"Towards Eco-Responsibility: The Need for New Education, New Technologies, New Teams, and New Ecomomics."

We have lived through the Century of Science. We have discovered the rules of matter and energy and host of discoveries allowed the population to grow from a little over one billion in 1900 to the present six billion. As Sir Crispin Tickell so eloquently stated: "It would be nice to think that the solutions of some of our present problems could be drawn from past experience, but in this case the past is a poor guide to the future. Our current situation is unique".

The new science also led to our unique powers of observation from galaxies to genetic molecules, and to our powers of destruction and as the Worldwatch Institute stressed in their report, State of the World 1995, in the period 1900-95 we killed 110 million people!

Our technologies have changed the planet, air pollution, soil erosion, water pollution and climate, etc. Our life support system and our quality of life depend on components such as food, water, energy, materials and waste management.

Specific questions I will consider include the following:

Can we produce clean energy for 10 billion humans?
Can we stop soil deterioration?
Can we provide adequate clean water?
Can we reduce wastes?
Can we clean the urban catastrophe?

If one examines the state of people, it is clear that quality education is the key to quality of life. We must have universal literacy, numeracy and science. And the rich must assist the poor nations, or else we live with continuous catastrophes of all types and scales.

We must develop new, truly sustainable technologies, but to do this we must develop systems which integrate knowledge from all sectors of society. For example, to produce food security we require biologists of all types: ecologists, soil scientists, climatologists, sociologists, educators at all levels and ECONOMISTS with a view longer than the next election.

In my recent experience, nations like Europe and Japan lead the world. They have accepted limits to growth, and they have reduced waste production of all types. Their biodiversity is rising again.

I very much agree with Brown and Flavin of the Worldwatch Institute (1999), "We need a new moral compass to guide us into the twenty-first century: a compass grounded in the principles of meeting human need sustainably."