Quotes
"Recognition of the one-ness of life on Earth, of its beauty and its sanctity, must be spread by an almost messianic revolution. The creation of awareness, of consciousness, of the need for change, needs a focus, a place from which it can radiate throughout the globe. "( Sir Mark Oliphant-deceased)
"Ultimately, this Earth can be saved from mankind only if people are prepared to live with nature, rather than upon nature. We have been taught that this world, and all plants and creatures thereon, were created for man's use: that he was given dominion over all other forms of life and that he must go forth and multiply. It is now clear that if he follows that belief his extinction is inevitable. Therefore, his whole relationship with Earth, with nature, must change rapidly. But relationships between individuals or between man and his environment are intellectual and of the spirit, rather than of material gain or loss." - Sir Mark Oliphant to Dr Michael Ellis
Sir Mark Oliphant - Father of Australian Science past Governor of South Australia Past President Australian Conservation Foundation Founder, Patron, Honorary President Renaissance group.
WORLD SCIENTISTS WARNING TO HUMANITY - SIGNED BY 1,600 LEADING SCIENTISTS INCLUDING HALF OF ALL NOBEL PRIZE WINNERS REPRESENTING 71 COUNTRIES. 18TH NOVEMBER 1992.
'No more than a few decades remain...we the undersigned, senior members of the world's scientific community, hereby warn all of humanity of what lies ahead. A great change in our stewardship of the Earth and life on it is required if vast human misery is to be avoided and our global home on this planet is not to be irretrievably mutilated.'
Albert Einstein wrote
'A human being is part of the whole that we call the universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences in himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest a kind of optical illusion of his consciousness. This illusion is a prison for us restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for only the few people nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living beings and all of nature.'
The highest wisdom has but one science, the science of the whole, the science explaining the whole creation and man's placement.' Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
'we are at war with the silent army that we do not even recognise, and we now are on an extinction curve, faster than at any time since the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.' Al Gore, Earth in the Balance.
'The possibility of a species wide destruction creates for the first time the necessity of a species wide ethic.' Erickson.
'Movements and non governmental organisations are now officially accredited with predicting the energy crisis as early as 1969, creating alternative fairer energy and sustainable development strategies and forcing issues of disarmament and peace, human rights and social justice on the national and international agendas.' Hazel Henderson, Politics of the Solar Age.
CHIEF SEATTLE'S 1854 ORATION"
AUTHENTIC TEXT OF CHIEF SEATTLE'S TREATY ORATION 1854
Yonder sky that has wept tears of compassion upon my people for centuries untold, and which to us appears changeless and eternal, may change. Today is fair. Tomorrow it may be overcast with clouds. My words are like the stars that never change. Whatever Seattle says, the great chief at Washington can rely upon with as much certainty as he can upon the return of the sun or the seasons. The white chief says that Big Chief at Washington sends us greetings of friendship and goodwill. This is kind of him for we know he has little need of our friendship in return. His people are many. They are like the grass that covers vast prairies. My people are few. They resemble the scattering trees of a storm-swept plain. The great, and I presume -- good, White Chief sends us word that he wishes to buy our land but is willing to allow us enough to live comfortably. This indeed appears just, even generous, for the Red Man no longer has rights that he need respect, and the offer may be wise, also, as we are no longer in need of an extensive country.
There was a time when our people covered the land as the waves of a wind-ruffled sea cover its shell-paved floor, but that time long since passed away with the greatness of tribes that are now but a mournful memory. I will not dwell on, nor mourn over, our untimely decay, nor reproach my paleface brothers with hastening it, as we too may have been somewhat to blame.
Youth is impulsive. When our young men grow angry at some real or imaginary wrong, and disfigure their faces with black paint, it denotes that their hearts are black, and that they are often cruel and relentless, and our old men and old women are unable to restrain them. Thus it has ever been. Thus it was when the white man began to push our forefathers ever westward. But let us hope that the hostilities between us may never return. We would have everything to lose and nothing to gain. Revenge by young men is considered gain, even at the cost of their own lives, but old men who stay at home in times of war, and mothers who have sons to lose, know better.
Our good father in Washington--for I presume he is now our father as well as yours, since King George has moved his boundaries further north--our great and good father, I say, sends us word that if we do as he desires he will protect us. His brave warriors will be to us a bristling wall of strength, and his wonderful ships of war will fill our harbors, so that our ancient enemies far to the northward -- the Haidas and Tsimshians -- will cease to frighten our women, children, and old men. Then in reality he will be our father and we his children. But can that ever be? Your God is not our God! Your God loves your people and hates mine! He folds his strong protecting arms lovingly about the paleface and leads him by the hand as a father leads an infant son. But, He has forsaken His Red children, if they really are His. Our God, the Great Spirit, seems also to have forsaken us. Your God makes your people wax stronger every day. Soon they will fill all the land. Our people are ebbing away like a rapidly receding tide that will never return. The white man's God cannot love our people or He would protect them. They seem to be orphans who can look nowhere for help. How then can we be brothers? How can your God become our God and renew our prosperity and awaken in us dreams of returning greatness? If we have a common Heavenly Father He must be partial, for He came to His paleface children. We never saw Him. He gave you laws but had no word for His red children whose teeming multitudes once filled this vast continent as stars fill the firmament. No; we are two distinct races with separate origins and separate destinies. There is little in common between us.
