Presentation to Richmond Rotary on Sep 11, 2020
Glad to be here! Thank you for the invitation! This is going to be something of a rambling talk. Before I introduce myself, I want to read a few words from the work of Jane Steger, a little known American mystic. Here is a passage from her 1926 Leaves from a Secret Journal: “Last night as I was thinking intently about the spirit of God in each one of us and especially of that spirit within myself and in life, a curious and quite definite feeling came over me as though I had entered into another country, flowed out into something wider, passed as it were to another plane. There was nothing strained or unnatural about it, nor was there the slightest mental confusion. I was perfectly aware of myself and of the surroundings of my room, but the point of consciousness appeared to have slipped from my head to my heart, from thought to emotion, perhaps. This is the country of the heart, I found myself exclaiming!” The country of the heart! Thank you, Jane Steger.
My name is Roger Eaton and I am founder and currently Executive Director of a California 501(c)(3) nonprofit, Collective Communication, Inc, sponsor of the online Voices of Humanity forum. But I’d rather introduce myself with a story from my early childhood. At the age of six I attended Lutheran Sunday School. There the teacher taught us the Bible starting with the story of Adam and Eve. We are all descended from Adam and Eve she told us. I remember throwing my hand up and saying “No we’re not!”. If we were all descended from Adam and Eve that would make us relatives. I knew I could not go knock on a stranger’s door and ask for lunch. The next week I persisted in contradicting the teacher. Finally, on the third Sunday, the teacher managed to persuade me. “OK,” I said. “Then that means we are all relatives!” and I expected everyone to change on the spot and become so much more welcoming. They didn’t, of course, but the news that we are all one family has stayed with me and guided my life in many ways.
The goals of the UN and how we might get there are the subject of my talk. I should begin by noting that Rotary was instrumental in creating the United Nations. That is greatly to Rotary’s credit!
The awesome Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) need more recognition, and the original goals of the UN, peace, disarmament and human rights, as put forward in the UN Charter, signed in San Francisco in 1945 are still number one UN priorities. Humanity has overstepped nature’s bounds, with global warming and the loss of wildlife topping the list. A concerted effort to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030 is our best hope of averting major disaster. But how? The nations do not trust each other and are not cooperating as they must to achieve the SDGs. Today is 9/11, an infamous day that ushered in two decades of chaos and destruction in the Middle East. It doesn’t matter whether you think Osama bin Laden organized it or Dick Cheney. Either way 9/11 demonstrates again that the nations do not trust each other and are far from cooperating as they must.
The Preamble to the UN Charter gives me goosebumps whenever I read it.
WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS DETERMINED
- to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and
- to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and
- to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and
- to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,
AND FOR THESE ENDS
- to practice tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good neighbours, and
- to unite our strength to maintain international peace and security, and
- to ensure, by the acceptance of principles and the institution of methods, that armed force shall not be used, save in the common interest, and
- to employ international machinery for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all peoples,
HAVE RESOLVED TO COMBINE OUR EFFORTS TO ACCOMPLISH THESE AIMS.
The very first resolution of the UN General Assembly in 1946 was to establish a general Commission. One of the commissions important purposes was to make proposals for “the elimination from national armaments of atomic weapons and of all other major weapons adaptable to mass destruction.”
In 1948, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was drafted under the guidance of Eleanor Roosevelt and proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly as a common standard for all peoples and all nations. With 524 translations, the UDHR is the most translated document ever. Though not a legally binding treaty, it has had a huge impact. Here’s how it begins: Article 1. “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.” Article 2. “Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.”
From 1948 until 2015 when the Sustainable Development Goals were unanimously adopted by all 193 UN nations, there have been hundreds of important resolutions and treaties passed by the UN. The SDGs were innovative but were also designed to repackage these resolutions and treaties, which they did with one glaring exception: The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1970, also known as the NPT.
President Kennedy set the stage for the NPT. In his address to the UN in 1961 he said: "Today, every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day when this planet may no longer be habitable. Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us. Men no longer debate whether armaments are a symptom or a cause of tension. The mere existence of modern weapons--ten million times more powerful than any that the world has ever seen, and only minutes away from any target on earth--is a source of horror, and discord and distrust.”
The Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 was probably as near to the end of civilization as we have come, though there have been numerous other close calls. I remember watching Walter Cronkite on CBS with a roomful of concerned fellow college classmates one evening. World War III was on the brink and could happen at any moment, but then the news was interrupted for a commercial about dog food and I left the room thinking this can’t be that serious!
A year later, on August 5, 1963, representatives of the United States, Soviet Union and Great Britain signed the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which prohibited the testing of nuclear weapons in outer space, underwater or in the atmosphere.
The Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons was adopted by the UN in 1970 and ratified by the U.S. Ratified! According to the U.S. Constitution, a ratified treaty becomes the law of the land.
