Columns:: Worth Repeating

since 12/15/98

Columns::April 1, 2002

Worth repeating

Peter Raven, head of the Missouri Botanical Garden and one of Time magazine’s “heroes for the planet,” delivered this year’s Odum Lecture last month, on “Biodiversity, Sustainability and Extinction.” An excerpt:
“You can make arguments about how the world is going to hell in a handbasket forever without really inspiring people to action. What’s really needed to inspire people to action is an intrinsically spiritual change which has to come from within, because unless we take a different attitude--unless we are preoccupied with more than what’s going to happen to us in the next two hours or the next two days, unless we really care about the plight of people throughout the world. . .--we’re unlikely to be dedicated enough to making a change to see it really come about.
“On the other hand, if we can . . . help those in our schools, churches, communities of every kind, to look with open eyes at the world as it really is and to consider the ways in which we depend on that world, if we can do that the operations of our individual institutions will be successful and we will really be making a valid contribution to the kind of world where our grandchildren might really like to live in the future. There is no doubt that the world is becoming a more homogeneous, less diverse, less prosperous, and less healthy (in the sense of epidemic diseases) place. There’s no doubt that it’s going to end up less interesting and more homogenized than it is now.
“We will become sustainable--because the world can produce only so much. We’ve got to be sustainable at some point. But the choice that we’ve got before us is whether we will become sustainable in a pleasant, rich, interesting world or not.”

--Beth Roberts

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