The Living-Planet Imperatives: Mandatory Interrogation and Redesigning of Development Universally: An Argument from Environmental Realism

The confluence of crises, dominated by COVID-19, climate change, and conflicts, are creating spin-off impacts on food and nutrition, health, education, the environment, and peace and security, and affecting all the SDGs. (UNO’s SDGs-2030 Report 2022, ) How can we transform our deeply troubled world into a wiser world, i.e., a world which stands united against global and regional challenges confronting humanity and earth? How can we transform the technology-driven knowledge inquiry itself so that the academic institutions of learning, research institutions/laboratories, government organizations, and international institutions, among other institutions, are transformed, and driven by a culture of wisdom inquiry (Pandit in Philosophies 6:90, 2021)? It is imperative to work for such a world, if we want authentically and unitedly to address the biggest challenges including the anthropogenic global warming driven climate change. In particular, we must address the challenges of (i) limiting the average rise in temperatures to 1.5 °C; (ii) saving the lives of billions of people already being impacted by the continued rise in greenhouse gas emissions, and (ii) coping with threats to food production, water supplies, human health, national economies, and, above all, to the living planet earth itself. The kind of world being envisaged here would be the most appropriate place to address the most urgent problems of safe-guarding of human well-being interests that have been seriously undermined by the unending race for nuclear weapons globally. It will go a long way to free humanity from continued race for proliferation of nuclear weapons, and from the looming totalitarian catastrophes such as a nuclear war (Pandit in Philosophies 6:90, 2021). Not only the current totalitarian regimes in our world but the increasingly failing international institutions such as the UNO, and its agencies, on the one hand, and the unending world-wide competition for the proliferation and deployment of nuclear weapons, on the other, need to be correctly gauged and addressed as the greatest danger signals at the planetary levels. They endanger not only the humanity’s future and human well-being interests themselves but the future of the war-ravaged ecologically challenged earth.