Extract of BBC report
Jeffrey Sachs delivers the first of five lectures at The Royal Society, London where he outlines 3 common challenges facing mankind and argues that we must adapt to the new age before it is too late!
The greatest challenge is learning to live in a crowded and interconnected world that is creating unprecedented pressures on human society and on the physical environment. Peace as a way of solving problems is a crucial concept for us since we are on a path of increasing risk and increasing instability, and by all objective measures the path of increasing hatred as well. We have not yet found a way of solving problems that our generation faces now.
According to Sachs, the 3 common problems are:
(1) The challenge of the Anthropocene – That is the idea that the physical systems of the planet -- chemical fluxes, the climate, habitats, biodiversity, evolutionary processes -- are to an incredible and unrecognized extent under human forcings (influences) that now dominate a large measure of the most central ecological, chemical and bio-physical processes on the planet.
(2) The challenge of geo-politics or the Age of Convergence – It's the notion that in a world that is more connected than ever before, a world where economic development, at least for the last 250 years, has been driven by technology, and now a world where those technologies diffuse rapidly around the world. One result is that there will be in our time a fundamental shift of economic power, and the political power that goes along with it. The unfortunate thing is we're (especially the West and the currently privileged) not ready for it.
(3) The challenge of the weakest links – In an interconnected world, all parts of the world are affected by what happens in all other parts of the world. We cannot be surprised when events in some far off and distant place can be of fundamental significance even for survival, for the spending of hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars for the direction of global politics especially those places in the world that suffer, where people die because they are too poor and those parts of the world which face horrific challenges to even get onto the ladder of development.
He cited examples such as the problem of peace-keeping in Darfur which is the poorest place on the whole planet where there is not enough water to keep people alive and where the electricity grid is hundreds of miles away. He questioned the situation where people are devoting massive sums of money to weapons that could be better devoted to combat ignorance, poverty and disease. He even shown us that one day's Pentagon spending could cover every sleeping site in Africa for five years with anti-malaria bed nets. His conclusion is amazingly simple: we do have choices -- they are good ones if we take them.
What do you think, friends?
Listen to his speech: Bursting at the Seams.
