# Challenges of Sustainable Development

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> Source: Bahá'í Library Online (bahai-library.com), curated by Jonah Winters. Used by permission of the curator. Original citation: Augusto Lopez-Carlos, Challenges of Sustainable Development, bahai-library.com.
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> 
> Challenges of Sustainable
> Development
> AUGUSTO LOPEZ-CLAROS*
> 
> If carried to excess, civilization will prove as prolific a source of evil as it had been of
> goodness when kept within the restraints of moderation.
> ——Bahá’u’lláh
> 
> Abstract
> This paper examines some of the building blocks of sustainable development.
> Economic growth is seen as having contributed to global prosperity in the post-
> war period, but there are emerging concerns that growth may soon conflict with
> environmental constraints. The role of and the interactions among conservation,
> technology, international cooperation, and human values are analyzed. Whether
> we find the collective will to act now to stem the tide of future crises or we wait
> for catastrophe to force change upon us is seen as the central question of our time.
> A move toward sustainable development could well usher in a new stage in the
> evolution of the human race, one likely to involve a quantum leap forward in
> terms of our collective achievements as a human family.
> 
> * The author is Director of Global Indicators and Analysis, World Bank. The
> views expressed in this paper are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect
> those of the organization for which he works. The author is indebted to Arthur L.
> Dahl for his insightful comments on earlier versions of this paper. Arthur has been
> a mentor to the author on these issues and for this the author is deeply grateful.
> Words of appreciation are also due to the late William S. Hatcher for the count-
> less hours of delightful conversations on these and related issues during the many
> years we lived in Russia, and to Ali Nakhjavani, for his warm, constant encourage-
> ment and wise counsel over the years. Neither of them, nor Arthur, is responsible
> for this paper’s limitations.
> 26              The Journal of Bahá’í Studies 22. 1/4. 2012
> 
> Résumé
> L’auteur examine certains des éléments qui servent de fondement au développe-
> ment durable. La croissance économique est perçue comme ayant contribué au
> développement d’une prospérité mondiale durant la période de l’après-guerre;
> cependant, des préoccupations croissantes se font sentir selon lesquelles la crois-
> sance pourrait bientôt se heurter à des contraintes environnementales. L’auteur
> analyse les rôles respectifs de la conservation de la nature, de la technologie, de la
> coopération internationale et des valeurs humaines, ainsi que leurs interactions
> réciproques. Allons-nous développer une volonté collective suffisante pour dès
> maintenant tâcher d’endiguer la vague de crises qui s’annoncent ou allons-nous
> attendre que des catastrophes nous contraignent à changer nos façons de faire?
> Cette alternative est vue comme étant la question centrale de notre époque. Un
> changement de cap vers le développement durable pourrait bien marquer une
> nouvelle étape dans l’évolution de la race humaine, une étape susceptible de con-
> stituer un progrès décisif en ce qui concerne nos réalisations collectives en tant
> que grande famille humaine.
> 
> Resumen
> Este ensayo examina algunos de los elementos fundamentales para edificar el
> desarrollo sostenible. El crecimiento económico se observa como haber contribui-
> do a la prosperidad global en el periodo post-guerra, pero hay preocupaciones
> emergentes de que el crecimiento pronto podrá estar en conflicto con restric-
> ciones ambientales. El rol de y las interacciones entre la conservación, la tec-
> nología, la cooperación internacional y los valores humanos, son analizados. Sea
> que encontremos la voluntad colectiva por actuar en este momento para refrenar
> la marea de futuros crisis o que esperemos que la catástrofe obligue que cam-
> biemos, es visto como la pregunta central de nuestro tiempo. Un movimiento
> hacia el desarrollo sostenible podría marcar el comienzo de una nueva etapa en la
> evolución de la raza humana, una que probablemente envuelva un salto cuántico
> en términos de nuestros logros colectivos como una familia humana.
