Dearest Global Family,
Following my most recent book, Resilience From The Heart: The Power To thrive In Life’s Extremes (Hay House 2015) much of the media focus has been on chapters of the book that address personal resilience—our emotional and spiritual ability to embrace big change in a healthy way in everyday life, and in emergency preparedness.
While personal resilience is clearly an important first step to embrace change in our lives, it’s just that—a first step toward thinking and living in a way that reflects the extremes of our transforming world.
Our resilience when it comes to the physical necessities of everyday life is just as important. And that’s why I’m writing to you today.
The Principle Of Spare Capacity
The key to successful resilience is to create it, before you need it. Thinking ahead when it comes to life’s necessities is so important, that experts in resilience theory list it as the first of five key principles for creating resilience—the Principle of Spare Capacity. Spare Capacity gives us a “cushion” of safety when it comes to our daily lives.
Our Time of Extremes
Resilience is especially important now, because we’re living a time of extremes.
From the burden of global debt on our jobs, savings, retirement income and the banking industry, to extreme weather emergencies and growing social tensions in some of the worlds largest cities, it’s clear that the limits of our “safe zone” for daily living are being stretched to capacity.
It’s also clear that if a breakdown in daily routines can happen in one place, that it’s possible for the same thing to happen again, in other places. We’re all vulnerable to a world in transition, and it makes sense to expect the unexpected. This includes temporary disruptions in everyday services, such as the grocery stores, fresh water sources, local markets, gas stations, banks, ATM machines, medical care and electrical power that we easily take for granted. It’s also important to remember that any disruptions of daily services are only a problem if we’re not prepared for them!
Emergency Preparedness with Spare Capacity
The principle of Spare Capacity applies to our physical necessities in daily life, as well as our emotional and spiritual necessities and wellbeing. It’s often easy to overlook Spare Capacity, especially when everything is running smoothly and it’s the last thing on our mind. In reality, this is the perfect time to think ahead, when you have the luxury of doing so—before an emergency hits.
For example, when we leave our home in the morning, we take what we need to support us throughout our day. If we need to change clothes for a jog after work; if we need our books for an evening class; if we need money to meet a friend for dinner; we routinely prepare for whatever our day will bring and we do so before we begin our day.
And this is the point.
We don’t do so from a place of fear. We prepare for the day because it just makes sense to do so. It’s this simple idea that forms the crux of this message today. And this is where our resilience comes in.
Create Your “Cushion” of Spare Capacity Now, Before You Need It
When an emergency actually happens, our need for Spare Capacity quickly moves front and center when it comes to life priorities. So why wait? Why not create a “cushion” of security for yourself and your family and build your Spare Capacity now, before you need it?
Whether you’re creating Spare Capacity with your family, friends or community, making the time to be prepared for the unexpected is powerfully bonding for adults, and it can be fun for young people, as well.
Whether you’re creating Spare Capacity with your family, friends or community, making the time to be prepared for the unexpected is powerfully bonding for adults, and it can be fun for young people, as well.
10 Steps for Your Emergency Preparedness
Giving Yourself a Cushion with Spare Capacity
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If you have not done so already, begin by taking an inventory of your daily needs.
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Sit with your family and create a list of the things that would be “show stoppers” if supplies were somehow disrupted in an emergency situation and these items were not available in the way that they typically are.
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Begin by asking yourself if you have:
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reliable and secure access to healthy, non-perishable food items for a minimum of 2 weeks? (During an extended power outage, it can be difficult to preserve dairy products, meat and frozen foods)
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a 2-week back-up supply of any prescription medications, supplements and hygiene items that you depend upon? (When grocery shelves cannot be stocked on a daily basis, they quickly become bare. Common items such as soaps, shampoos, feminine hygiene and vital medications such as insulin, antibiotics and daily vitamins can be especially hard to find)
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reliable access to drinking water, or filters to create clean water, for yourself, your family and pets in the event public supplies are contaminated or unavailable?
