Major challenges
The major challenge of the present half-century will consist in living - and even surviving - in a world that is drifting and may even head towards its own destruction. This challenge could be reduced to a few major issues, both complex and mutually reinforcing. We are actually facing a systemic challenge, in other words a problem that does not admit simple solutions or isolated responses. It is for this very reason that the political class and the prevailing governance processes are helpless: they all tend to formulate linear or simplistic cause and effect responses, whereas systems analyses and holistic approaches should be methodically used.
The biggest of these issues is obviously growth: an exponential and destructive growth that affects all natural balances. Demographic growth - which will hopefully reach a plateau in the decades to come - will continue to impose an excessive load on the carrying capacity of the Earth. Industrial and urban growth, which will also reach its limits because it's unsustainable – will further destroy our environment and exhaust our natural resources. They both lead to chain imbalances, which will become more and more difficult to control.
The issue of oil and alternatives energies will also become crucial in all societies. The inevitable depletion of oil resources leads to the end of the societies and ways of life as we know them today. The control of the remaining hydrocarbon reserves and the development of alternative energies have already become a major issue for the coming years. These changes will have both geopolitical and economic dimensions. The clashes of which they are bearers also announce others clashes for other declining resources such as the water, the land and other resources.
All these upheavals will seriously endanger the planet: eco-systems, first, most of which are threatened by human predators (hunting, fishing, deforestation, etc.) or, indirectly, by the destructive effects of their activities (overexploitation of land, desertification, pollution, etc.). Animal and vegetable species will disappear irremediably and, with them, irreplaceable biological wealth. Eco-systems will therefore enter into crisis following the loss of essential vital links. And the entire planet will further enter the turmoil, with global warming and climate change, which will upset its configuration and expose all its peoples to extreme risks.
Against this background of widespread crisis, tensions will multiply within societies but also between nations. Future changes will have a direct impact on the lives of individuals, from the poorest to the richest. The former will try to survive - and occasionally rise up - while the latter will monopolize an increasing share of the wealth to perpetuate their social domination. This situation will create extreme tensions within societies, while at the same time fueling the struggle for the control of the resources. The temptation will then be great for the ruling classes to set up police regimes while embarking on military adventures to get their hands on the wealth of the neighbor.
These tensions will also develop against a backdrop of widespread intolerance exploited and manipulated by unscrupulous leaders. Marginalization of large sectors of the society, inter-community coexistence every time more difficult and violent affirmation of cultural identities in face of the aggressive globalized model promoted by the capital will lead to ever more intolerance. The fear of the Other and the specter of terrorism, cleverly exploited by the ruling class, will become the trigger of an endless race towards assumed security , as we see right now in the world.
All this inevitably leads - if we don't care - to a repressive world, the advent of which the ruling classes are already working at. Because, failing to control the upheavals to come and the tensions they will induce, the temptation will be great for the privileged to set up police regimes to control populations while protecting their wealth and their power. This new type of totalitarianism will materialize through an endless race towards increased security measures and the placing of the societies under surveillance, processes already quite advanced. It will lead us directly, if we do not react in time, to the death of the democracy and of the fundamental rights.
