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Preoccupied with the war on terrorism,
we have lost sight of a more dangerous enemy of social peace
and progress -- the inability of the world's people to access
the ecological goods and services they need to maintain
and build their societies. By 2025, the combined demands
of continued economic growth and the reduction of global
poverty will require, annually, the ecological equivalent
of three or four Earths. If history is our guide, the options
for meeting these enormous 'provisioning' needs are extremely
limited. Like the tribes, cities, and nations of earlier
times, we may end up fighting our neighbours for privileged
access to declining ecosystem goods and services. This confrontation
will inevitably pit the wealthy beneficiaries of the global
economy against the billions of excluded, and lead to accelerated
ecological collapse, the derailment of growth, and social
chaos. The only alternative to this dismal prospect is to
mobilize on a scale as if for war in order to meet this
provisioning challenge on the battlefields of directed technological
innovation.
In The Next World War, Roy Woodbridge
argues that the international community must redirect present
sustainable development and poverty reduction efforts in
ways that place the provisioning of societies at the heart
of political decision-making. To move this highly focused
agenda forward, he calls on the United Nations to convene
a World Forum on Global Provisioning to declare war on ecological
decline and set the battle plans for the next world war
-- the war to equitably provision continued growth.
Roy Woodbridge is the president of Woodbridge
& Associates, an environmental policy consulting firm
in Vancouver.
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