United Nations – Opinions

Dec. 11, Rick Halperin, the director of the SMU Dallas Human Rights Program, along with John Vernon, law professor SMU Dallas Dedman School of Law, for a commentary advocating that world leaders reconsider and recommit to the tenets and spirit considered 75 years ago when the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights was drafted. Published in the Dallas Morning news under the heading 1948 U.N. declaration is the sanity we need now: https://tinyurl.com/37u87eay

It is hard for most Americans to fathom the wounded state of the world as it was in October 1945.

The Northern Hemisphere was in ruins. Europe, the Soviet Union, much of Asia and particularly Japan were coming to grips with the utter devastation wreaked by World War II during which 70 million people, mostly civilians, were killed.

In 1945, there was no understanding of the Holocaust, which had claimed the lives of 17 million people, 6 million of whom were Jewish. Two atomic bombs had been dropped late in the war on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, unleashing the atomic age. All of this had come on the deadly heels of World War I, which had claimed at least 20 million lives, half of whom were civilians.

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May 20, Jo Guldi, data scientist, historian, and Associate Professor at SMU Dallas, for a piece advocating for world-wide equity in land ownership as one means to combat global warming. Published in Foreign Policy News under the heading We need a global government of land, air and water: https://bit.ly/3MyYlxv

Polls show that two-thirds of Americans believe that the government should do more to combat climate change. Over the past decade, the People’s Climate March (2014 and 2017), Extinction Rebellion (2018-21) and the March for Science (2017) have come and gone without achieving systemic reforms or creating political mechanisms . That’s because Americans have only been thinking about America. To fight the unprecedented, planetary challenge of climate change, we need politicians willing to run on a platform of international solidarity that claims Earth as a space for human life.

Parochialism is entirely understandable. Climate change in the abstract is made real at home, literally. All Americans, particularly indigenous, ethnic, and working-class Americans are near the brunt of climate change: they inhabit landscapes made toxic by corporate dumping or easily flooded by increasingly violent storms. Yet Americans’ experience is not unique. The same issues elsewhere articulate a global emergency.

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