Plan for the Survival of Humanity
For those who still doubt it, the news of this summer (series of heat waves, multiplication of forest fires, cyclones, etc.) is a reminder of what scientists have been saying for almost fifty years: our civilization is facing a global climate crisis endangering the entire planet. Human activities have become the predominant telluric force, our current geological era being described as Anthropocene. The figures projected by organisations such as the IPBES or the NASA predict an apocalypse shortly (2040 is tomorrow!). The prospect of the earth’s collapse has been the object of a specific scientific discipline: Collapsology.
All this is known. However, faced with this picture that scientists paint, our governments remain in business as usual. They manage everyday affairs, without having the honesty to recognise the urgency of the problem. Informed ultra-rich people, who continue to garner wealth, have adopted secession strategies: buying islands or investing in real estate in New Zealand, thinking that through confinement and remoteness they could escape future disasters. But they too have children and live on the same planet. Whether one is in flight forward, denial, or lack the will to act, we are all in the same boat. We must urgently learn to leave our respective chapels and work towards bringing change together. We have a great tool in our hands to achieve that change: non-violence.
On 2nd October we celebrated the 150th anniversary of the birth of Mahatma Gandhi. On this occasion, a great march for justice and peace, completely in the Gandhian tradition and named Jai Jagat (in Hindi “the victory of the world”), will leave Delhi to join other marchers in Geneva. It has a clear goal: to promote a model that leaves no one behind. Its model responds to the 2030 Agenda of the United Nations and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a real “plan for the survival of humanity”. With the Jai Jagat walkers in Geneva in September 2020, where the march from Delhi will converge with organised marches from other parts of the world, a whole series of debates, dialogues and cultural events will take place.
The initiative for this march comes from the Indian landless movement Ekta Parishad and its leader Rajagopal. It is now supported by various personalities and hundreds of groups around the world. We have very little time left in the face of the coming collapse. This movement endeavours to gather millions around this simple idea: ‘Be the change that you wish to see in the world’ that Gandhi advocated. Non-violence is not abandonment, it is not passivity: it is, on the contrary, an active form of resistance. History has seen such movements. This time, however, it is a movement to save the entire planet.
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