PART I
INTRODUCTION
1970
"Freedom means responsibility. That is
why men dread it."
George
Bernard Shaw
GENERAL
All
over the world men and women are awakening to demand their rights, to demand a
place under the sun and an end to tyranny. They are relying, however, on
existing archaic dogmas and expedient slogans to achieve these goals. Unless
they come to realize the full meaning of these rights, the battle may be lost
and the contestants disillusioned.
It ought to be clearly understood
that there is no way to disentangle human rights from economic rights; that
there can never be a true understanding of rights which fails to take note of
each of us as organic beings - child, adolescent, adult, elder; and that the
one thing indeed which allows us our experiments in government is our
inalienable right and responsibility to conduct our own affairs and enhance our
own rights. Rights must also be linked to species survival which, in turn, must
be linked to our ability to understand both biologic and ecologic man/woman and
to act in concert to protect them. To the 18th Century cry, "All men are
created equal," we should add the 20th Century admonition "...and
they may all perish equally."
While
historic attempts to define rights have grown out of confrontations between
opposing political powers, today they must grow out of an awareness of our own
tenuous position as the dominant species. The thrust of our "rights"
making, rather than a compromise with the state, will be a "coming to terms"
with our total environment, including our fellow beings, which will tend to
maximize our own and their own chances for survival and fulfillment.
"Fragmented
man," a Marshall McLuhan phrase, is obsolete. The abstracted textbook
"consumer," the "political animal" or the
"producer" were but weak shadows of our real selves. They were cold
clinical dissections, mere parts lacking all claim to synergy.
Isolated
man is also becoming extinct. No tribe, nation, culture or individual is today
unplugged. Whatever goes on here creates waves there. As somebody noted
recently, we ought to adopt a "Declaration of Interdependence."
Today
we are witnessing confrontation and breakdown of many of our antiquated
systems, including law. These confrontations, while seemingly anarchic, are
indeed a healthy signal. There is a growing awareness on the part of many that
these systems are no longer capable of resolving our problems without changes.
If we react wisely, and do not overreact to these events, we will come out
ahead. What is called for is nothing less than a redefinition of basic human
rights, a general theory, if you will, keyed to a concept of "total
man/woman" in a finite world. While I do not pretend to have arrived at a
final resolution of this question, I hope my search will shed some light on the
subject and perhaps spur others to further the quest.
I do
not believe my ideas or the thirty articles of the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights will be readily accepted. Given the present status of rights
worldwide, one would be foolhardy to believe that even the most basic rights
are easily achievable. Too many of today's national governments have not
progressed much beyond tribal warfare, but this should not deter us from
charting a clear direction. The time lapse from Magna Carta to our Declaration
of Independence was 561 years but it took only 73 years from the signing of the
American Bill of Rights until the 14th amendment abolishing slavery was added.
There is room for hope.
Finally,
this paper is not an attempt to rewrite our own Bill of Rights nor the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaimed by the United Nations on
December 10, 1948. Rather, it is an attempt to approach the concept of rights
and responsibilities by putting the individual into the real world, one in
which he or she is a part of a family, a community, a country and a world
community. All of which share a common habitat, the biosphere. It is an attempt
to redefine these relationships so as to provide each individual, family,
community and country with a maximum potential for realizing their dreams while
concurrently restraining each from interfering with others' potential and their
mutual habitat.
MIND, MATTER
& SURVIVAL
We
are part and parcel of the totality of evolving universe, and as such, we are
bound by its inescapable laws. Homo sapiens are expendable organisms in the
midst of other expendable organisms. The emergence of modern man was likely a
fluke and his demise may well be another according to Motoo Kimura whose theory
of random molecular evolution is today pretty well accepted by the scientific
community.
It is
one thing to have our luck run out in evolution's game of chance. It is another
to aid and abet this fate. If humanity is to survive this amoral process
whereby nature regularly selects and discards component parts we must forever
be refining and revising our notions of survival. We must, in effect, create
survival mechanisms commensurate with the problems we face.
Certain
discernable laws regarding survival have been put forward by men and women in
the sciences. These formulations can serve as guides in our present discussion.
