Big-Historical Environmentalism for the 21st Century

Abstract

The beginning of the 21st century witnessed terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre in the United States. This incident changed global politics and brought new twists and turns in world history. The last two decades have seen the rise of identity politics, leading to the escalation of local conflicts across the world. At the same time, environmental challenges to human societies have become increasingly threatening, manifested on a planetary scale through global warming and loss of biodiversity. The effect of political and environmental challenges happening together is being felt in social-cultural-economic realms. All of these tensions have been starkly laid bare in the way governments and societies in different parts of the world have responded to the challenge of the global covid pandemic that we are currently facing. The pandemic will ebb and flow, and reduce itself to a non-threatening form in a few years, but the challenges of global warming and loss of biodiversity just keep growing and will plague us for decades to come. While the battle against alarming changes in the environment around us will continue till the end of the century, many experts believe that the seeds of our success or failure will be sown in this decade. The actions we take and the social-economic-political systems we set up by 2030 will largely cast the die for the future of humanity beyond the 21st century. This situation underlines the importance of seeing the big picture that only Big History can reveal by connecting the dots of events in different spheres of human activity on a planetary scale. Our big-history thinking clearly shows interlinkages between seemingly independent crises that seem to be bombarding us one after the other.