To us the ashes of our ancestors are sacred and their resting place is hallowed ground. You wander far from the graves of your ancestors and seemingly without regret. Your religion was written upon tablets of stone by the iron finger of your God so that you could not forget. The Red Man could never comprehend or remember it. Our religion is the traditions of our ancestors -- the dreams of our old men, given them in solemn hours of the night by the Great Spirit; and the visions of our sachems, and is written in the hearts of our people.
Your dead cease to love you and the land of their nativity as soon as they pass the portals of the tomb and wander away beyond the stars. They are soon forgotten and never return. Our dead never forget this beautiful world that gave them being. They still love its verdant valleys, its murmuring rivers, its magnificent mountains, sequestered vales and verdant lined lakes and bays, and ever yearn in tender fond affection over the lonely hearted living, and often return from the happy hunting ground to visit, guide, console, and comfort them.
Day and night cannot dwell together. The Red Man has ever fled the approach of the White Man, as the morning mist flees before the morning sun. However, your proposition seems fair and I think that my people will accept it and will retire to the reservation you offer them. Then we will dwell apart in peace, for the words of the Great White Chief seem to be the words of nature speaking to my people out of dense darkness.
It matters little where we pass the remnant of our days. They will not be many. The Indian's night promises to be dark. Not a single star of hope hovers above his horizon. Sad-voiced winds moan in the distance. Grim fate seems to be on the Red Man's trail, and wherever he will hear the approaching footsteps of his fell destroyer and prepare stolidly to meet his doom, as does the wounded doe that hears the approaching footsteps of the hunter.
A few more moons, a few more winters, and not one of the descendants of the mighty hosts that once moved over this broad land or lived in happy homes, protected by the Great Spirit, will remain to mourn over the graves of a people once more powerful and hopeful than yours. But why should I mourn at the untimely fate of my people? Tribe follows tribe, and nation follows nation, like the waves of the sea. It is the order of nature, and regret is useless. Your time of decay may be distant, but it will surely come, for even the White Man whose God walked and talked with him as friend to friend, cannot be exempt from the common destiny. We may be brothers after all. We will see.
We will ponder your proposition and when we decide we will let you know. But should we accept it, I here and now make this condition that we will not be denied the privilege without molestation of visiting at any time the tombs of our ancestors, friends, and children. Every part of this soil is sacred in the estimation of my people. Every hillside, every valley, every plain and grove, has been hallowed by some sad or happy event in days long vanished. Even the rocks, which seem to be dumb and dead as the swelter in the sun along the silent shore, thrill with memories of stirring events connected with the lives of my people, and the very dust upon which you now stand responds more lovingly to their footsteps than yours, because it is rich with the blood of our ancestors, and our bare feet are conscious of the sympathetic touch. Our departed braves, fond mothers, glad, happy hearted maidens, and even the little children who lived here and rejoiced here for a brief season, will love these somber solitudes and at eventide they greet shadowy returning spirits. And when the last Red Man shall have perished, and the memory of my tribe shall have become a myth among the White Men, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe, and when your children's children think themselves alone in the field, the store, the shop, upon the highway, or in the silence of the pathless woods, they will not be alone. In all the earth there is no place dedicated to solitude. At night when the streets of your cities and villages are silent and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled them and still love this beautiful land. The White Man will never be alone.
Let him be just and deal kindly with my people, for the dead are not powerless. Dead, did I say? There is no death, only a change of worlds.
19th of February 2003
PRESS COMMUNIQUE
"WAR CAN NO LONGER BE AN INSTRUMENT OF NATIONAL POLITICS"
With the Statement "War: A Crime Against Humanity" the Club of Budapest is launching a debate on the right of national states to declare and wage war as a means of settling issues of foreign policy. "Times are over when questions of war and peace could be decided in the context of international power politics," says Ervin Laszlo, President of the Club of Budapest, a global think-and-action tank with a hundred members including the Dalai Lama, Mikhail Gorbachev, Archbishop Tutu, Elie Wiesel, Peter Ustinov and others. "Right cannot be decided by might, in the international field any more than in the personal domain. In an interdependent global community every war between nations is fundamentally a civil war." Terrorists and potential aggressors must be stopped, but war is not the way to stop them. Warfare must be replaced by dialogue leading to mutual understanding as a basis of multilateral cooperation in regard to relations among nations in the political as well as in the economic and the ecological spheres.
