Remembrance should spur action

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 11/11/2021 (1774 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Remembrance Day is our annual moment to pause and honour the sacrifice of those in our armed forces who suffered or died on behalf of Canada. The special date of Nov. 11 recalls the moment in 1918 when Germany and its allies concluded an armistice with the British Empire and its allies, ending a terrible bloodbath that everyone involved intended never to repeat.

Warfare has continued ever since, usually not on the industrial scale of the slaughter that was seen in the 1914-18 war. The dream of a world without war has never died. Institutions such as the European Union and the United Nations offer some reasons for hoping that wars may eventually become less common. But the dream is still far from fulfilment.

November 1918 marked the end of a world war and the beginning of an influenza pandemic that may have taken many more lives than the war. Ten million military personnel and another 10 million civilians died in the 1914-18 war. The flu probably took 50 million lives worldwide — though no one really knows because diagnosis was difficult. Accurate diagnosis scarcely mattered, because there was no treatment for the disease.

This Remembrance Day finds the world in the midst of another global catastrophe: the COVID-19 pandemic has already taken at least the five million lives reported by national health authorities. Statisticians who compare pandemic-era deaths with earlier years suspect that the official figures for India and many other countries greatly understate the reality.

Even at five million deaths, COVID-19 ranks alongside world wars and the 1918 flu as a global catastrophe and a mark of human vulnerability. Scientists quickly developed the vaccines that can stop spread of the virus but most humans around the world are still not vaccinated. Many governments cannot afford to buy the vaccine and many people think the vaccine is more dangerous than the virus it combats.

While the pandemic continues to sweep around the world, the next global catastrophe is already starting to unfold. Mountaintop glaciers are melting and gushing into the oceans. Permafrost in the Canadian Arctic is turning to mud. Canadian forests are burning as never before. Croplands this summer turned to deserts.

Concerted joint action by all nations will be needed to curtail the burning of fossil fuels, stop the rise in Earth’s surface temperature and keep the planet habitable. Our species is occasionally capable of concerted joint action, as they showed in the 1987 Montreal Protocol banning production of the chlorofluorocarbons that were destroying the protective ozone layer in Earth’s atmosphere.

On the evidence of the campaign against COVID-19, however, the human species is not yet skilled at concerted joint action. Governments of wealthy nations, urged on by their people to take care of Number One, elbow their way to the front of the line for vaccine supplies, pushing ahead of others facing the same peril.

If this is the way our species is going to combat global warming, then our chances of saving the planet may be no brighter than our chances of putting an end to war. Canada may have to ask for many more sacrifices by its people to protect the country from the global catastrophes unfolding around us.

As we honour the sacrifices of past generations, we should recognize that the era of sacrifice is not necessarily all behind us. This world is still a dangerous place to live and taking care of Number One may not answer the need.