Excerpt #15 from my book, Interconnected, Interrelated & Interdependent, Like It or Not:
IDENTIFYING CAUSE
Today we find ourselves faced with challenges of unprecedented scale and complexity, an outcome that represents the synergistic effect of our shortcomings.
Interestingly, we already possess every technology we require to solve our problems.
Our solutions, however, lie not in our technology but in ourselves.
As a civilization, we have travelled through the ages on an adventurous journey.
We have braved hardships, conquered diseases, endured nature’s fickleness, and have advanced ourselves in many respects.
We now face impasses that call for different kinds of resolutions, for they will not bow to technological quick-fixes.
They demand of us a shift of emphasis from the means to the meaning, from what we do to why and how we act, and to a re-evaluation of our motivations and values.
We now stand center stage as we have become the focus for what will or will not be possible for our species.
The responsibility for life has come full circle having been passed from the individual to the institution, to the state, and now back again to the individual.
The part we are asked to play is both elementary and profound, that of a caring and responsible person to ourselves, to each other, and to our environment.
If there is to be a worthwhile future for our planet and ourselves, we must pursue constructive, sustainable, and obtainable goals.
This is a task which must be undertaken immediately.
The time for action to prevent this outcome is running out.
Unless nations collectively and individually take bold and imaginative steps toward improved social and economic conditions, reduced fertility, better management of resources, and protection of the biosphere, our world’s troubles will only worsen.
Only a thorough reordering will do.
To achieve broad-based improvement in the human condition, national population and economic policies must be formulated that will put the world on a sustainable development path.
The components of such a path include, for example, stabilizing population, protecting the web of life, eliminating fossil fuels, long-term thinking, and directing financial resources to better the human condition instead of toward human annihilation.
“It is patently clear, without assigning praise or blame, that the nation-states of the globe are bereft not only of any common concept of world order but also of a clear, consistent view of national interest that could apply to anything beyond the contingency of the moment of a perilously short-term time scale.” (Raghavan Iyer)
It is important to understand how this predicament has developed, for it has not simply materialized out of nothing.
Given life’s countless choices, it may be that at several significant forks in the road, we chose the wrong branches.
The reverberations of those decisions have rippled down through the ages, gaining momentum in time.
What we are experiencing today are the increasingly visible and constantly escalating effects of those misjudgments.
The Road Not Taken
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
ROBERT FROST