By Deepak Chopra - Author, 'Soul of Leadership'; founder, The Chopra Foundation
The media had fun, as it periodically does, when a fundamentalist preacher declares the end of the world. But there was a jittery feeling, too, because for the first time since the end of the Cold War, when the world might have ended in nuclear winter, global warming makes secular people feel doomed. There's a slender hope that climate change may not be as catastrophic as some scientists believe. Yet on the whole nobody denies the buildup of greenhouse gases, while at the same time no one remotely has a viable solution.
How can doom be replaced with a more productive feeling? When I first began posting in 1995, I found myself addressing four global problems that seemed insoluble: over-population, pollution from fossil fuels, pandemic diseases, and refugeeism. Each of these four had their own trajectory, but they seemed equally unstoppable. I didn't put terrorism on the same level, although many observers might, because there have been waves of terrorist activity that rise and fall. Eventually the iPod would win out over the mullahs. A younger generation of Arabs would want to join the modern world, and by being connected to modernity through cell phones, Facebook, and shared music files, they would prevail over reactionaries in their society. Perhaps the Arab spring indicates that this victory is closer than anyone ever supposed.
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