Robert Muller: [GMW #2220] Learning To Be Careful Managers Of Our Planet With Global Consciousness

Tuesday, May 24, 2011

[GMW #2220] Learning To Be Careful Managers Of Our Planet With Global Consciousness

Idea Dream - Robert Muller's Ideas 1001 to 1500

~ Ideas 1455 to 1466 ~ 5 to 16 July 1998

I have been invited to attend again a Findhorn conference in England but am unable to go. To support the advocacy work of that splendid environmental organization, I reproduce here the following text:

Transcript of short talk by Robert Muller
to the Ecovillages and Sustainable Development Conference
in Findhorn, in October 1995

In my 40 years in the UN, I have seen three very basic changes. From 1945-70 the UN was focused on humanism and humans; on avoiding war, on preventing children dying, and on The Declaration of Human Rights. The Charter of the UN does not mention the Earth. Why? Because in our belief the Earth was limitless. This continued until the late 60's when poets like Rachel Carson and advanced countries like Sweden began to notice that something was wrong with nature around us.

A completely new period of history thus started with the First World Conference on the Environment in Sweden in 1972. There was continuation of the preoccupation with humans, but also a new preoccupation with the world around us. It was only in the late 60's that we realized that we had a population problem, because the fertility rate continued at about the same level, while the mortality rate was declining. The population explosion intensified the problem of the environment. In 1980 we began to get warnings from climatologists that something was going wrong with the world's climate.

As a result since 1980 we have entered a third period – from now on the Earth is number one, and humanity is number two. Humanity is number two because we wish humans to decline on this planet. And we have begun to question the consumption of resources by Western countries which is 30 times the amount consumed by developing countries. Believing that the world was unlimited, we started with the discipline and science called economics, (from Greek, oikonomos, the management of the home), before ecology, (the Greek, oikologos, the knowledge of the home). We began to manipulate the home before we knew what we were manipulating. Economics should have been and should become a sub-science of ecology.

The prospect of the third millennium has an incredible effect. Humanity is preparing itself for a new millennium and century. I have pages and pages of events which will take place even beyond the year 2000.

There is reason for optimism. Humanity is really trying. But we are only in the kindergarten of the global age. We have not yet learned to be the careful managers of our planet. We are still its exploiters.

I have just attended the Gorbachev meeting on the State of the World in San Francisco, and I have gained a lot of hope. They had the courage to get some of the best world experts to look into the state of the world and into the future, to create a vision of the society we want in the next millennium...and then do it. They want to implement the population plan, support simple and frugal lives, and get multinational corporations to acquire global consciousness. This gives me hope. From a pessimistic young man, when I entered the UN immediately after World War II, I have become an optimistic elder.

Let me give you some very specific recommendations and ideas:

Idea 1455 Create a World Association of Eco-Communities to be NGO-accredited by the UN.

Robert's The Miracle, Joy and Art of Living,
Volume II Chapter 5 - Of Love
Love is our only salvation, the only cement and uplifting force that holds us upright in the mysterious, fathomless universe.

Love is our voluntary, conscious, willful endearment with life, with the Earth and with the positive flows of the universe.

UN News Sources - UN Chronicle, United Nations News Service , UN Wire News Archive
References: Earth Charter, Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Rights of: Children, Women, Indigenous People
To Be Written: Rights of Nature, Birds, Animals, Fish, etc.

Photo Credit: June Marie SobritoLocation: Larchmont, NY

When nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Books recommended by Robert are here.
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