> 
> A SENSIBLE DEFINITION
> 
> A broadly accepted definition of “sustainability” is that put forward by the
> Brundtland Commission (formally known as the World Commission on
> Environment and Development) convened by the United Nations a quar-
> Challenges of Sustainable Development                   27
> 
> ter of a century ago, which states that sustainable development “meets the
> needs of the present without compromising the ability of future genera-
> tions to meet their own needs” (Report 43). To those who attempted to
> give operational meaning to this intuitively sensible definition in the fol-
> lowing years, it soon became clear that sustainability was not a goal to be
> reached, but rather a balance to be maintained across space and time, in
> which there are complex interactions at play between the environment,
> the economy, institutions, and human values.
> A good practical example of sustainability at work can be seen in the
> Nordic countries’ approach to budgetary management. These countries
> have been running budget surpluses for many years because they face the
> emerging problem of an aging population. If the state is to provide pen-
> sions and social protections in the future that will be broadly equivalent
> to those enjoyed by its citizens today, it must begin to save now. Citizens
> of Nordic countries have agreed to have their governments spend less
> than they collect in taxes today so that the standard of living of future
> generations will not be jeopardized. Thus, contrary to the habits of many
> other industrialized countries, which over the past twenty years and with
> particular intensity during the latest financial crisis have sometimes run
> sometimes large budget deficits and accumulated rising levels of public
> debt, the Nordics have firmly integrated into public financial management
> the policy that present generations cannot compromise “the ability of
> future generations to meet their own needs” (Report 43) and have done so
> with the full support of voters. This example highlights the importance of
> good governance that has earned public trust in finding solutions appro-
> priate to specific problems of sustainability.
> More recently, environmental concerns have figured prominently in dis-
> cussions about sustainability and sustainable development, with econo-
> mists and policymakers highlighting the importance of economic growth
> for promoting rising living standards and further reducing poverty, and
> environmentalists arguing that the benefits of growth should be viewed
> against the background of pressures on limited resources. A senior British
> economist recently wrote: “With the environmental situation reaching
> crisis point, however, it is time to stop pretending that mindlessly chasing
> 28            The Journal of Bahá’í Studies 22. 1/4. 2012
> 
> economic growth is compatible with sustainability” (Jackson 43). This
> debate raises a complex set of issues concerning sustainable consumption
> and production, the distribution of wealth and increasing income dispari-
> ties, the distinction between growth and development, and the extent to
> which growth is necessary for prosperity. Underlying all of these factors
> is the issue of governance, how we manage the planet we live on within
> the diverse societies and cultures into which humanity has evolved, and
> the globalized economy that provides for our material needs, in all their
> complexity and at their multiple levels of operation, to go from the pres-
> ent situation toward a sustainable and equitable future.
> 
> TWO KEY QUESTIONS ABOUT DEVELOPMENT
> 
> Two questions are at the heart of the debate on the meaning and the impli-
> cations of sustainable development. Taking as a starting point the period
> immediately following the creation of the United Nations in 1945, the
> questions are: What have been the fruits of economic development, and is
> humanity better off today according to some objective criteria? The first
> one deals with the issue of what has actually happened to development
> during the past half century.
> There are several reasons why 1945 is a sensible starting point to
> address these questions. As noted below, this was the time when econom-
> ic and social development began to be perceived as a special responsibili-
> ty of the international community. This realization is partly reflected in
> the creation of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund
> (IMF), the two premier international financial organizations charged with
> the task of promoting development. For instance, the Articles of
> Agreement of the IMF state that its aim is “to facilitate the expansion and
> balanced growth of international trade, and to contribute thereby to the
> promotion and maintenance of high levels of employment and real income
> and to the development of the productive resources of all members as pri-
> mary objectives of economic policy” (Article I, section ii).
> It was only under the auspices of the United Nations that a system of
> national accounts was created, which made it possible to compile interna-
> Challenges of Sustainable Development                         29
> 
> tionally comparable economic output statistics based on common method-
> ologies. This achievement, in turn, allowed the expansion of the debate on
> development from heated and often misinformed ideological struggles
> based on faith and opinion to more objective exchanges anchored in hard
> numbers and quantitative indicators.
> The second question relates to the more fundamental issue of whether
> humanity—notwithstanding progress achieved during the postwar peri-
> od—is presently on a sustainable development path, as defined by the
> Brundtland Commission. As we shall see below, while the answers to these
> two questions are unusually complex, the debate has acquired a renewed
> urgency in recent years, with many voices suggesting that the entire
> future of the planet is “in the balance” (Gore).
