“We stand at a critical moment in Earth’s history, a time when humanity must choose its future. As the world becomes increasingly independent and fragile, the future at once holds great peril and promise. To move forward we must recognize that in the midst of a magnificent diversity of cultures and life forms we are one human family and one Earth community with a common destiny. We must join together and bring forth a sustainable global society founded on respect for nature, universal human rights, economic justice, and a culture of peace. Towards this end, it is imperative that we, the peoples of the Earth, declare our responsibility to one another, to the greater community of life, and to future generations”.
What we’re doing:
In the modern world there’s mostly an inverse relationship between individual human development and the so called development or industrialization, of what are thought of as poorer, or ‘underdeveloped’ countries. On average, the least psychologically developed humans (those who are adolescent and patho-adolescent) appear to be in the self-described “developed” countries (the First and Second Worlds). The most developed (mature) humans appear to be , on average, those in the traditional and indigenous Fourth World societies- those very few cultures, that is, that have so far escaped the social and ecological pillage of industrial “development” and “progress”.
Diversity is the health of life giving systems or ecosystems. Every new species, every last variation within a species, represents a heightened chance of survival under unpredictable conditions. As advanced as the best laboratories may be, we continually discover substances in the plants and animals around us that may heal and nourish. For instance, there have been reports of a chemical isolated from the bark of a rare yew tree that provides the promise of a cancer cure; and yet another of a new class of drugs extracted from a nondescript garden spider that will help treat stroke and epilepsy. This is why the steadily accelerating rate of extinction we witness today impoverishes us even if it is in ways we may never realize. How much more important it is, to protect the diversity of talent and intelligence we find amongst our own kind.