To understand the NPT, it is important to be clear about the difference between nuclear disarmament and nuclear non-proliferation. Non-proliferation means preventing additional countries from developing “the Bomb”. Nuclear disarmament means that the nuclear nations eliminate their existing nuclear arms.
The NPT was a deal between the nuclear haves and the have-nots. The have-nots agreed not to forgo nuclear weapons and the haves agreed to disarm. Well not quite. Article VI of the treaty reads: “Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.” When the International Court of Justice considered the legality of the threat or use of nuclear weapons in 1996, the judges unanimously concluded, based upon Article VI of the NPT, that “There exists an obligation to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects under strict and effective international control.” That is a common sense reading of Article VI, but are the nuclear nations pursuing nuclear disarmament in good faith? Clearly not.
To repeat a key point, good faith negotiations are promised by Article VI not just for nuclear weapons, but also “on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.” The NPT is calling for an end to the scourge of war. Since nuclear weapons are front and center in the NPT, one may ask why it even mentions general disarmament. The NPT Preamble suggests that progress on nuclear disarmament will be “pursuant” to general and complete disarmament, but it works the other way around as well. Nations won’t give up their nuclear arms as long as other nations have them hugely out-gunned with conventional arms. In 2019 global military expenditures hit a new peak of nearly two trillion dollars of which the U.S. accounted for 38%, China 11%, India 4% and Russia 3%. These are the top four nations in the list. If you are Russia with military spending at less than ten percent of U.S. military spending, you are not comfortable with pursuing nuclear disarmament ahead of conventional disarmament. Ditto for Pakistan with a military budget at about 18% of India’s. Nuclear and conventional disarmament must be part of a single package.
The next big set of UN goals to look at are the Sustainable Development Goals of 2015. Before I get to them, though, I want to cover the real possibility of major disaster coming our way. Most people do not realize that humanity is headed off the cliff, like Walt Disney’s lemmings. Rather than learning to live in harmony with nature, we are exploiting nature. Will that lead to the end of civilization? Yes. The pandemic is just another bump in the road down to the precipice.
Yet the future is unpredictable. So who knows? Maybe an artificial intelligence breakthrough will give us a solution. Or cheap fusion energy will change everything. How often it happens, driving on a highway we see a knot of cars way up ahead slowing the traffic, but by the time we get there, things have cleared up. No wonder we are not as concerned as we should be. And yes, we should be.
The two most obvious of humanity’s self-destructive ways, besides war, are climate change and biodiversity loss.
To begin with climate change, the Paris Climate Agreement of 2015 calls for a maximum increase of 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial average if we are to keep the effects manageable. At 1 degree Celsius, the effects are already severe. Best estimate is that we are heading for between 1.8 and 2.9 degrees Celsius warming by 2090. Two degrees Celsius by 2050 is not out of the question. With that level of warming, New Orleans and Miami are goners as is coastal Bangladesh.
The World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency, published in October, 2019 with 13,593 signatories from 156 nations says: “We scientists have a moral obligation to clearly warn humanity of any catastrophic threat. ... greenhouse gas emissions are still rising, with increasingly damaging effects. With few exceptions, we are largely failing to address this predicament. The climate crisis has arrived and is accelerating faster than many scientists expected. It is more severe than anticipated, threatening natural ecosystems and the fate of humanity.” Here in the Bay Area, the recent apocalyptic skies, dark and smokey orange, give us a hint of what’s ahead.
Then there is biodiversity loss. We know from a recent World Wildlife Fund report that on average vertebrate species populations declined 68% between 1970 and today. That is huge. A major 2019 report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services tells us that the threat of extinction looms for as many as 1 million species of plants and animals. Sir Robert Watson, Chair of the organization summed up their report this way: "The health of ecosystems on which we and all other species depend is deteriorating more rapidly than ever. We are eroding the very foundations of our economies, livelihoods, food security, health and quality of life worldwide."
Kate Raworth’s “doughnut” model of the economy makes for a good introduction to the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Raworth is a brilliant English economist. Her “doughnut” model of the economy is well on its way to replacing the old “let it rip” neo-liberal model that many of us learned in college Economics 101 when we read Paul Samuelson’s textbook.
Around the outside of the doughnut are a list of planetary ecological boundaries that humanity must respect. Four of these are already breached: climate change, biodiversity loss, nitrogen and phosphorus loading, and land conversion. Land conversion means the destruction of natural forests, wetlands and grasslands for human purposes. Around the inside of the doughnut are a list of twelve internationally agreed minimum social standards based on the UN Sustainable Development Goals. None of these standards have been met. The zone in the doughnut between the outer ecological ceiling and the inner social standards is the safe and just space for humanity to live in harmony with mother earth.