> 
> DEVELOPMENT SUCCESSES?
> 
> Development as a global objective for improving human welfare is a rela-
> tively recent concept. It was first embodied in the United Nations Charter,
> which stated: “The United Nations shall promote higher standards of liv-
> ing, full employment, and conditions of economic and social progress and
> development” (Chapter IX, Article 55). In time, at least among practicing
> economists in academia and policymakers in government, “development”
> came to be seen as improved economic opportunity through the accumu-
> lation of capital and rising productivity. The implicit assumption was that
> economic growth would lead to a rise in living standards, increases in life
> expectancy, reduced mortality, a reduction in the incidence of poverty, and
> so on—all worthy social goals.
> Between 1950 and 2011, world gross domestic product (GDP) per capi-
> ta expanded at an annual average rate of 2.1 percent, and this expansion—
> although with considerable regional variations1—was associated with a
> 1. For instance, Asia grew at 3.4 percent, but sub-Saharan Africa at 1 percent.
> Other regions include: Western Europe (2.8 percent), Latin America (1.6 percent),
> Eastern Europe (2 percent), the former Soviet Union (1 percent), and United
> States, Canada and Australia (2.2 percent). For a comprehensive set of economic
> and social indicators see, for instance, World Development Indicators, a series issued
> 30              The Journal of Bahá’í Studies 22. 1/4. 2012
> 
> remarkable evolution in three key indicators of human welfare. In the half-
> century between 1960 and 2011, infant mortality fell from 140 to 37 per
> 1000 live births; average life expectancy at birth rose from fifty-three to
> seventy years, a 32 percent increase which is nothing short of spectacular;
> and adult illiteracy fell from 53 to 16 percent. Equally impressive was the
> sharp drop in the incidence of poverty. Data from a World Bank study
> show that between 1981 and 2010—a period that includes the globaliza-
> tion phase of the twentieth century—the share of the world’s population
> living in extreme poverty fell from 52 to 21 percent.2
> While this progress still left about 1.3 billion people living under harsh
> conditions,3 the existence of a positive trend was undeniable and, against
> the low expectations of the late 1940s, was a welcome development. As
> noted by Richard Cooper, performance “in the period 1950–2000 can only
> be described as fantastic in terms of the perspective of 1950, in the literal
> 
> periodically by the World Bank, available online at www.worldbank.org and pub-
> lished annually in hard copy. The GDP is a measure of the market value of all
> goods and services produced within the country in one year. GDP growth, there-
> fore, is no more than the rate at which this variable increases in value from one
> period (typically a year) to the next.
> 2. See Chen and Ravallion, “More relatively-poor people in a less absolutely-
> poor world.” World Bank, Development Research Group, Policy Research
> Working Paper 6114, available at www.worldbank.org. The poverty data can be
> found at <http://databank.worldbank.org/data/download/WDI-2013-ebook.pdf >
> 3. Poverty is defined by the World Bank as living on less than $2 per day; for
> extreme poverty the threshold is lowered to $1.25 per day. The number of people
> living in extreme poverty in 1981 was 1.94 billion, or 660 million more than in
> 2010. Nevertheless, while accepting such figures, Joseph Stiglitz makes the valid
> point that “life for people this poor is brutal,” with malnutrition endemic, life
> expectancy well below the global average, and medical care scarce or nonexistent.
> See Stiglitz, Making Globalization Work, p. 10).
> Challenges of Sustainable Development                      31
> 
> sense that if someone had forecast what actually happened he would have
> been dismissed by contemporaries as living in a world of fantasy …. There
> is, to be sure, much work to be done, since too many people still live in
> poverty. But it is also necessary to note success when there has been suc-
> cess, to avoid drawing erroneous conclusions” (39).4 The observation that
> economic growth had been the main engine of poverty reduction and
> other improvements in human welfare has led many to ask themselves
> what could be done to accelerate growth everywhere, particularly in
> Africa, where the incidence of poverty actually rose during this period.5
> The question acquired particular urgency among policymakers in the
> developing world, given the pressing needs to continue to make progress
> in improving living standards, against the background of rising expecta-
> 
> 4. Many critics of development practices during the past half-century will tend
> to focus on the unfinished agenda, the fact that, notwithstanding the gains made
> during this period, there is still too much poverty in the world and that this pover-
> ty coexists uncomfortably with rising income disparities. Some of these critics call
> into question the very approach to development taken by such institutions as the
> World Bank, the IMF, and aid agencies of the large donor countries, which also
> happen to be the largest shareholders of these two development organizations.
