Sense & sustainability

All of last week, the world was plunged into chaos. As US President Donald Trump announced tariffs, ratcheted them up, then paused some but peaked others, markets collapsed while recessionary fears rose. Indeed, the global public went on a rollercoaster ride, fuelled by the Trump regime’s Great Gatsby-like blasé sensibilities. The chaos only stopped with a 90-day tariff hiatus proclaimed — except for China. What happens after this interval is anyone’s guess, including, in all likelihood, a by-now bleary-eyed Donald Trump’s.

However, one thing is for sure — this turmoil too shall pass. Like several societal events, this will have a transitory nature, not because its impacts will be small, but because humanity will invent many new cataclysms, even before we complete calculating our tariffs. These taxes themselves stem out of unthinking human tendencies. The Trump administration blames them on a long history of globalisation and a short one of inflation — both grew from a brew of ceaseless activity, the first causing worldwide webs of supply chains, wrecking nature to reach products to our doorsteps, the second emerging from a pandemic where humans broke the natural world to the point of unleashing a virulent virus. These events shook societies. Yet, many view them now through an amnesia-like fog, unwilling to learn the lessons ravaging nature holds for us.

Importantly though, the greatest crisis on Earth today is not tariff wars — it is climate change. Through gigantic commerce, mining, militarism and industrialisation, our planet-heating emissions have caused the Anthropocene — an era of indelible human impacts upon Earth. Its metrics include temperature rise — January 2025 was the hottest month on record — to glacial ice loss (the last five years have seen the most rapid glacier retreat ever), sea level rise of 4.5 mm per year and extreme weather events, heatwaves, fires and floods sweeping the Palisades to the Philippines already in 2025. We have altered the very breath of our planet — those impacts will change Earth forever.
This is where the ‘sense’ part comes in. Increasingly, the world is seeing companies and countries wake up, smell the storms and switch to sustainability. From joining the clean energy transition to adopting net zero practices, multiple nations have joined the Paris Agreement, whose earnest hope is that there are evenings in Paris — and Mumbai, Manila, London and Tokyo — left for people to peacefully enjoy. The move to sustainability is also strategically smart — as Times Evoke’s global experts emphasise, the resilience it has given China lets it stare down the world’s biggest superpower today. Join Times Evoke in exploring the Anthropocene where tariff clouds have a silver lining — it’s called sustainability.