There are two major factors which, according to Alfred North Whitehead, make
for "enduring organisms." The first is their ability to reproduce their
own kind in abundant quantity, and the second is their ability to evolve a
compatible environment. Sir Charles Sherrington, a noted English biologist,
puts forth the thesis in a book entitled Man
On His Nature, that man is, in fact, nature's latest attempt to evolve an
enduring organism. The essential, or novel, ingredient with which nature has
endowed its latest experiment, says Sherrington, is "mind". Perhaps,
he adds hopefully, mind may itself evolve altruism (an ingredient which the
author feels essential to continued survival). Here is an eloquent excerpt from
Sherrington to the point:
"Man in his mood may count himself in his day a
brief spectator of his own shaping as it still progresses; so too of the
planet's fertility, in commerce with its surroundings. The commerce of both is
with the sun and beyond that with what to the spectator has often seemed the
illimitable, so far as the illimitable is thinkable by him. The human spectator
has in mind that in this spectacle the planet is in turn an offspring of the
sun, and that he the spectator is in turn an offspring of the planet. He has in
mind that all earth's tenantry, his fellow tenantry, are as autochthonous as
he. Earth's offspring, comprising rock and soil and sea and cloud and plant and
brute and himself, man. In all that tenantry, he is among the latest come. The
planet with its offspring, to him, its latest child looking around him, becomes
something of a community. It counts for him as a something which although an
aggregate of many parts is yet for him embraceable and intelligible as a unity.
It is more to him than merely his setting and the home which houses him. It,
with what it comprises, shapes before him to the likeness of a familial
assembly, a community of related things. Of things which are parts of one
greater thing.
He sees the whole as an organization, not static but
progressive. Remembering life as a grade of organization he sees progressive
organization in the planet include life and promise of more life. At one time
it had not that organization which means life. He envisages energy as the
vehicle for mind, progressing under progressive organization of those types of
system which unfold life. The whole presents itself as one great graduated
scale of seething organization. He reflects that at one time the planet can
have had none of his particular species of system. Now it has. That is, it has
evolved recognizable mind. This has issued from its side, at the interface
where atmosphere and other physical phases meet, under alternate day and night.
The planet has thus latterly become a place of thinking. More, it now harbors
mind which recognizes values as 'values'. It is a planet now with hopes and
fears and tentative 'right' and 'wrong.' A planet which is human. What will be
to follow? Our human spectator watching his mother-earth believes that there
will come forth from her side more mind, and still more mind. In believing
this, he is not doubtful of the gearing together of energy and mind."
Nor does Sherrington neglect the balance of the human
construct, i.e. the unique ability to walk upright, to make tools with her free
hands and to utilize his vocal cords for complex communication. But, for the
lack of intellect, these abilities would have withered and the evolved man-made
world we know would never have materialized. While Sherrington wrote this in
1937, scientists' views have not changed radically. Quoting from an article on
genetic evolution in the Chicago Tribune
dated May, 1990 by Kotulak & Gorner:
"The modern human body was completed 1 million
years ago but the brain has doubled in size since then, the fastest rate of
growth for any organ - or any living thing, for that matter - in the fossil
record. To many authorities that means that evolution selects for
intelligence."*
On
this point of intellect, as man's unique quality, most scientists would
probably agree. They are not all agreed, however, about the ability of this
evolved mind to resolve humanity's problems or prolong their stay on earth.
They do agree, short of divine intervention, there is no other hope.
Whitehead's
observations are generalizations for all organisms, while Sherrington's are
limited to man's unique characteristics. What is pertinent in the first case,
for our own discussion here, is that it spells out those things which are
essential for our survival as a specie. The second observation pinpoints for us
those unique characteristics with which nature has endowed the species Homo
sapiens and enabled them to currently prevail over other organisms.
Synthesizing these observations suggests that our survival depends upon the
full utilization of our unique powers to evolve and maintain a compatible world
capable of supporting humankind and other living species with whom we
interdependently share the planet. But even this may not assure our success.
SURVIVAL MECHANISMS
Historically
man has been concerned with self-survival, community survival and national
survival. It is only recently that he has become aware of, or concerned about,
international survival. This is not to say that he has been historically
delinquent in evolving a compatible environment. Indeed he has developed
numerous workable mechanisms to resolve his dilemmas. He creates language and
law, art and science, music and medicine, each out of the cradle of his brain.
They are tools of understanding and control. They are means of reducing
friction and confusion between humans, and between man and his environment. Man
reshapes the earth to his needs, reduces the outside-of-man chance factors, and
he defeats, restricts, and controls other organisms to his own ends. He writes
and records events thus establishing a continuity of experience. In a word, he
struggles toward an ever greater organization of events which will be
compatible with his survival needs.
