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| Individual/Humanity Well-Being |
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| World Environmental Well-Being |
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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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