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a supply of pet food and pet medications for a minimum of 2 weeks?
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access to the finances / cash you would need for 2 weeks if ATM machines were not available and banks were closed?
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a minimum of candles and battery-operated lanterns and flash lights for brief power outages? Or better yet…
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a source of back-up power for your home and necessities? (Household wind, solar and /or propane generators are now abundant, and reasonably priced, at online sources such as www.amazon.com and www.earthtech.com, for example.)
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For guidelines on how to create family and community resilience, please see Resilient Living, Chapter Three of the book: Resilience From the Heart: The Power to Thrive in Life’s Extremes (Hay House 2016)
Our resilience in life begins with being honest with ourselves. When we honestly acknowledge that we’re living a temporary time of volatility and extremes, when emergencies can happen at any time, it makes sense to think in a way that reflects the facts. As we do, we find the strength and confidence to embrace life’s extremes in a healthy way rather than responding from fear and uncertainty. When the facts are clear, our choices become obvious.
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The world just changed.
It happened in plain sight, as we watched like the proverbial train wreck that we know will end in disaster, yet cannot stop watching. In a matter of days following the declaration of a global pandemic, the mundane routines of everyday life ground to a halt in an effort to slow the spread of the COVID19 virus. And just like that, the lives of nearly 20% of earth’s population—over 1.7 billion people—have been forced into a new and difficult reality. The question on everyone’s mind is “What now? What happens next?” The answer to this question is the source of fear and frustration, as well as anxiety and anger for hundreds of thousands of people across the world. As they watch their jobs, business, and savings evaporate day-by-day in the shutdown, they feel that their future is evaporating as well.
What’s Next?
The honest answer to the question of “what comes next” is that no one knows with certainty. We can’t know, because a global shutdown in a globalized world has never happened before. We have no map to lead us as we find our way in this historic and bizarre crisis.
In the face of such uncertainty, however, there is one thing that we do know with absolute certainty—we are a planet deep in grief. Individually and collectively, consciously and subconsciously, alone and together, we are grieving the loss of the familiar world that we knew only a few short weeks ago, and the way of life that we took for granted. Our willingness to recognize, and embrace, this fact is the only way for us to emerge into whatever comes next, and to do so in a healthy way.
Global Grief
Fortunately for us, the experience of grief is nothing new. It has been studied so deeply, for so many years, that it’s no longer a mystery when it comes to what we can expect, and how to move through our grief in a healthy way. When I think of the grief, I can think of no better model that the one developed in 1969 by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross to serve as a guide in our process.
Kübler-Ross identified and summarized the five stages of grief that accompany any form of loss, and charted the stages as a model that provides a map for our experience. (Fig 1) The beauty of Kübler-Ross’s work is that it gives both a structure to our experience, as well as a sense of meaning to our emotions.
Fig 1. Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’s Five Stages of Grief. Our ability to reconcile our loss determines how quickly we move through the stages from Denial to Acceptance.
Source: https://www.psycom.net/depression.central.grief.html
From her studies of many people grieving for many reasons, Kübler-Ross’s model shows two powerful themes for our global shutdown:
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We see that our experiences, such as denial, anger and depression, are not random at all—that they are part of a continuum of emotions that are expressed, and even predicted, as stages of grief as we come to terms with our loss.
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We discover that the model is also a map of the emotional landscape that that leads to the healing of our loss.
In Kübler-Ross’s model we discover how to transition, and ultimately transcend our loss with new understandings and new visions for a new life.
The Good News
For me, this is perhaps the best possible news that can come from our loss at this unthinkable time. We will get through this. And we will get through this together. After we allow ourselves to embrace, and transcend, the stages of Denial, Anger, Bargaining and Depression, we will face the last stage of the model; the stage of Acceptance.
