Ensuring sustainability
It’s hard to predict what things will be like on earth many years from now but it seems certain that future generations, if they exist at all, may well wonder: How can it be that with so much knowledge, so much intelligence, so much inventiveness, so many scientific and technical skills, humanity failed to find a way to meet the most basic need: the eternal demand for sustainability? How can it be that the greatest wealth-generating period in history, the age of the greatest achievements in technology and health, the age which studied, revived and rehashed all previous cultures, extracting the quintessence from each one, in the end failed to take into serious consideration the problems it inherited and, above all, the problems it caused – the environmental problems which torpedoed this ingenious, complex and contradictory time. Problems related to our approach to life (unfettered materialism and individualism, vanity and vacuousness) undermined hopes for a full, happy and dignified existence. Social problems (poverty, violence, intolerance) jeopardized what had been achieved until then. It is to be hoped that the above questions will never come up. However, it’s hard to deny that ensuring a decent world for our children and grandchildren on Earth is not such a popular concern…