According to the Club of Budapest, the project of creating a structure of global cooperation beyond the veto-power and special status of individual states is best pursued in the framework of a "World Futures Council" as proposed among others by Mikhail Gorbachev and Jacob von Uexkuell. The Council is to be constituted of one hundred independent individuals of high integrity who place the shared human interest above any parochial national or cultural interest. The Club of Budapest takes an active part in the creation of such a Council and will promote its work with special attention to questions of civil and political values and perceptions, and the humanism and sustainability of the policies motivated by them.
The following Statement is signed by Members of the Club of Budapest inter alia Sir Peter Ustinov, Paolo Coelho, Pir Inayat-Vilayat Khan, Zubin Mehta, Betty Williams, Hans Küng, Sir Sigmund Sternberg, Jane Goodall, Peter Russell, Vigdis Finnbogadottir, and Lady Fiona Montagu.
WAR: A CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY
The time has come for the world community to recognize that war, rather than an instrument for the elimination of terrorists and aggressors, is a crime against humanity. It is itself an act of aggression that threatens human life, and the environment on which human life vitally depends.
No other species kills massively its own kind: war is a uniquely human phenomenon. Such killing was never justified, but it had a marginal warrant at a time when war was waged among neighboring groups for the acquisition of territory with natural and human resources and could be limited to the territories and the warriors of the protagonists. At a time when resources are not limited to defined territories and hostilities cannot be contained, war is neither politically nor economically justified. Given that modern warfare kills innocent civilians, inflicts serious damage on the life-supporting environment, and may escalate to a global conflagration, waging war needs to be declared a crime against humanity. No nation-state should have the legitimate right to wage war against any other nation-state.
The stockpiling of weapons of mass destruction is not a warrant for waging war. Weapons of mass destruction-whether they are nuclear, chemical, biological, or conventional-are a threat to human life and habitat by whoever possesses them. They are not tolerable in the hands of any state, whether it is large or small, rich or poor, and headed by a dictator or by an elected politician. Such weapons need to be eliminated from the arsenals of every state, a task that is not the self-declared prerogative of any government but the responsibility of the global community of all peoples and states. There will be no lasting peace on earth until all weapons of mass destruction are destroyed, their production and stockpiling proscribed, and strategies calling for their use replaced by strategies of dialogue, negotiation and, if necessary, internationally agreed economic and political sanctions.
Attempting to eliminate weapons of mass destruction with weapons of mass destruction is to fight violence with violence on the principle of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, a policy that can end up making everyone blind and toothless. Aggressors and terrorists must be stopped, but war is not the way to stop them.
'We travel together, passengers on a little spaceship, dependent on its vulnerable resources of air and soil all committed for our safety for its security and peace, preserved from annihilation only by the work and care, and I would say the love we give our fragile craft. We cannot maintain it half fortunate and half miserable, half confident, half despairing, half slave to the ancient enemies of man, half free in a liberation of resources, undreamed of until this day. No craft, no crew can travel safely with such contradiction when their evolution depends on the survival of us all.' Adlai Stevenson, 1900-1965, Democratic US Presidential Candidate, 1952 and 1956.
Dr Robert Muller, former Assistant Secretary General , United Nations and the first Chancellor of the United Nations University of Peace, has said.
'The human species is making enormous progress. It has a worldwide, almost cosmic knowledge of space and time, and has global auditory, visual and communication abilities. It has global hands and feet, through industry and transportation. Through the Internet, it has a global brain. A global heart is nascent. A global soul or spiritual renaissance is underway. However, humanity is still in a primitive stage in its craving for immediate material satisfactions, craving for power, money and possessions.'
'The next stages will be those of morality, ethics, distinction between good and bad, extraordinary wisdom and fulfillment of life, a harmony with Earth, her elements, her nature and other species, her heavens and the unfoldment of time which we call evolution.'
'We are witnessing the birth of a new age - the age of right global values as we take a gigantic step forward in human and planetary evolution.'
'The revolt against global business is part of the overall process.'
'We have an incredibly important evolutionary role and responsibility.' Robert Muller.
When I went to the Moon, I was as pragmatic a test pilot engineer and scientist as any one of my colleagues.... but there was another aspect to my experience during Apollo 14......The first thing that came to mind as I looked at Earth was its incredible beauty...I knew that life in the Universe was not just an accident based on random processes. This knowledge came to me directly.... It was an experiential cognition. But still as real as the objective data upon which say the navigational programme was based."
Edgar Mitchell (Astronaut, supporter)