In our Acceptance, we discover that we’re moving forward emotionally from the world that we’ve left behind. We begin to consider new possibilities for our lives and what lies ahead. We begin to consider new ways of thinking and living. These are the hallmarks of a new life, and a new world. And this is why it’s so vital that we allow ourselves to go through the grieving process, step-by-step, stage-by-stage, allowing the days and weeks we find ourselves in now, to serve us as the buffer that we need to heal, before we embrace what comes next.
The world of the past is gone. It will not, and cannot, be as it was before COVID19. This means that we cannot go back in time to something that no longer exists. And while the vision for the world ahead of us may not be sharp and clear, we certainly don’t want that world built upon the anger, frustration and anxiety from our unresolved grief. When people ask me ‘What’s next? What can we do now?” my sense is that we’re already doing it—we’re grieving the loss of our world.
The key to our future success is to give ourselves the opportunity to grieve, adjust and adapt so that we are ready for the next phase of the grand adventure that we find ourselves immersed within.
Getting Our Priorities Right
When we’re ready, there is a powerful place where science, policy and politics converge as a gateway to our greatest expressions of creativity and the potential. The same sweet spot of such possibility, however, also holds the power to destroy the very values that we cherish as individuals and societies. These are the uniquely human values that nurture our individualism, and the freedom to pursue the life, and the lifestyle, that feeds and inspires our imagination and creativity. The question that must guide our choices in the post COVID19 reset is simply this:
Do we love ourselves enough to balance the necessity of a safe, sustainable, and equitable society that preserves natures harmony, without giving away our humanness and our most cherished human values in the process?
We won’t need to wait long for the answer to our question. The world that emerges after Reset 2020 will tell us how we answered the question, and become the legacy that we’ll leave for our children and to theirs.
It’s not just the emphatic warnings of overzealous environmentalists that tell us we’re in a time of climate extremes. It’s not just the elders of the world’s indigenous communities sharing the wisdom and warnings of their ancestors regarding our era. It’s the data itself that tells the story. And the data tells us that we’re living in a rare era of cyclic change that few humans in the past have ever experienced. Since the mid-1990s,our global family has met with the crises, and risen to face the aftermath, of a growing number of weather-related extremes—from record-setting floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, and temperatures, to killer superstorms — that have had consequences unparalleled in recorded history.
Fact 1 – Exceeding Thresholds for Survival:
We’ve crossed vital ecological thresholds that are necessary for Earth’s survival (such as too-high levels of CO2 and species extinction).1
Fact 2 – Increasing Frequency of Floods:
There has been a two-and-a-half-fold increase in the number of devastating floods worldwide that occurred between February and May 2010 as compared to the number of floods during the same season of the year in each of the years between 2002 and 2006.
Fact 3 – Increasing Frequency of Storms:
There has been an increase in the number of North Atlantic tropical storms that the National Weather Service documented between 1998 and 2007, a trend that continues to the present day.
Fact 4 – Increasing Frequency of Wildfires:
There has been a dramatic surge in the number of wildfires (associated with drought) since 1998 in North America and throughout much of Australia and Europe.
