “the planet is on pace for an excess of 3 degrees Celsius in warming”, a figure which could have “catastrophic consequences”.
Minus 50 degrees Celsius is a challenge for human beings who were not raised in the Arctic, becoming familiar with polar bears and dog sleds. Plus 50 degrees Celsius is part of a nomadic reality, of survival in the desert, short of water and shadow, but rich in stars above and vicious vipers in the sand. Eskimos, known as Inuit and Yupik, and Bedouins and Tuaregs, indigenous people, survive by trusting instinct and their embrace of nature, strengthened throughout childhood by cod liver oil or camel milk. More than half a century ago, in January 1968, I experienced for the first time the dark winter of the Arctic, and temperatures between minus 30 and minus 50 degrees Celsius, made worse by 94 mile per hour winds in Greenland: Danish territory, unending ice, three kilometers thick, glaciers, snow. An American military station, named Thule Air Base. It was a forward observation post of the Cold War, operating early warning systems for a feared nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union, assisted from the air by nuclear armed B-52s that were on watch 24/24.
The music was as dramatic and emotional as the adventure. Dennis Tito, named by BBC news “the spaceman” (April 28, 2001) on his personal way to heaven—for him the International Space Station (ISS)408 kilometers above earth .The American mega-investor, who paid about 20 million dollars to realize the “dream born in a poor child”, surviving with his Italian family of immigrants in the New York borough Bronx, drowned the noise of the lifting rocket by opera music of his choice, Aida and her lover Ramadès, their final aria before dying together in glorious Egypt.
If any proof was needed that change was in the air and repression on the horizon, it was in the center of Kabul: a simple sign was changed, the Ministry of Women’s Affairs was turned into the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtues and Prevention of Vice. This was nothing less than the return of the Taliban’s moral police, well remembered by the older population, ready to enforce a harsh interpretation of the religious law, the Sharia, including stoning, amputation, lashing, and public executions.
When Argentina’s President Alberto Fernandez tested positive for COVID-19 on his 62nd birthday, April 2, 2021 it might not have seemed unusual when there have been almost 200 million cases worldwide. But the leader of Argentina received two doses of the Russian vaccine Sputnik V, on January and in February 2021, a virus terminator advertised by Moscow as potent like almost no other on the globe, with an efficiency rate given by Russia’s Gamaleya Institute at 96.1%. The risk of infection should be minimal for those vaccinated with it.
There is not much of an argument: some countries in mighty Africa faced and mastered the COVID-19 invasion as efficiently, or even better, than any nation on the globe, including former colonial powers in Europe. By June 2021, 140,400 Africans had died, compared to more than 500,000 virus victims in Brazil, or 600,000 plus in the U.S. Some experts explain the result as a product of long experience from a multitude of previous health crises: Ebola, AIDS/HIV, malaria, tuberculosis. Others mentioned the youth of Africa, pointing to giant Nigeria, with a median population age of 18. And only 2% of Africa’s population of 1.3 billion is aged above 70, whereas in many Western societies, the older population has been the most devastated by the pandemic. Nigeria, with a population of 211 million, reported to date only 2124 COVID-19 victims. Its capitol, Lagos, about 15 million inhabitants, reported only 220 COVID-19 deaths.