This
tendency to create order, however, has taken place historically in separate
enclaves isolated in space and time and has fostered a multiplicity of orders
and cultures. These ethnocentric enclaves have often retarded or reversed the
tendency toward universal survival.
Clandestine
survival based on a dog eat dogma, on a territorial imperative and on
superstition and fear have dominated both primitive and advanced cultures. The
fruits of this reality have been devastation, mass murder and slavery. Whole
generations have been lost at war while the survivors spent their lives in
flight or rebuilding their lives and their communities.
A
short time ago we were captive to the most virulent ideological cold war in
history as two giant powers vied with each other for world dominance. The arms
race which ensued, had it by mere chance escalated to a hot war, could have
changed the meaning of civilization forever. And we are not yet free from the
nightmares which it projected. Any self-appointed tyrant can still acquire
enough lethal technology to cause irreparable damage to humankind. Neither
Hitler nor Stalin should be seen as aberrations nor would either have shrunk at
using today's technology for their own insane aims.
Today,
mercifully, this cold war has abated and we are in the midst of a global
economic war pitting corporate giants in developed and developing countries
against each other and most everyone else. Whoever wins, most of us will surely
lose. Nor does this seemingly benign war preclude hot ones.
But
we have many mechanisms today which can help us cope and many more which, given
the will, we could develop. We are able to loft earth-circling communication
satellites capable of visual and audio transmission. We are able privately to
communicate via telephone or computer with friends and strangers around the
globe. Within hours we are able to reach the most remote locations on the
planet by air transport. We are becoming, in spite of our parochial
governments, a global village.
Some
would also argue that we have the technical capability to produce and equitably
distribute food, clothing and housing in sufficient quantity to satisfy
humanity's reasonable and foreseeable needs. This potential capacity to meet
needs in spite of steadily increasing population and presumably decreasing
resources, Buckminster Fuller attributes to man's unique ability to constantly
accomplish more with less through his mind-over-matter organization of earth's
inherent capabilities.
In a
word, we have vast problems confronting us and vast resources (human and
natural) with which to meet them. What is demanded is that we develop
integrated and overlapping survival mechanisms commensurate with the new
challenge. Law as a survival mechanism must seek to define the acts of men in
such a way as to reduce destructive friction between them while concurrently
allowing the greatest possible latitude for constructive input. Put another
way, a workable rule of law should engender maximum freedom of thought and
action while protecting against the misuse and abuse of same. Man expands,
discovers, redefines, and creates new social and mechanical inventions through
the free exchange of ideas and through voluntary acts. He demands this
flexibility in order to constantly reappraise his needs, correct his past
mistakes and act wisely. In his Perfect
Constitution, Kant summarizes this attitude stating, "Only when man
has developed a just constitution will he be able to fulfill his total
destiny."
It is
not "law" against which the majority of today's youth rebel, but the
built-in intolerances of yesterday's laws and the tyranny of yesterday's
majorities or minorities. Socrates challenged what he considered unjust but he
did not contest the need for law and bowed to its dictates.
DEFINITIONS
I
would like to digress a moment to offer a few definitions of terms which
hopefully may render what follows reasonably intelligible.
First
it seems appropriate to discuss rights. The idea of rights was an
invention of man's mind fashioned to protect himself against the formidable
counterweight of oppressive authority. Natural rights were a natural reaction
to hereditary monarchies. Evolution of these rights, like the evolution of
mathematics, has paralleled necessity. Today's necessity is biological and
total. If man is to survive he must allow his fellow man maximum freedom of
thought and action within a defined framework of global stability. Thus human
rights can be viewed as a concept of justice wherein each individual is viewed
as unique and equal before the law, and is entitled, as such, to an equal
opportunity to develop and exercise his or her own potential in all
interactions with fellow humans and their collective environment earth, and
that with said entitlement goes the right and responsibility, acting collectively
as citizens, to form governments and to help define, circumscribe and protect
one another's equal opportunity through the process of formulating and
administrating laws to this effect. There are no "natural" rights,
there are only those which we collectively conceive to be both just and
necessary for our ongoing evolution as a part of the greater whole and,
therefore, are willing to fight for.
This
thesis rejects all forms of exclusive privilege and power by reason of race,
religion, culture, ethnic origin, heredity, sex or any other arbitrary
construct. It embraces the idea that all citizens, privately and collectively,
must empower and protect themselves with equal prerogatives to exercise their
own unique abilities without interference and without interfering with others.