While it’s certainly not unusual for weather-related disasters to occur, it is unusual for there to be so many of them occurring in so many places in the world at the same time. “Each year we have extreme weather,” Omar Baddour, the chief of the data management applications division at the World Meteorological Organization in Geneva, Switzerland, has explained, “but it’s unusual to have so many extreme events around the world at once.”2 Even while Baddour was alerting us that global weather events for winter 2012 would go beyond business as usual, a bizarre series of storms were wreaking havoc across the globe. These included massive floods in the United Kingdom, extensive fires in Australia, and an epic storm of both rain and snow that threatened the lives of 160,000 Syrian refugees living in temporary camps set up in makeshift shelters in Lebanon. Before the winter months arrived, it was already clear that 2012 would be a year for the record books. By year’s end, the extremes had left a legacy that included:
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The world’s ninth-warmest recorded year since 1850
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Record low rainfall in the United States and the most severe and extensive drought in at least 25 years
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Record high temperatures in the United States, with 197 all-time highs tied or broken
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Superstorm Sandy, which brought a record 32.5-foot high wave to New York Harbor
A study published in the journal Climatic Change tells us without reservation that extremes such as these are more than just local anomalies. They’re happening on a worldwide basis, and the world simply isn’t prepared for how quickly the climate is changing. “The last decade brought unprecedented heat waves,” says the lead author for the report, Dim Coumou. “For instance in the U.S. in 2012, in Russia in 2010, in Australia in 2009, and in Europe in 2003.”3 Coumou summarizes the impact of such extremes in one sentence, stating, “Heat extremes are causing many deaths, major forest fires, and harvest losses—societies and ecosystems are not adapted to ever new record-breaking temperatures.”4
While the decades-old controversy regarding the existence and causes of climate extremes appears to be far from resolved, the data of the earth itself reveals the facts. It’s a fact that the history of the planet is one of dynamic change in climate and weather patterns.
It’s also a fact that patterns of the past suggest we should be experiencing a time of warming at present. The question is, How much should we expect? The bottom graph in Figure 1.1 gives us a clearer picture of what our warming has looked like for a smaller period of time. Here, the revised indicators for the last 2,000 years show that temperatures during the medieval warming period (MWP), between 820 c.e. and 1040 c.e., were nearly four times greater than what we’re experiencing today.
Another warming episode in the late 1200s involved temperatures twice as high as today.5 While the variations are in fractions of a degree Celsius, I’m sharing them here to offer a rounded perspective on climate change and what it’s meant in the past. It’s interesting to note that these temperature changes occurred without the factors that are commonly believed to be the cause of such extremes, such as industrial sources of CO2. The question is, Why? If the CO2 was not the trigger at that time, what was? And what does it mean for us today? These are questions we must honestly answer if we are to address the issues of climate change that we will face in the coming centuries.
By any measure, the 20th century was a wild ride for the people of Earth. Between 1900 and 2000, we went from a world of about 1.6 billion to over 6 billion people, survived two world wars, squeaked through 44 years of the Cold War and 70,000 ready-to-go-at-the-touch-of-a-button nuclear missiles, unlocked the DNA code of life, walked on the moon, and ultimately made the computers that took the first humans into space look like children’s toys. It was 100 years of the most accelerated population growth, and the greatest threat of our extinction, in 5,000 years of recorded history.
Many historians look upon the 20th century as the age of knowledge, and it’s easy to see why. Along with the scientific discoveries about nature and life, we also made great discoveries about our past. Written records addressing concepts at the foundation of three major world religions were discovered midway through the century. New interpretations were made of even older artifacts from places like Egypt, Sumer, and Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. Clearly the last century was one of recovering the knowledge of our past. And while we will undoubtedly continue to make new discoveries that shed additional light on our history, it’s also clear that in this new century, we find ourselves once again living in a very different world than our parents and grandparents did.
The 21st century will be seen as the century of wisdom, as a time when we are forced to apply what we’ve learned in order to survive the world we’ve created. To do so, we will have to approach our problems very differently than we have in the past. We will be challenged to draw upon all that we know and use it in new, creative, and innovative ways. But to do so will require another kind of information that is seldom talked about in the science books of theories, proofs, and facts.
We will have to temper the facts of scientific knowledge—the data of the data sheets and the results of computer-generated models, graphs, and predictions—with the very ability that sets us apart from other forms of life. We will have to use what generations past simply called “common sense.” The term common sense, however, may not be as ordinary as we make it sound. Rather, it’s the kind of thinking that comes from a systematic and organized process, one where we consider knowledge from many sources of information, mix it all together, and weigh it carefully before making our choices. And when we seem to be on the fence about the final decision, it’s then that we add the intangible factor of common sense, often based on what we call “gut feeling” or “instinct.”