> Often calls are made for “a new development model,” although it is not spelled out
> what that development model should consist of and, equally importantly, whether
> such calls have any practical, conceptual, and political underpinnings. For a par-
> ticularly incisive, well-thought-out, non-dogmatic, and unusually pragmatic
> analysis of the problems of the fifty-eight poorest countries in the world and what
> the international community can do about them, see Paul Collier’s The Bottom
> Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It.
> 5. A report prepared by the United Nations Development Program for the 2008
> United Nations General Assembly shows that the Millennium Development Goal
> of halving world poverty between 2000 and 2015 is within reach, largely because
> between 1990 and 2005 China brought 475 million people out of poverty, com-
> pared to an increase of 100 million during the same period in sub-Saharan Africa.
> See “Number of poor rises,” The London Financial Times, 12 Sept. 2008.
> 32              The Journal of Bahá’í Studies 22. 1/4. 2012
> 
> tions among their respective populations.
> In a highly influential book published in 2002, the American economist
> William Easterly states that he cares about economic growth because “it
> makes the lives of poor people better . . . [and] frees the poor from hunger
> and disease” (8). He then proceeds to show that growth improves infant
> mortality, that, for instance, in Africa 500,000 deaths could have been
> averted if growth in the decade of the 1980s had been 1.5 percent higher.
> The above insights, in turn, contributed to an intense debate among pro-
> fessional economists and policymakers about the relative importance of
> various factors, policies, and institutions in creating the conditions for sus-
> tained growth.6 What is their relative importance? How do they interact
> with each other? How successful have countries been in identifying and
> adopting them?
> A recent and impressive contribution to the ongoing debate is the 2008
> study published by the Commission on Growth and Development of the
> World Bank, chaired by Michael Spence, Nobel economics laureate.7 Two
> aspects of this report make it a particularly valuable source of insight.
> First, the twenty-one commissioners who prepared this study brought
> together a rich variety of perspectives, drawn from decades of experience
> in government, academia, and the business world, both in a developed-
> and developing-country context. Second, the report benefitted from a
> wide-ranging process of consultation with leading experts on a broad
> array of issues, including the role of fiscal policy, education, geography,
> 
> 6. One area that has received particular attention has been the role of technol-
> ogy and innovation. Economic output is no longer just a function of capital and
> labor but, increasingly, knowledge and the acquisition of new knowledge, a point
> of view eloquently supported in the Bahá’í writings. As early as 1875 ‘Abdu’l-Bahá
> placed “the expansion of the frontiers of knowledge” at the basis of “Europe’s
> progress and civilization.” See ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, The Secret of Divine Civilization, p. 10.
> 7. See The Growth Report: Strategies for Sustained Growth and Inclusive
> Development, released in May 2008 and available at www.growthcommission.org.
> The Growth Report was funded by the World Bank, several industrial country aid
> agencies (Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom), and some private foundations.
> Challenges of Sustainable Development                33
> 
> trade, technology, institutions, and interactions with the environment.
> The commission examined the experiences of thirteen countries in which,
> beginning in 1960, the annual average rate of economic growth was
> recorded to be at least 7 percent over a period of twenty-five years or
> more, and identified those factors, common or country-specific, that con-
> tributed to such remarkable economic performance.
> An economy that grows at an average annual rate of 7 percent doubles
> in size roughly every ten years. The thirteen economies examined were
> those of Botswana, Brazil, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia,
> Malta, Oman, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand. During the
> periods of high growth, these economies exhibited some common features,
> including full exploitation of the opportunities afforded by the world
> economy through trade, foreign investment and inward technology trans-
> fer, macroeconomic stability, and high rates of saving. On the whole, their
> reasonably competent governments were able to avoid some of the terri-
> ble mistakes that have been so costly in other countries, such as subsidiz-
> ing energy consumption, using the civil service as “employer of last
> resort,” neglecting infrastructure, imposing price controls, and underesti-
> mating the importance of education as a key driver of the development
> process.
> ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, the son of the Founder of the Bahá’í Faith and the head of
> the Bahá’í Faith during the period 1892–1921, was an extremely percep-
> tive observer of the contemporary economic and political challenges con-
> fronting Middle Eastern societies. In an insightful treatise examining a
> range of development issues written in 1875, He is explicit in His support
> of the benefits of interaction with the rest of the world. He chides nine-
> teenth-century Iranian society for its inwardness and suspicion of the
> “new systems and procedures” (‘Abdu’l-Bahá 13) and “progressive enter-
> prises” (13) that have made such an enormous contribution to the devel-
> opment of other nations. “Were the people of Europe harmed by the adop-
> tion of such measures? Or did they rather by these means reach the high-
> est degree of material development?” (13) He asks searchingly. He is
> equally compelling in His recognition of the importance of good gover-
> nance, saying in reference to “ministers of state and representatives” that
> 34            The Journal of Bahá’í Studies 22. 1/4. 2012
> 
> “administrative skill and wisdom in the conduct of their office raises the
> science of government to new heights of perfection” (20–21).
> The commission is unambiguous in the benefits it attaches to economic
> growth: “Growth is not an end in itself. But it makes it possible to achieve
> other important objectives of individuals and societies. It can spare people
> en masse from poverty and drudgery. Nothing else ever has. It also creates
> the resources to support health care, education, and the other Millennium
> Development Goals to which the world has committed itself. In short, we
> take the view that growth is a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for
> broader development, enlarging the scope for individuals to be productive
> and creative” (Growth Report 1). The report continues by saying that “in a
> very poor country, it is arithmetically impossible to reduce poverty with-
> out growth. There is no one to redistribute from. Conversely, if everyone
> is poor, growth will reduce poverty regardless of how it is distributed. But
> some kinds of growth reduce poverty more effectively than others … The
> expansion of smallholder farming, for example, cuts poverty quickly, rais-
> ing incomes of rural cultivators and reducing the price of the poor’s food
> bill. Growth in labor-intensive manufacturing also raises the incomes of
> the poor. The expansion of capital-intensive mining industries, on the
> other hand, can result in jobless growth, making little impression on
> poverty” (1).
> Professor Spence was even more direct in his public pronouncements at
> the time that the report was released, saying that “The Growth Report also
> kills off once and for all the misguided notion that you can lift people out
> of poverty in the absence of growth” (1). He also noted that India needed
> “to grow at a fast pace for another 13–15 years to catch up to where China
> is today,” and that it was expected that some six hundred million people in
> China presently working in agriculture would need to move into more
> productive jobs in urban areas and that, therefore, as has happened in the
> past twenty years in China, “growth will lift many more people out of
> poverty in the coming decades” (14).
> Notwithstanding the unanimous consensus among the distinguished
> authors of The Growth Report, their views are by no means universally
> shared, particularly among scientists and experts laboring on environ-
> Challenges of Sustainable Development                 35
> 
> mental issues. This is how the editors of a special issue of New Scientist put
> it: “Growth to most economists is as essential as the air we breathe: it is,
> they claim, the only force capable of lifting the poor out of poverty, feed-
> ing the world’s growing population, meeting the costs of rising public
> spending and stimulating technological development—not to mention
> funding increasingly expensive lifestyles. They see no limits to that
> growth, ever” (Daly 46). The essence of the arguments put forward by
> environmentalists is that “our economy is now reaching the point where
> it is outstripping Earth’s ability to sustain it. Resources are running out
> and waste sinks are becoming full. The remaining natural world can no
> longer support the existing economy, much less one that continues to
> expand” (46).
> A more cogent statement of conventional economists’ view on natural
> resource use reads as follows:
> 
> Production uses up natural resources, in particular energy. Is it true,
> as is sometimes alleged, that exponential growth in the economy will
> eventually use up the fixed stock of resources? Well yes, it is true in
> the limited sense that current theories suggest the universe will one
> day run down. However, this seems more of a concern for a course in
> astrophysics, or perhaps theology, than for a course in economics.