We should do this not because it is fashionable, democratic, or socialistic,
but because only in this way will we have sufficient latitude to think through,
debate and act upon our best ideas. This view of rights and of man concerns
itself with the interaction of all individual acts which create larger and more
visible historic events. It views these cumulative happenings as greater than
the sum of the input of individual acts but regards the individual acts as
prime movers.
Our
present operating concept of the individual is still an abstraction. We must
see him or her as organic beings, as babies, children, youth, mature adults and
as senior citizens, as parents and as members of a family.
At
yet another level of integration we need to view our individual as a doer, a
provider of services and as a worker with others converting natural resources
and cultural ones for use by themselves and others. We are all producers and
consumers. This dynamic level of integration, which once existed locally in
semi-isolation, has evolved to world scale.
Finally,
we need to view our individual as a participant in governing not just as a
passive recipient of the dictates of a few. Here the concept of rights requires
the wisdom and responsibility of all. Here is where we need to integrate all
the foregoing rights and responsibilities, devise just laws and administer
them. And we can no longer do these things only at the local or national level.
World government has become a necessity.
Here
then is our complete individual, living in a complex, evolving natural and
cultural world, collectively attempting to sort out his/her multitudinous
relationships in order to maximize his or her own survival potential.
I
have used the term "infringement" quite extensively throughout my
discussion and hasten to explain my usage. Every act or state of being is to
some extent an infringement on every other act or state of being. Each one's
existence modifies his neighbor's. So long as this infringement does not functionally
impair his neighbor's activity it is not critical. However, when the nature of
the infringement is such that it impairs the rights of others or actually
endangers the well-being or existence of another, then it is critical. An
audience creating a low decibel murmur is not critical to the speaker
addressing it. High decibel heckling, on the other hand, becomes critical.
Minute concentrations of D.D.T. within one specie may not be critical to that
specie, but its cumulative ecological pyramiding may be lethal to those species
at the top. The ability of a stream to reduce small quantities of waste to
harmless material means only that at certain levels and frequencies disposal of
certain waste products in a specific stream are not critical.
Critical
infringement by one person of another is not always easy to pinpoint.
Direct bodily infringement, e.g., assault and battery, is clear enough but
other forms of infringement are not so clear. How far can a person go in
exploiting his environment or his neighbor's without endangering that
environment and indirectly himself or his neighbor? Is selling drugs, when the
seller knows the debilitating results he is bringing to the buyer, a clear
infringement, or should some fault fall to the knowledgeable buyer? Is keeping
a patient alive via heroic means, in spite of the patient's written request
otherwise, an infringement of the patient's rights? Is not an afflicted
individual who knowingly passes along the A.I.D.S. virus committing
premeditated murder? Are not parents who refuse medical assistance to their
child, when the disease is well understood and easily cured, infringing of the
child's rights - and maybe committing murder? To what extent should one
building be allowed to cast its shadow on another? What noise level is
compatible with urban living and what is unbearable? What urban population
densities can be sustained at predictable levels of advancing technology – both
physiologically and psychologically? The answers to these questions and
thousands of others like them have been, are currently being, and will continue
to be sought by developing "critical infringement" guidelines.
Rights
and responsibilities are complimentary. Whereas every person requires
certain rights to fulfill his or her destiny they must, ergo, protect each
other's equal rights. This is a responsibility. The right to freedom of speech
implies the responsibility to protect everyone's right to say what they will.
The right to procreate implies the responsibility to be good parents. The right
of self-government implies a responsibility to demand good government, etc.
Today the tendency is to emphasize rights over responsibilities. I believe,
however, as today's infringements become ever more critical, we will come to
realize the importance of our individual and collective responsibilities;
responsibilities to our fellow citizens, to our children and to our
environment.
The
term use, applied either as a verb or noun, has been herein used to
describe relationships which have heretofore been thought of in terms such as
"ownership." Use implies something transitory, while ownership has
come to imply a permanency. The ownership world is a sub-dividable one, while
the "use" world is a series of interrelationships defying simple
boundaries. I have employed the term both as it applies to an individual's use
of his own body and mind and as it applies to individuals, groups, or nations
using the transitory space-time-energy world of which they are a part. For a
small word, use has a big spot in the dictionary with its various derivatives
all bearing on our subject: useful, useless, misuse, abuse, utilize, usury,
usufruct.