It’s a good thing that we do, because there are times in the recent past when it’s precisely that undefined quality of human decision making that may have saved the world from disaster! An event during the height of the Cold War is a beautiful example of the power of common sense. On September 26, 1983, Stanislav Petrov, a high-ranking Soviet military man, was in command of an early-warning system designed to detect any signs of an American attack.
Tensions were already at an all-time high following the Soviet interception and shooting down of a civilian jumbo jet and the loss of all 269 people on board, including U.S. Congressman Lawrence McDonald, earlier that month. At 30 minutes after midnight, the moment Petrov and his command team hoped would never happen did, in fact, occur. Warning lights flashed, sirens sounded, and the computer screens in their room at the top of the Soviet Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS) showed five nuclear missiles coming from the U.S. headed directly for the Soviet Union. In a matter of moments, Petrov had to make the choice he dreaded—to return the fire, or not—knowing that, in that moment, the potential beginning of World War III and the fate of humanity was in his hands.
He and the men under his command were military professionals. They had trained for precisely such a moment. His instructions were clear. In the event of attack, he was to push the start button at his console to launch a counterattack against the U.S. Once he did so, he knew that he would set into motion a fail-proof system designed for all-out war. Once the button was pushed, the sequence could not be stopped. It was designed so that it operated from that point forward without the help of humans. “The main computer wouldn’t ask me [what to do],” Petrov later explained. “It was specially constructed in such a way that [once the button was pushed] no one could affect the system’s operations.”1
To Petrov, his operators, and the equipment, the emergency looked real. All of the data checked out. The system seemed to be working, and as far as the radar detectors were concerned, Russia was under the nuclear attack that would begin a third world war. But Petrov had second thoughts. Something didn’t seem right to him. With only five missiles detected, it wasn’t an “all out” attack from the U.S., and that was the part that didn’t make
sense. It just didn’t seem like any scenario considered by military intelligence.
Petrov had to act immediately, but before he did, he had to be clear about what was happening. Did he actually feel that the Soviet Union was under a nuclear attack from the U.S., or was it something else? In less than one minute he made his decision. Petrov reported the alarm to his superiors and the other command posts, but he declared it as a “false” reading. And then he waited. If he was wrong, the incoming missiles would strike their Russian targets within 15 minutes. After what must have been a very long quarter of an hour, he—and no doubt countless others in command posts throughout the former Soviet Union—breathed a sigh of relief. Nothing had happened: the complex network of satellites and computers had issued a false warning. A later investigation confirmed that the readings were due to a “glitch” in the radar.
The reason why I’m sharing the story is because of what it illustrates. Even when all of the sophisticated technology told Petrov that Russia was under attack; even though it was the height of the Cold War tensions of 1983; and even with all of his conditioning as a military man trained to follow orders, protocols, and procedures, Stanislav Petrov tempered all he knew with the intangible experience of common sense and a gut feeling—an experience that can’t be taught in a classroom or taken in pill form. In this case, one man’s common sense is the reason World War III did not begin in September 1983.
Twenty-one years later, in 2004, Petrov was recognized as the “man who saved the world” and honored for his courage to trust his instincts by the Association of World Citizens.2 While hopefully none of us will ever be asked to make the kind of choice that Petrov did in 1983, I have no doubt that common sense will play a key role in assessing the knowledge that science puts at our fingertips. It will be our skillful use of that knowledge, tempered with a generous portion of common sense, that will help us bridge the gap between science and its application. . . the age of knowledge and the age of wisdom. And it doesn’t have to happen in a big global way.
Many “firsts” happened in the 20th century: some good, some not so good, and some simply mind-boggling. Since 1900 the world has witnessed the first airplane and television, the first computers, and the first humans on the moon . . . along with the invention of microchips, the discovery of DNA, and the splitting of the atom. The world has also witnessed explosive, never-before seen growth in population.
