“Our global
civilisation is clearly on the edge of failure and the most important task it
faces, preserving the lives and well-being of its citizens and the future
habitability of the planet. But if we’re willing to live with the growing
likelihood of nuclear war shouldn’t we also been willing to explore vigorously
every possible means to prevent nuclear war. Shouldn’t we consider in every
nation major changes in the traditional ways of doing things, a fundamental
restructuring of economic political social and religious institutions. We’ve
reached a point where there can be no more special interests or special cases,
nuclear arms threaten every person on the Earth. Fundamental changes in society
are sometimes labelled impractical or contrary to human nature, as if nuclear
war were practical or as if there’s only one human nature. But fundamental
changes can clearly be made, we’re surrounded by them. In the last two
centuries abject slavery which was with us for thousands of years has almost
entirely been eliminated in a stirring worldwide revolution. Women,
systematically mistreated for millennia are gradually gaining the political and
economic power traditionally denied them and some wars of aggression have
recently been stopped or curtailed because of a revulsion felt by the people in
the aggressor nations. The old appeals to racial sexual religious chauvinism
and to rabid nationalist fervor are beginning not to work. A new consciousness
is developing which sees the earth as a single organism and recognizes that an
organism at war with itself is doomed. We are one planet. One of the great
revelations of the age of space exploration is the image of the earth finite
and lonely, somehow vulnerable, bearing the entire human species through the
oceans of space and time.”
