Even Mother Earth’s fury has failed to awaken us

Mother Earth has been the archetype of generosity and graciousness for as long as our planet has existed. Like every mother, though, there is a point where we push her too far and she loses her patience.

Even before the coronavirus pandemic, Mother Earth had already been giving us polite warnings that we were pushing her and our planet too far. Since then, she has started to show her frustration more frequently.

And yet we have continued to ignore the rapidly deteriorating state of our environment to the point where it is starting to threaten our very existence.

The weapons used in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, and elsewhere to destroy families and territories are not unlike the tools we humans have turned on Mother Earth, cutting down and torching her forests, parching her of freshwater, poisoning her soil, and overexploiting her resources.

We are right to be concerned about the harm humans are inflicting upon other humans, but we should be far more concerned by the existential threat posed to humanity by our wretched destruction of the environment that sustains us.

As we look around us, we see lakes and arable land disappear, pollinating insects dwindle, fish vanish from our oceans, and weather phenomena become ever more extreme.

We have continued to ignore the rapidly deteriorating state of our environment to the point where it is starting to threaten our very existence.

Hassan bin Youssef Yassin

The year 2023 was not only the hottest on record; it was an outlier in the trend of global warming, a slowly rising line suddenly turning exponential. 

Livelihoods around the world are being decimated by the greed of our fishing fleets, intensive agriculture, and our collective inability to acknowledge the harm, waste, and pollution that our daily lives inflict on the planet.

Despite our highly advanced information and communication technologies, empathy and understanding are losing ground, creating division at the very moment that we most need cooperation to stave off this common threat.

The hurt and delusion, the staggering self-interest of the media, corporations, and politicians, and the tragic blindness and complacency of humanity are all leading us toward the precipice.

Even the rage of Mother Earth has failed to awaken us. Must it take an even greater natural disaster to jolt us into action before it is too late? 

• Hassan bin Youssef Yassin worked closely with Saudi Arabia’s petroleum ministers Abdullah Tariki and Ahmed Zaki Yamani from 1959-67. He led the Saudi Information Office in Washington from 1972-81 and served with the Arab League’s observer delegation to the UN from 1981-83.