From the end of the last ice age until about the year 1650, the total population of the planet is estimated to have been stable at less than 500 million people. To put this into perspective, it means that for the last 9,000 years or so, the number of people living on the earth and being sustained by its resources has only been about half the number now living in India today. After 1650, that number changed. The graph in Figure 3.4 gives us an appreciation of just how quickly the population of Earth has grown in only 350 years’ time, and the rate at which it has doubled.
Figure 3.4. Estimate of Earth’s total population from 10,000 b.c.e. to 2000 c.e. The steep increase approaching the year 2000 began in 1804 when the global population reached the one-billion mark. The dramatic population growth since that time is unprecedented in the history of the world and is key to the multiple crises of disappearing food, shrinking supplies of fresh water, and the decreasing availability of cropland necessary to sustain our global family. (Credit: EI T, public domain.)
Between the years 1650 and 1804, the population of the earth, which had remained under 500 million for so long, suddenly jumped to 1 billion people. Then, it took only 123 years to reach 2 billion. After that it seems there was no looking back. As the number of people in the world increased to 3, 4, 5, and 6 billion, the number of years it took to add each additional billion shrank from hundreds to 33, 14, 13, and 12, respectively. While our global family had reached the new record of about 6.89 billion by the year 2010 and is still growing, the rate of growth seems to have slowed from a peak, estimated by the United Nations, of 88 million people per year, in 1989, to the current 75 million people per year.1
The rate of population growth in the recent past, and where that growth is believed to be headed, has signaled an alarm for the governments, universities, and agencies whose job it is to track this kind of information. The above data is powerful evidence of an unsustainable trend: the doubling of the world’s population on a timescale that follows a predictable rhythm of cycles. And while the current trend suggests that the next doubling of our global family, from 4 billion (in 1974) to 8 billion, will occur by 2025, the experts believe that, if it happens at all, this will be the last time a doubling occurs until sometime in the 22nd century.
Another doubling in this century is doubtful, largely due to the sheer number of people likely to be involved in any crisis we’ll face during that time. Whether a pandemic disease, a shortage of food and water, or the death toll of war will prevent the next doubling is uncertain. What is certain is that each of these potential crises poses a very real threat—one that, if realized, would impact a huge number of people quickly. Although such a dramatic drop in global population is rare, it has occurred in the past. The spread of disease in the 14th century is a powerful reminder that such things are possible. Between 1348 and 1351 the “Black Death” spread throughout most of Europe. Although the sporadic record keeping of that time makes determining the exact death toll difficult, the estimated number of people killed by the plague ranges between 75 million and 200 million.
While today’s antibiotics make such a mortality rate unlikely, they only work to treat bacterial infections. The increase in the number of new viral infections that have no known cure, combined with modern air travel, which makes it possible for people to transport themselves in a matter of hours from areas of high infection rates to the biggest cities with the densest populations, makes this threat a very real source of concern. For reasons such as these, our ability to forecast population trends is a powerful tool in our toolkit to deal with a changing world and predict the demands that growing numbers of people are placing on the land that supports them. The CIA described the need for such information, saying: “The [population] growth rate is a factor in determining how great a burden would be imposed on a country by the changing needs of its people for infrastructure (e.g., schools, hospitals, housing, roads), resources (e.g., food, water, electricity), and jobs. Rapid population growth can be seen as threatening by neighboring countries.”2
As Joel E. Cohen, mathematical biologist and head of the Laboratory of Populations at The Rockefeller University, states in Scientific American, “The peak population growth rate ever reached, about 2.1 percent a year, occurred between 1965 and 1970. Human population never grew with such speed before the 20th century and is never again likely to grow with such speed.”3 The good news in Cohen’s assessment is that the population explosion appears to have peaked about 40 years ago. The flip side is that most of those born during that peak are still alive and need to find the resources of food, water, shelter, and jobs to sustain them through their life expectancy, now estimated to be an average of 67 years worldwide. This is where politics, technology, lifestyle, and age-old customs are converging to create the hotbed of crises that we see today.
