Out of Blood and Tears — The Ukraine Provides an Opportunity for Humankind
Discovering Montreal, slowly venturing out of the little circle of the neighborhood of a temporary home, a crazy idea came to mind. It did not come from the day’s blue sky but from previous forays into the small area which used to be home for factory workers, but is now gently changing with a French bakery and an upscale organic market just two blocks from two great, thriving second-hand stores, and even something rarely seen — a wonderful place to walk, run or bike, a long, narrow but flourishing park just across the street from some still busy factories in the industrial area next to the Saint Lawrence river.
The people in this city are, it seems, much more interested in sustainability and environmental protection than many on the other side of the Canadian border. In fact, there are three different types of trash cans to be put out for the city to pick up. One is for garbage, one for recyclables, and the third for compost. In addition, the Mayor of Montreal has just announced that starting next summer seniors above the age of sixty-five (65) would have a free pass for all the city’s public transit system to ensure that the elderly have easy access to what city has to offer without having to resort to the use of a car. Unsurprisingly, right now, this is the place for COP15, the world biodiversity conference that has brought 10,000 people to again discuss our planet’s environmental degradation and what can be done about it.
Against this background, an only partly successful recent world climate conference (COP26) and conflicts in the world, especially one destroying a rather developed country, the Ukraine, while rendering life unbearable for too many of its people, an idea popped up. Why not rebuild the Ukraine, when the conflict is over, in an environmentally sound way? After all, with the Marshall Plan Western Europe was rebuilt so well that by the 1970’s it was impossible for my postwar generation to feel World War II’s effects except through the memories of those who had lived that disaster.
Rebuilding the Ukraine in an environmentally positive way would make it possible to judge how the best that we know and have at present can deal with the degradation that has decimated so many of our fellow species, so much life-giving flora, and is leading to effects that impact all of us who share this little planet.
Yes, it would be expensive, as was the Marshall Plan, but it would not only be better for the ordinary people in the Ukraine who are suffering so much but might give us more than one insight on what we humans can do for each other in the short run and for generations to come.
Years ago, in the nineteen nineties, when we had been already aware of what we were doing to ourselves for a couple of decades, but when the impact had not yet been so flagrant, I wrote a science fiction about a country that embarks on a real experiment to improve its environment. I called that book Lights. Last year, the lockdown due Covid 19, I edited and updated it, calling it Flickering Lights. However, it is but a romantic fiction.
Now, unexpectedly, we have a real opportunity to use our knowledge and wisdom not only to bring some healing to a people who are enduring the unbearable but bring a measure of hope to all of us. Do we not style ourselves homo sapiens? Do we want to live up to our self-styled designation? Do we want to try to avoid being homo stultus, cursed by our children and grandchildren for continuing to carry on carelessly and thoughtlessly? Give it some thought.