Crucial
to much of this essay is the concept of resources. One dictionary
definition comes close to a definition which fits, "Resources are the
collective wealth of a country or its means of producing wealth." For my
purposes I would like to expand on this. One way would be to say that our
evolved world, the solar system and beyond, are all resources. They are all in
some way helping to support us. This view would also include our inherited
cultures, sciences, humanities and arts, the institutions which espouse them
and the artifacts which proclaim them. We can also define resources as those
elements of this same construct which we have, or may find, some specific use
through the conversion of energy, matter and information there from. This
second definition falls under the loose heading of applied arts and sciences.
We use the knowledge, or information, accumulated through interaction with our
environment together with our evolved tools (technologies) to transform matter
and energy into immediate and purposeful services. Thus resources are both
abstract and real, natural and man-made. Information and energy are both
resources.
What
we humans call resources are also a part of a greater dynamic called the
biosphere. While it, in turn, is a part of an even greater dynamic, the solar
system, and so forth. It is from this dual identity that the trouble begins,
separating the economists from the ecologists. When we extract or add to a
dynamic system, the ecologists tell us, we may well foul up the system. The
economists understand supply and demand. Scarcity is also a part of their
lexicon, but nature to them is but a kind of warehouse; if one resource is in
short supply another can be substituted. Today’s warehouse itself is always
there. It never malfunctions. The problem is to reconcile our use of resources
with nature's functioning needs.
Finally
it should be noted that we, individually or collectively, use our inherited
resources to provide or receive services or disservices for or
from one another, nothing more nor nothing less, in a world enhanced or
despoiled by our predecessors, and one which we in turn will pass along to our
children modified for better or for worse by our own use or abuse. In energetic
terms we are all converters converting resources into useable stock and finally
into degraded but possibly reusable resources and heat. But we are also
converters, converting experience into information and, while stock is
degraded, following the law of entropy, information accumulates, is recorded
and continues to increase. Of course, the highly anticipated potential of
computer Y2K problems may prove me a liar; our electronic storage systems may
prove less satisfactory than the Egyptian's papyrus.
Services
can be exclusive and simple like a massage or exclusive and complex like
providing a home. They can be inclusive like providing national disaster
insurance or an interstate highway system. Some services are of brief duration
like a ballet performance, others may last much longer like a highway bridge.
So long as the home or bridge are usable and not "unusable" they
remain in the first case private or, in the second case, public services. Once
they become unusable or useless they are available, where material, energy or
information can be salvaged, for re-use to provide different or similar
services. Or, at worst, they may become waste. Nor are they yet services as
they exist in nature, but only potential resources awaiting our information and
energy to reorder them. What we are doing in every case is
"usufruct," i.e., using the fruits of nature with our fellow humans
for our own ends. We are all in service industries.
In
grey areas, where services and disservices tend to blend, it may not always be
easy to advantage one over the other. In these instances each individual, as a
receiver of a service, should have the right to choose so long as he or she is
fully apprised of the known risks by those providing the service. Medical
operations or drugs with known side effects come to mind as clear examples.
While the law must attempt to protect everyone it should not preclude free
choice where there is no clear evidence of critical infringement.
The
current human population is inheritor and potential transmitter of an evolving
gene pool synchronized with the biosphere for survival. We are one of nature's
regenerative elements and as such are as much a resource as a resource user.
The procreating, nurturing and educating we do for our young is no more than
the robins or blue jays do for theirs. We perform these services necessary for
the continuity of the specie but can claim no ownership of the results, our
children.
What
then of the concept of ownership? The true role of ownership is to be
perceived in the providing and receiving of services. Information, experience,
ingenuity, skill and hard work have been added to given natural or cultural
resources converting them into life sustaining, enhancing and protecting
entities. Service is the value added. It is the only serious claim we have to
ownership and it is not for ever. At some point ideas become common heritage
and buildings become historic monuments or scrap heaps of potentially
recyclable material. At this stage they have become resources or waste. If
waste can be degraded by its ecosystem without damage to that system and thus
indirectly to man it too is a resource. If not, it is a problem. With ownership
comes the responsibility to protect one's surroundings and one's fellow man.
Non-biodegradable waste is a problem of ownership. It is also an obvious
disservice.
