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WORLD CITIZEN LETTER: 533
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WCL 533 September 2006
Where your treasure is will your heart be also!
If you really, REALLY want to shift our world to a peaceful one, try changing spending patterns. First, move ALL spending on lethal weapons to new places. Half must go to establishing the international courts, training police to replace soldiers and to making enforcement possible and rewarding. The flow of money into such areas would transform attitudes and ideas, making many cherished beliefs outmoded and creating new, co-operative, ways of living and working.
Next, spend the enormous sums available on trouble-spots. For example, turn Gaza and the West Bank into tourist attractions, with wages and salaries for working residents that will attract not only tourists the world over, but particularly Israeli businesses, eager not to be left out of the gold rush. The local standard of living would rise very quickly, immediately diminishing the local drive to end the Israeli occupation militarily. With sufficient funds, it would also have longer-term effects, all tending to make peaceful outcomes attractive and the poisonous local histories easier to forget.
Relocate the three-quarters of all scientists who throughout the world are presently engaged on various military activities – either making weapons or backup for war preparations. Instead they will need to be diverted to projects for improving people’s lives some known about but under-funded. Wells in drought-hit areas; land reclamation in counties suffering erosion and other similar help for the stricken. Electricity in remote areas. Build roads to villages in hilly areas still cut of from social service. The list is endless. All need application of the latest scientific advances: they are usually the last to get them.
Improve education in the poorest areas and pay parents to keep their children in school. Make funded programmes to include local participation, giving both incentive and encouragement for democratic inclusion. Use trained personnel, such as soldiers, retrained for more useful purposes, and ensure that police are trained in human rights administration. All such programmes will be costly and need to be carried out on an international scale to ensure that they are not used, as heretofore, largely to bolster national (and centralised) power structures, notably sovereign states.
Scientific advances that President George W Bush professes to expect to solve climatic change will cost huge sums. Not only in the most dangerous industrialised countries in Europe and North America but above all in China and India. The cost will have to be shared and its urgency understood. Without global co-operation and lots and LOTS of money there will be no hope of achieving anything substantial. At the same time as saving the planet our scientists will also at times be over-whelmed by new, presently unsuspected plagues that will be increasingly likely as the global population continues to grow.
The Law of Unintended Consequences will lead to unexpected problems. The birth-rate in many counties will sink drastically but without such changes the world will become even more over-populated. And, of course, it is easy to dismiss any such suggestions as those above as fanciful. But within a few short years the human race will be jointly faced with the prospect of a catastrophic collapse of our present environment stability.
What is indicated here will be the MINIMUM necessary for survival. Those of us who go before it happens may, very unfortunately, have the last laugh. Climatic change will be no laughing matter.
John Roberts
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