In our world of diversity, it has often been easier to focus on the differences that divide us rather than the principles that unite us. Ours is the story of a species defined by religion, the color of our skin, the wealth of our societies, and the advancement of our technology. Within the 4.5 billion years that scientists estimate our world has been in existence, our nearest human ancestors emerged only about 250,000 years ago. During that relatively brief span of time, we’ve managed to seek out our differences and parlay them into the invisible boundaries of class and society that fuel our sense of separateness. Based upon those boundaries, countless members of our global family have suffered in ways that seem unthinkable, even unimaginable, to the minds of rational and loving people. Together, we share the darkness of a history punctuated by persecutions, inquisitions, enslavement, and attempts to eliminate entire races from the face of the earth.
Today, we’re in awe of the seemingly miraculous technology that allows us to combat disease and extend our lives to advanced ages. At the same time, we find ourselves in a world where the very life that so many people fight to preserve is routinely extinguished through the atrocity and violence of what has been called “man’s inhumanity to man.” While the development of high-tech weapons in the last century made it possible to destroy huge numbers of lives in a single day, history shows that something much deeper is responsible for creating what historian Eric Hobsbawm called “the most murderous century in recorded history.”1 In his assessment of the toll taken by what he calls “politically motivated carnage,” Zbiginew Brzezinski, former national security advisor under the Carter Administration, estimated that, by 1993, the violence stemming from our differences in the 20th century had cost between 167 and 175 million lives—roughly the equivalent of the populations of Great Britain, France, and Italy combined!3 Along with the battles to settle disputes over borders and resources, the last century saw a rise in horrors of a different kind—the seemingly relentless efforts to “cleanse” societies based upon principles beyond those of land and the ownership of natural resources. In 1948, the United Nations General Assembly chose the term genocide to describe this kind of violence, defining it as “a denial of the right of existence of entire human groups.” Article II of the 1948 UN Convention on Genocide further defined and described five categories of genocide with regard to human populations:
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Killing members of the group.
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Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group.
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Deliberately inflicting upon the group conditions of life designed to bring about its physical destruction, in whole or in part.
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Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.
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Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
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Figure 1.1: Estimated death tolls from inquisitions and episodes of genocide. Although the Crusades occurred before the time period discussed in the text, they are included for comparison. Statistics for the Balkans are conservative due to unreported civilian deaths, and may run as high as 4.8 million.2 Estimates are derived from averages of historic record.
The form of genocide based upon differences of race, religion, and heritage that is largely responsible for the magnitude of deaths reported by Brzezinski and others is called ethnic cleansing. Although the history of such persecutions began long before the modern era, it was the 300-year effort to drive the Native North Americans from their land and to eliminate their way of life that began the current trends, and the magnitude, of the genocide that has continued until today (see Figure 1.1). Between the Atlantic slave trade of the Africans and the holocausts of Native Americans in the 17th through 19th centuries, nearly 40 million humans had already perished due to differences of religion, race, and heritage before the horrors of the last century. With the addition of 20th-century atrocities throughout Europe, including the Jewish holocaust of World War II; the Polish holocaust of Christians and Catholics during World War II; and the ethnic cleansings that have occurred in the Balkan regions, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Africa, and Tibet, that number easily exceeds 53 million.
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Figure 1.2: Estimated death tolls from differences of religion and beliefs, AIDS, and natural disasters in the 20th century. Natural disasters exclude events such as droughts and famines.
To put such staggering numbers into perspective, while the last century is noted for its bloody wars, more than five times as many lives—80 million children, women, and men of all ages—were lost to violence based in ethnic, religious, and philosophical conflicts than were lost to all of the major natural disasters and the AIDS epidemic combined during the same period of time (see Figure 1.2). While historians generally agree upon these numbers, the numbers themselves are less significant than the magnitude of the story they tell. Perhaps it is for this reason that the last century is also known as the century that “murdered peace.”3