The Sunday Edition for December 29, 2019
Listen to this week's episode with host Michael Enright.
Where we have been in the last decade, where we are going in the next — Michael's essay: It's hard to think of a more tumultuous or disorienting decade than the 2010s — the forces of climate change, migration, technology, social media, in addition to political turbulence, made the world a very different place in 2019 than it was in 2010. On the final Sunday of the 2010s, in a special three-hour program, we will take the measure of the past 10 years and how they have changed us and the world.
A pendulum of political currents has shaped the past decade: For the last 10 years, the very foundations of the current political order seem to have been tested and found wanting. We watched the old consensus of liberal democracy crumble, while populist movements gained a foothold. We saw some of the largest progressive protests and social movements in years and, at the same time, saw some of the most right-wing governments in recent memory elected. Our discussion of the 2010s will begin with two observers of the turbulent and contradictory political currents that shaped the decade: Jennifer Welsh, a professor and Canada Research Chair in Global Governance and Security at McGill University. And Jeet Heer, National Affairs Correspondent for The Nation magazine.
The backlash against migration in the 2010s and bold ideas for the future: Migration became one of the defining issues of the past decade, with tens of millions of people forcibly displaced from their homes, and xenophobic, nationalist political parties rising up in response. McGill University law professor François Crépeau served as the UN's Special Rapporteur for the Human Rights of Migrants from 2011-2017. Crépeau looks back on a decade of mass migration and its political and social repercussions, and he outlines a new vision for the decades to come.
The last decade was the hottest in history, both in temperature and in our sense of urgency: The past ten years have brought profound shifts in the earth's climate, in the nature of environmental activism and in the scientific community. Katharine Hayhoe is the director of the Climate Science Center and a professor of political science at Texas Tech University. The renowned Canadian climate scientist is also the winner of the UN's highest environmental honour, the Champions of the Earth Award.
In the 2010s, the internet went from being 'elsewhere' to ruling our lives: Dizzying changes in the world of social media and the internet have had profound consequences — for how we consume the news, how we talk, how we vote, how we rest, how we learn, how we work, and how we view the world around us. Elamin Abdelmahmoud, curation editor at BuzzFeed News and co-host of the CBC podcast Party Lines, talks to Michael Enright about how the internet has changed us — for better and for worse — this decade.
Rebecca Solnit on the power of changing the narrative and writing our own stories: In her most recent book Whose Story Is This?, Rebecca Solnit argues that the question of who gets to narrate the story of our time matters deeply. From Idle No More to Black Lives Matter to Me Too, many of the biggest social movements of this decade have challenged dominant narratives and retold them from a different perspective.