 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
92
PART III
SHORT TEXTS
ANNUAL REPORT ON SPACESHIP EARTH
Passengers of Earth:
1. As you know, we are hurtling through space at about 107,000 km/hr on a fixed course. Although we
can never return to home base to take on new supplies, the ship has a marvelous and intricate life-support
system.The system uses
5 solar energy to recycle the chemicals needed to provide a reasonable number of us with adequate water,
air and food.
2. Let me briefly summarize the state of our passengers and our life-support system. There are about 4
billion of us on board, with more than 150 nations occupying various sections
10 of the craft. About 25% of you have inherited the good-toluxurious quarters in the tourist and first-class
sections, and you have used approximately 80% of all resources available this past year. In fact, most of the
15 North Americans have the more lavish quarters. Even though they represent only about 5% of this year’s
resources.
3. I am sad to say that things not have really improved for the 75% of our passengers travelling in the
hold. Over one-third of you are suffering from hunger, malnutrition, or both,
20 and three-quarters of you do not have adequate water or shelter. These numbers will certainly rise as your
soaring population wipes out any gains in food supply and economic development.
25
4. However, the overpopulation of the hold in relation to available food is only part of the problem.
There is a second type of overpopulation that is even more serious because it threatens our entire life-support
system. This type is occurring in the tourist and first-class sections. These sections are overpopulated in
30 relation to the level of resource consumption and the resultant pollution of our environment. For example,
the average North American has about 25 to 50 times as much impact on our life-support system as each
35 passenger travelling in the hold, because the North American consumes 25 to 50 times as much of our
resources and causes 25 to 50 times as much pollution. In this sense, then, the North American section is the
most overpopulated one on the ship.
5. In addition to these matters, I am concerned at the lack of cooperation and the continued fighting
40 among some groups, which can destroy many, if not all, of us. Only about 10% of you are American and
Russian, but your powerful weapons and your unceasing threats to build even more destructive ones must
concern each of us.
6. Passengers of Earth: we are now entering the early stages of our first major spaceship crisis — an
45 interlocking crisis of overpopulation, pollution, resource depletion, and the danger of mass destruction by
intergroup warfare. Our most thoughful experts agree that the situation is serious, but certainly not hopeless.
On the contrary, they feel that it is well within man's ability to learn how to control our population growth,
50 pollution and resource consumption, and to learn how to live together in cooperation and peace. But we have
only about 30 to 50 years to deal with these matters, and we must begin now.
from: Time magazine
«WHAT REALLY MATTERED»
by Otto Friedrich
A. Any man who gets to be managing editor of The New York Times can safely be described as a man
blessed with selfconfidence. E. Clifton Daniel, now 75, demonstrated that quality anew last week when he
5 ventured to name the ten most important headlines of the 20th century in connection with an international
project called Chronicle of the 20th Century, for which Daniel served as an editor, and which undertakes to
tell the history of the era in headlines and quasi* news stories. Daniel's top ten:
*quasi — resembling, or seeming, but not actually