Africa-Press – Lesotho. For us, and even more for our children. All of us of course know the answer: it is one where everybody has enough healthy food to eat and potable water for drinking along with clean water for other purposes such as washing and cleaning.
One where the air is pure and fresh, there is little or no soil pollution, where everybody has a roof over their head and a job for earning a living, where children have access to good basic education and equal opportunities to pursue higher studies and training that open the doors for them according to their interests and aptitudes whether in the vocational, professional or academic streams.
A society where peace and harmony prevail – this is perhaps the most fundamental of requirements which enables everything else to follow. It implies a society grounded in universal human values that transcend cultural diversities and religions, where the rule of law prevails and no one is above the law.
The problem is getting from here to there, from the manifestly dysfunctional state of fierce antagonisms, rapacious competiveness, global belligerence that thrive on vested interests and are driving the growing economic inequalities and disparities that have been talked about and analysed ad nauseam.
To a land and a future frequently promised by political leaders but that never materialize – save for them. Everywhere we look there are contradictions: talk of peace but make war, take pledges to seriously tackle climate change and then go back to or increase dependence on coal – as the war in Ukraine has forced some countries e.
g. Germany to do. The sustainable climate targets recede further as a result, and everyday in some part of the world the results are being seen in the form of more frequent floods or droughts, of soaring temperatures and forest wildfires.
Initially these phenomena used to take place in different geographies at different times. Now they are practically concurrent, and one sees twin phenomena in the same country or continent.
In the US wildfires rage in California but there are floods down south in Arizona; in China the Yangtze river is drying up exposing islands in the river bed – on one there was a small Buddha temple – but elsewhere floods are taking place.
In India there are floods in the north east; as regards the heat, well that’s nothing to talk about there – I myself have been in Delhi decades ago in the summer, standing outside my hospital waiting for a transport, with the temperature touching 47 degrees Celsius and the shoes sticking to melting tar on the road.
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