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17/11/2000 The proverbial man - or maybe these days it should be the woman - from Mars arriving on planet Earth at the opening of the third millennium would surely be amazed at how as intelligent a race as homo sapiens could have got himself into quite such a pickle over the stewardship of this particular lump of spinning rock, third out from the Sun.. Despite the bounty of the Earth, and her readiness to heal the polluting wounds we daily inflict upon her, we are in serious danger of obliterating our own species through not much more than carelessness, lack of attention and failure to co-operate with our fellow beings. Indeed the visitor from Mars could be forgiven for concluding that only some dark, malevolent genius could have engineered our current state: a world riven by gross disparities of wealth and life expectancy; by armed conflicts, most prevalent in its poorest regions; by the exploitation of women and children. A world so rich that it can afford to spend two billion dollars a day on arms but which cannot afford to provide universal education or healthcare and where 40,000 children die needlessly every day from easily treatable maladies. A world of six billion individuals, facing a population explosion on the one hand and an AIDS pandemic on the other, and yet one which cannot afford to maintain a supply of condoms to its poorest and most fertile citizens. Strangest of all, a world which has only just stepped back from the brink of nuclear holocaust only to find that its industrial and deforestation activities are posing a slower, but in the long run an equally certain, risk of annihilation. If these events have come about as a result of human action, the Martian might argue, then there is still hope. Learning to co-operate for the strategic good of the planet may be difficult - but surely it cannot pose greater problems than flying to the Moon - or even Mars, for that matter. Maybe it is time to commit serious money, serious resources to understanding how we might manage ourselves better - to commence a new enlightenment. The money to come from defence budgets. "We must indeed all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately," remarked Benjamin Franklin to Thomas Hancock as he signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Quite so, Mr Franklin, quite so.
©EuropaWorld 2000 - Copyright Policy
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