Renowned journalist and columnist on international affairs Gwynne Dyer returns to the Timmins Museum: NEC for a discussion entitled The New World Disorder on Sunday, March 1st, 2015 at 7:00pm. Tickets are available at the museum for $10.00. Always informative and even entertaining, Dyer’s presentations never fail to enlighten, provoke, and stimulate.

Canadian forces have just been committed to combat for the third time in ten years: Afghanistan in 2006, Libya in 2011, and now Iraq. We’re only making air attacks this time, but it adds to the sense that the world is drifting out of control. The partition of Ukraine, the rise of a terrorist “Islamic Caliphate”, and the wildfire spread of Ebola fever; in their different ways each seems to mark a break with a past where things like that were simply not allowed to happen.

The fighting in Ukraine, with the unadmitted participation of Russian troops, has raised the spectre of a new Cold War. The unbridled cruelty of the ISIS fighters who created the “Islamic State” in parts of Iraq and Syria last summer (together with the little-noted capture of most of Libya by Islamist militias) suggests that Osama bin Laden’s dream of a Muslim world united under extremist leadership is creeping closer to reality. And the number of Ebola victims is doubling every couple of weeks; it may reach 1.4 million by the end of January.

There are lots more things to worry about, if you’re up for it. China’s relations with its neighbours are going from bad to worse, and its armed forces are growing fast. Climate change is moving quickly, and little is being done to contain it. New UN figures say that the world’s population will go on growing past the end of the century, by which time it may have reached 12.5 billion.

Has the dam really burst? Is the reasonably stable world of the past few decades going to be overwhelmed by violence and chaos? The level of fear of the future is definitely rising, and this lecture tackles it head-on. (Hint: it’s probably not as bad as it seems.)