In 2015 the UN unanimously adopted the awesome Sustainable Development Goals for 2030 (SDGs). There are seventeen SDGs with 169 associated targets. A quick read on SDG progress shows we are not on track for 2030 success. Here is from the 2020 UN report: 1) Poverty is increasing due to covid-19 and will be reduced but not ended by 2030. 2) Food insecurity is on the rise. 3) Progress on health has been interrupted by the pandemic. 4) Progress on education was already too slow before covid-19. 5) There is some progress towards gender equality. 6) There is some progress on water and sanitation issues. 7) More effort is needed on scaling up sustainable energy. 8) Sustainable economic growth was headed in the wrong direction even before the pandemic. 9) Progress towards resilient infrastructure, inclusive, sustainable and innovative manufacturing is slowing due to tariffs and trade tensions. 10) Overall the trend is towards more inequality, not less. 11) Progress is not clear toward safe, resilient, sustainable cities. The proportion of slum dwellers is increasing. 12) Sustainable consumption and production patterns are moving in the wrong direction. 13) The global community shies away from commitments required to reverse the climate crisis. 14) Progress on ocean sustainability has been minimal. 15) We are falling short on 2020 targets to halt biodiversity loss on land. 16) The increase in refugees and armed conflicts are stalling progress on peaceful and inclusive societies. 17) Global partnerships for sustainability are not growing.
The SDGs do not include international peace and disarmament for the excellent reason that they never would have been approved if they had. Nuclear arms in particular are self-sustaining. The very existence of nuclear weapons is compelling evidence that we live in a ruthless us-vs-them world, and in such a world the nuclear weapons states are convinced it would be folly to disarm. In this distrustful world overshadowed by nuclear weapons we don’t have the international cooperation needed for 2030 SDG success. This means that the SDGs cannot succeed on their own without including disarmament. We already saw that nuclear disarmament and complete and general disarmament are a package. Now I hope it is clear that the SDGs and disarmament are an even larger package. We cannot possibly achieve peace without SDG success, and it works the other way around as well. We cannot achieve the SDGs without also achieving both nuclear and conventional disarmament.
At the international level, though, that conclusion is non-starter. The SDGs are being pushed as “The Global Goals”, with no reference whatsoever to nuclear disarmament. And while nuclear disarmament remains the top goal of the UN, actions towards that goal stay clear of any involvement with the SDGs. That’s at the international level, but at the city level, prospects for a global alliance for all of the goals of the UN look much better. The SDGs are already coming down to the city level. UN Habitat is targeting 900 cities around the world for its SDG campaign, and here in the US, New York, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh and San Jose are already in the process of adopting the SDGs. Plus, cities are nuclear targets and do not themselves have nukes, so it should be no surprise that 7956 cities have joined together in Mayors for Peace to call for immediate nuclear disarmament. The Goals of the UN provide a common framework to unite human efforts to avert catastrophe and the cities of Planet Earth are ready to commit.
There is a missing ingredient. Most people everywhere would love to see a world governed by intelligence and generosity, a world of trust and cooperation. I believe that, and I even believe that people generally believe that, but given the existence of nuclear weapons, I can’t believe that others believe that people generally believe that! The missing ingredient is a global consciousness. Given the internet, though, we are not that far from the shared sense of our common humanity that we need. The quickest route to success would be for Facebook to list the top-liked posts from the last 30 days overall and broken out by nation, language, city, gender and age. Everyone remotely interested in global issues would read those top posts and the result would be a heartfelt global consciousness - the missing ingredient.
I say heartfelt because the most liked posts will always be wise, generous and upbeat. Stupid or dull or hateful posts will never get to the top. As the months go by and we see the world consistently agreeing on intelligent, kind and spirited messages, we will each have a moment of realization that humanity is actually on our side. On this basis it will be possible to build not just an inter-city but also an international bottom up movement to achieve the goals of the UN.
Finally I want to mention my own Voices of Humanity project. VoH is an online forum designed to use thumbs-up / thumbs-down voting on messages to build that global consciousness that we need. Voices of Humanity is about to install a new feature, called “Apart and Together” (A&T). Using the lunar cycle for timing, A&T alternates between 1) each community electing its own messages, and 2) all the communities together electing messages to represent their common humanity.
Testing of the Apart and Together conversation between the nations will begin on International Peace Day, September 21, and the full scale launch is scheduled for UN Day, October 24th. We are aiming to have at least 100 participants lined up with at least five nations having 10 or more participants each. The expectation is that once we are off the ground, participation will grow quickly.
The Goals of the UN are the best scaffold we have for the massive bottom up global movement we need. The "Apart & Together" international conversation will have nuclear disarmament as the default topic, but all the other goals of the UN will be easy to select as alternative topics and "Any topic" will also be an option at the top of the list so we have an across-the-silos capability for the UN goals at the same time that we give the nations each a separate voice Apart as well as a unifying voice Together. Unity-and-diversity for the UN Goals and simultaneously unity-and-diversity for the nations. This is a winning combination. Please see https://voh.intermix.org and get in touch with me via the email link at the bottom of that page.
#UNgoals4cities #un_goals #together
