Humankind Advancing, Vol.9, No.1 January 1998

AWARENESS OF GLOBAL PROBLEMS

Excerpts from Dr. Robert Muller's "2000 Ideas for a Better World"


Once it is conscious of the imperative need for proper Earth government, humanity will have to respond to the following complaints by the Earth:

"Why did I have to take all of a sudden a population increase from 2.5 billion people in 1952 to 5.6 billion today, more than a doubling in less than fifty years?"

We could answer as an excuse: "It happened out of sheer ignorance.... The UN warned nations and humanity by means of world population conferences and every other possible means that a population explosion was upon us. But religions and other factors opposed it."

The Earth would have other complaints, she would ask for example:

Why EACH MINUTE do you destroy 21 hectares (52 acres) of my tropical forests (38 million acres a year) after having destroyed most of the forests in your "rich" countries?

do you consume 35,725 barrels of oil to run around in cars and circle around me in airplanes?

do you let 50 tons of fertile soil be wasted or blown off my cropland?

do you add 12,000 tons of carbon dioxide to my atmosphere, to the air you breathe?

Why EACH HOUR do you let 685 hectares of productive dryland become desert?

do you spend 12 million dollars on military expenditures, a trillion a year?

are 55 people poisoned and 5 killed by pesticides?

are 60 new cases of cancer diagnosed in the United States alone,

over 5,000,000 cases each year with 20,000 cases leading to death, because of the thinning of my ozonosphere which protected you from the ultra-violet rays of the sun?

Why EACH DAY do 25,000 people die of water shortage and contamination?

are 10 tons of nuclear waste generated in 420 nuclear plants?

do 250,000 tons of sulfuric acid fall as acid rain in the northern hemisphere, killing lakes and devastating remaining forests?

are 60 tons of plastic packages and 372 tons of fishing nets dumped into the seas by commercial fishermen, killing fishes, sea birds and sea mammals?

does every five hours a species become extinct on my surface?

Why DURING A HUMAN LIFETIME do you dump so much garbage and waste on me: while the average is 150 times of the weight of a person in a poor country over a lifetime, why does the average American leave behind a mountain of waste 4,000 times his own weight?

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Dr. Robert Muller, Chancellor Emeritus of the University for Peace, worked for over 30 years with the United Nations, in the later period as Assistant Secretary General.