By Martin Scheinin
This blog post is published to honour the career of Professor Elina Pirjatanniemi. See more here.
It is the year 2076 and Sofi is turning 60. She is one of the estimated 300 million humans on Earth. When she was 10, there were 8 billion people. Humanity was decimated by floods, heat waves, food and water shortages, pandemics, and, of course, humans competing in killing each other. The worst decade was in the 2030s when a big part of the people in the south no longer could live where they wanted to be. Trying to save their lives, the only option was to embark on the long journey towards the north. Humans in the north thought that everything up there was all theirs, and without mercy, they used their weapons, money and technology to slaughter anyone who tried to cross what they called their “borders”, some imaginary lines on land or in water.
A little before that, in the last years of the 2020s, when Sofi was a young teenager, the world abandoned what used to be called “human rights”. It was fast and easy, and driven by something as petty as greed and misanthropy. The administrations in some places in the north, then called “states”, just stopped funding the planetary and regional organisations that sought to protect human rights under 20th century documents according to which all human beings, irrespective of who they were or where they lived, should have equal and inalienable “rights”, this word meaning entitlements in relation to all administrators and even in respect of each other. Those documents also had created panels of people whose job it was to determine whether somebody’s rights had been breached and how that breach was to be repaired. While this system was never perfect, it did function, with its ebbs and flows, over some fifty years
Sofi remembers those things well because both of her parents were professionals in the field of human rights. They wrote and spoke about them to others, also to the people in the administrations and even sat on the panels that decided disputes. They also wrote more texts about the texts. Sofi still has some of their books or pamphlets. She remembers her parents fondly. They were trying to save the world, and they thought that human rights were important in that mission. They had friends and colleagues in different parts of the world, and they travelled a lot, especially before the time Sofi was born and before people finally realised that the climate was collapsing and too much travel was one of the many causes.
Her parents were of course wrong. No paper could stop the climate collapse or the slaughter when things got really bad. But they and their international friends were good people, and they were also right, almost as much as they were wrong. What these good people stood for would have been great, had it succeeded. But it didn’t.
Today, life is tough for everyone. Much of nature and human achievements on earth were destroyed. Most of what was left behind is useless. Gradually, the less than five per cent of humans who survived found their ways to make use of some of the materials, equipment, machines and books that they found lying around. The Sun still provides a constant energy flow that can sustain life on Earth. Now everything that is produced, be it food, clothes or other material objects, is done utilising that energy flow. Mostly this happens using old solar panels from the 2020s and 2030s, as humans have found ways to keep them working or to make new ones, even if much less efficient than the old ones, due to needing to use raw materials that are available. The planet has stopped becoming hotter. By 2060, people in many places reached a stage where there is a surplus after meeting the basic survival needs of everyone in the community. Therefore, not everybody needs to be busy with cultivating or producing what is needed for the next day. Sofi remembers well the earlier phase. She was busy, but she also found happiness in it. Every day she saw the results of working with her own hands. She was able to feed her children and see them grow. She had her private sphere and a sense of dignity as an individual.
Now Sofi has a different job. Within her community she has been assigned the role of a scribe. She is working on a book that will be reproduced in multiple copies and stored for future generations. She calls it a Guidebook for Humans. There will be chapters about the past, about lessons from the time when humanity almost destroyed itself. Other chapters are about how humans can survive and lead a sustainable life in the new conditions on Earth – practical stuff about energy, materials, growing food, making tools and machines, and about books, different languages and so-called digital resources that are known to contain a lot of valuable information that needs to be preserved, even if it is not yet accessible to people. One chapter of the book is about what is known about other communities on Earth, what kind of contact with them has been established and how one can seek to make contact with other ones. The most important message to convey in this chapter is about patience: establishing contact and communicating with other humans on Earth will be difficult and slow, but still worth all the trouble.
Sofi’s community has contact with a vital community further north, calling themselves Sámi. They have survived in the post-collapse circumstances by restoring their relationship with nature and trusting in their oral history. They are, by and large, self-sufficient, herding their reindeer, fishing in highland lakes not contaminated by water in the now poisonous oceans, and collecting berries and herbs. The Arctic winter is long and cold, but the Sámi have well-insulated dwellings and warm clothing. Their key resources are reindeer for skins, bones, meat and transport, any vegetation sustained by the Arctic climate, and clean water. Every year, a small group of Sámi makes the long journey to visit Sofi’s community to exchange goods. Sofi has written a chapter about the Sámi as a success story, with a lesson to others.
Sofi’s favourite chapter is called Rules of Humanity, and therefore she works on it patiently throughout the process of putting together the whole Guidebook. Tentatively, the sections in this chapter are called ‘Freedom and Empathy’. ‘Dignity and Equality’ ‘Privacy and Community,’ ‘Wishes and Needs’ and ‘Humans and Non-humans’. She is thrilled with the idea of seeking to reconcile two seemingly competing values in every section. Sofi understands and also wants the future readers of the Guidebook for Humans to know that this part of her big project continues the work of her parents and their friends and colleagues some 50 years ago, on what then was called human rights. Even if the concept of human rights failed, the ideas behind them were much older than the rise and fall of human rights law as an artefact of the societies of the 20th century. Perhaps, she thinks, these ideas will gather attention again, and even more than ever before. Sofi feels motivated to pursue her book project, in the hope that future generations will be wiser than those who in the late 2020s first abandoned the framework of human rights and then in the 2030s almost destroyed life on Earth.
Martin Scheinin (@martinscheinin.bsky.social) is Part-time professor of international human rights law (European University Institute and Lund University).