| 情報・電子系応用分野 |
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| 生命系応用分野 |
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| 環境系応用分野 |
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理事長武田郁夫から武田賞を受け取るワイツゼッカー氏。
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Dr. Takeda, Professor Suzuki, ladies
and gentlemen, from the bottom of my heart I feel the
gratitude for receiving this very unusual award. As I
had the chance to say yesterday, I felt particularly flattered
being piggy-backed into Bio Schmidt-Bleek's Rucksack and
thereby joining with him in this fantastic award. But
whatever our merits may have been in the past, let us
have a look into the future, the present challenges, and
how we can deal with them in the future.
There are perhaps nine months to go to the World Summit on Sustainable Development at which occasion peoples of the world are going to look back 10 years to the Earth Summit for Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro and will be disappointed. At Rio de Janeiro some kind of a triangle was established of sustainable development consisting of the three corners-economy, economy and social equity.
I'm afraid that during the last 10 years we have seen the triangle narrowing down essentially to economic considerations and a gross neglect of both environment and social equity. The gap has grown dramatically between rich and poor. It has nearly doubled, and today we are losing some 100 animal or plant species every day.
We have got to reverse these trends. How can we do that? I can suggest two major tasks ahead. One, which I addressed yesterday, is redirecting technological progress essentially by emphasizing the increase of resource productivity while, at the same time, perhaps doing a little less on increasing labor productivity because labor is in over-supply. We have 800 million unemployed or underemployed people on this earth while nature is in short supply. We will be able to quadruple resource productivity enabling us then to double wealth, mostly, I hope, to the favor of the poor, and cut resource use in half.
But alone this is not going to happen. Markets are not going to give the signals, so we may have to have a re-invention of democracy so that people affected by what goes wrong can raise their voice through the mechanisms of democracy--I'm happy to join Richard in this regard--but re-inventing the democracy this time for the global scale because originally democracy was invented for the nation state, which is rather powerless in the global economy. So, it seems there are important, even grandiose, tasks ahead worthy of the efforts of people who may win the Takeda Awards during the next 100 years.
Thank you. |
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