Brighter Times to Come

Fülszöveg

Brighter Times to Come
One world or no world. The news item was drowned in the flood of world news: somewhere off Florida one night, a deep-sea fisherman fell overboard unnoticed and swam an astonishingly long distance to the safety of the coast. Asked how he had managed it even though he was not a good swimmer and was clearly only moderately fit, he replied, "I had a simple choice: sink or swim."
The world community is in the same position as that swimmer. It has a choice: either it solves the global problems of over-population, famine, dying species and the greenhouse effect, or it is done for. There is now no escaping this either/or situation. Anyone who thinks this is exaggerated does not read his newspapers, or - even worse - does not understand what he reads. If this book nevertheless does not report a great deal about the disastrous state of the globe - more or less assuming that the reader will be familiar with the situation there is a simple justification for that. We... Tovább

Fülszöveg

Brighter Times to Come
One world or no world. The news item was drowned in the flood of world news: somewhere off Florida one night, a deep-sea fisherman fell overboard unnoticed and swam an astonishingly long distance to the safety of the coast. Asked how he had managed it even though he was not a good swimmer and was clearly only moderately fit, he replied, "I had a simple choice: sink or swim."
The world community is in the same position as that swimmer. It has a choice: either it solves the global problems of over-population, famine, dying species and the greenhouse effect, or it is done for. There is now no escaping this either/or situation. Anyone who thinks this is exaggerated does not read his newspapers, or - even worse - does not understand what he reads. If this book nevertheless does not report a great deal about the disastrous state of the globe - more or less assuming that the reader will be familiar with the situation there is a simple justification for that. We are addressing those swimmers (to use the same metaphor) who believe that there is a safe coast beyond the dark horizon, and who are swimming on.
In Mali, for example, there are people who are holding back the desert with stones. There are farmers in the dust bowl of Rajasthan who are wresting the law of shortages out of the hands of the experts. There are Indios in Southern Mexico who receive a fair price for their coffee and are not exposed to the ruinous conditions of the world market. There is a comparatively poor country, like Venezuela, showing the rich North what can be done if nature conservation is taken seriously. There are Australians who refuse to accept the judgment of common sense, which says that it is impossible to protect a 1,200-mile-long reef properly. They are protecting it all the same, just differently. Then the decades of work by nature
conservationists struggling to defend the last continent against "cultivation" by Man have suddenly been crowned with success - just when everything appeared lost. Antarctica is not to be thrown open to plundering, at least not yet.
All these may be signs of brighter times to come, a silver lining, in other words, which cannot yet illuminate the prevailing darkness. And yet - or perhaps for precisely that reason -, it may make sense to present these examples, because one thing is certain: success encourages others.
The WWF, the German famine relief organisation Deutsche Welthunger-hilfe, the Third World trading organisation GEPA, UNEP (the United Nations Environment Programme) and many others have realised what is meant by the motto "One world or no world". We have a choice. But not for long. Vissza