Derek J Wilson

Derek Wilson's most recent speech is published in a booklet with the title Where in the World are We Going? Click here to order. The following is the Foreword from the booklet.

In June 1992, at the Earth Summit in Rio, the largest ever gathering of heads of state agreed that our impact on earth had to be reduced. Five months later a remarkable statement was issued — World Scientists Warning to Humanity — signed by 1,600 senior scientists from all over the world, including more than half of all living Nobel Prize winners:

Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course... many of our current practices put at serious risk the future for human society ... and many so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know. Fundamental changes are urgent ... No more than one or a few years remain before the chance to avert the threats we now confront will be lost and the prospects of humanity immeasurably diminished.

At the time, no major American television network reported this Warning to Humanity, while the two prestigious newspapers, the New York Times and the Washington Post, pronounced it ‘not newsworthy’.
Now, eleven years later, there are many more people, greater resource consumption, more vehicles, more deforestation, increasing biodiversity loss, less topsoil, less fresh water, etc., and an ever-widening gap between the haves and the havenots — meaning that we are much further away from sustainability, a requirement now generally recognised as being vital for our future well-being.
Isn’t it about time we seriously confronted the ideology of limitless growth on a finite Earth, or do we continue in this demented fashion sleepwalking our civilisation towards its final holocaust?
This brief paper, with some minor amendments, was a talk given at St Mary’s Church, Karori, Wellington, on 20 July 2003.

Derek J Wilson
Wellington
Aotearoa New Zealand
September 2003