Ownership
of services, then, are considered private or public depending on their nature
and the prerogative of affected citizens. The making and using of most tools,
machinery, factories, office buildings, ships, homes, etc., would probably
remain privately owned while the use, at least, of schools, utilities, highways
and public service buildings would be community or state owned. In Sweden and
other highly socialized democracies, competition to provide certain services
might pit private enterprise, co-operatives and government against one another,
or conversely, they might jointly venture said services e.g., health care
insurance, low income housing, postal services, etc. Whatever, the term
ownership would be applied to services given and received but devoid of the
value of any used resources. Ownership is the human work embodied within a
service, or conversion, and it lasts only so long as it remains a service.
Private
property is not defined in either our own Bill of Rights or the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights. Our U.S. courts subsequently have, of course, done
so. Likewise state constitutions have helped define property rights and
obligations. It is with these weighted decisions that my foregoing analysis is
in some conflict. I will have much more to say on this subject later. Chief
Seattle, however, summarized it in an eloquent letter to the President of the
U.S. in 1852 responding to the Government's inquiry requesting purchase of
Native lands. The heart of his letter is as follows:
"This we know: The earth does not belong to man,
man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites
us all. Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand in it.
Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself."[1]
The
term survival is injected to denote the seriousness of man's situation
and is not to be taken lightly. I am not disregarding Jefferson's "Life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness." On the contrary, I want to broaden
the legal basis for the first two of these cherished items by including all the
relevant factors within a formulation of rights which will help an ever
increasing number of men and women achieve a good life and liberty, and give
them a chance to pursue the happiness of their choice.
But
all the terms just noted are manmade constructs which do not speak to the
larger construct, the biosphere, of which they are a part. Viewed from this
vantage point both man himself and his acts are subject to the biosphere's
systemic requirements, therefore, we could conclude that some or many of man's
actions might impact on the biosphere's functioning. Where man has little
energy and information available, this impact is negligible but when the
opposite is true, his impact can be great and disruptive. It is also true that
where man has harnessed more energy and accumulated more information,
population has increased thereby further impacting on his and other species'
mutual environment. Formerly, we homo sapiens could legally lump most
everything outside of ourselves into a few categories: ownership (private or
public), air rights, easements, riparian rights, water rights, etc. Now that
the ecologists know a bit more about this "everything else" we need
to redefine all these homocentric terms.
A BRIEF SYNOPSIS
The
main body of this essay is roughly divided into four sections progressing in
some reasonable semblance of order as follows. Section II, "Types of
Rights," attempts to define each category of rights. It progresses from
individual rights to collective rights and responsibilities. Part III,
"Securing Use Rights," is an extensive attempt to focus on the major
issues which frustrate equal access to resources, both natural and cultural. I
have included several scenarios in this section which might help achieve
justice while concurrently protecting the environment. This section most
clearly addresses the essay's title, "The Ecological Imperative,"
though it does not embrace other pertinent issues. Part IV, "Relationship
of Rights and Responsibilities," examines a few major societal
responsibilities which have become necessities for the well-being and survival
of modern society: social insurances, including education, population and
consumption limitations. While suggesting some scenarios which might help
alleviate inequalities and reduce environmental stress, I attempt to make it
clear that we must collectively reorder our priorities and rethink our current
paradigms. Again, we have the technologies and we are beginning to see the big
picture but as yet we lack the will to change. In Part V, "International
Rights and Responsibilities," I discuss the current explosion of
international trade and finance and how it is being dominated by the demands of
commerce. It is an attempt to delineate what is happening as opposed to what
ought to be happening relative to human rights and environmental stability. I
also explore the need and potential for democracy at the global level. Finally,
I have attempted to pinpoint some of the major flaws in the functioning of our
democracies and to offer corrective measures; measures which address the
current abuse of citizens’ comprehensive rights and responsibilities. (Part II
through Part VII)
Finally,
I have concluded with a serious look at our chances of survival as viewed by
many ecologists and scientists (Part VIII through Part IX). My only addition to
this part was to offer an alternate proposal to address Global Warming,
however, I concluded it was too improbable.
I
started this essay in March 1970 during which time I was busy with an
architectural practice in Chicago during President Johnson’s “War on Poverty”
plus another Viet Nam. I am going to close it now in April of 2008 and pray for
a successful outcome for my two subjects – Human Rights and the Ecological
Imperative, and to all the readers who have had the fortitude to finish my
essay.
Comments
accepted at JimSwann@hotmail.com