> Over any interesting horizon, the economy is protected from
> resource-depletion disasters by two factors. First, technical progress
> permits us to produce more using fewer resources. For example, the
> energy efficiency of room lighting has increased by a factor of 4,500
> since Neolithic times. Second, as specific resources come into short
> supply, their prices rise, leading producers to shift toward substitutes.
> (Dornbusch et al. 89)
> 
> This logic notwithstanding, the economic impact of the sustained rise
> in energy prices as fossil fuel extraction becomes more expensive, and
> comparable rises in prices for food and raw materials, as well as the rising
> cost of natural disasters linked to climate change, suggest that global
> resource limits are producing shortages that now require some rethinking
> 36             The Journal of Bahá’í Studies 22. 1/4. 2012
> 
> about the basic assumptions that have justified our focus on growth in
> recent decades. As the head of the European Central Bank stated in 2009:
> “We live in non-linear times: the classic economic models and theories
> cannot be applied, and future development cannot be foreseen” (Seager
> 1–2). In this context, it is understandable that efforts are underway to
> explore prosperity without growth,8 or the implications of a steady-state
> economy.9
> 
> A SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT PATH?
> In parallel to the encouraging trends in development noted above, scien-
> tists began to ask themselves whether the processes underlying our devel-
> opment path were sustainable. Even if one accepts that remarkable
> progress has been made during the past half century in improving the lot
> of vast segments of humanity, are the processes and the policies that have
> produced these trends sustainable?
> Regrettably, the answer increasingly seemed to be negative. Among
> environmentalists, the focus was on climate change, biodiversity loss, and
> pollution. That fact that the earth has self-correcting mechanisms, and
> that the physical processes underpinning changes in the environment have
> huge inertia, does not invalidate the growing consensus in the scientific
> community that, at the margin, the trends are not sustainable. For exam-
> ple, global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels have sharply acceler-
> ated since 2000, reflecting a quickening in the pace of growth of the glob-
> al economy,10 a sharp rise in energy consumption in China, and the weak-
> 
> 8. See Jackson, Prosperity Without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet.
> 9. See Dietz and O’Neill, Enough is Enough: Building a Sustainable Economy in a
> World of Finite Resources, 2013.
> 10. According to World Economic Outlook, published by the IMF, the average
> annual global economic growth between 2000 and 2003 was 3.3 percent before
> accelerating quickly to 5.0 percent during the period 2004–2007. This pickup in
> the pace of economic growth was associated with a remarkable increase in the
> price of oil and other commodities.
> Challenges of Sustainable Development                    37
> 
> ening of natural carbon sinks, such as forests and seas.11 Not surprising-
> ly, large volumes of the Arctic ice have melted, and accelerated ice-sheet
> flow in Greenland glaciers is contributing to a rise in sea levels. Satellite
> observations of the Arctic ice cap show a significant reduction in the ice
> cover, with a record decrease in 2012 to less than half the area typically
> occupied four decades ago.12 In 1996 the volume of ice melted in
> Greenland was 22 cubic miles (92 cubic kilometers). By 2005 this figure
> had risen to 53 cubic miles (221 cubic kilometers).13
> Even when world economic growth came to a halt in 2009 because of
> the global financial crisis, these perturbing environmental trends were not
> reversed since the present scale of human activity was only marginally
> and temporarily affected, and world economic growth has again taken off.
> In the absence of other measures aimed directly at reducing emissions,
> only a sustained, deep economic depression such as that experienced dur-
> ing the 1929–1933 period might have had an impact on the pace of accu-
> mulation of carbon dioxide emissions. However, even the most pessimistic
> analysts do not forecast a return to the severe economic dislocations of the
> Great Depression that, as is well known, were greatly intensified by poli-
> cy mistakes on the part of the economic authorities. Furthermore, expect-
> ing an economic depression to help temporarily mitigate the challenges of
> global warming is hardly a commendable solution considering the incal-
> culable social costs involved.
> But even beyond purely environmental concerns, there are other forces
> at work that are already having a major impact on our system’s institu-
> tional underpinnings, forces that have been at the center of the progress
> 
> 11. In the twenty-year period 1980–2000, CO2 emissions rose at an average
> rate of 1.6 percent per year. By 2004, however, they were rising by 5.4 percent,
> with Asia and North America leading the way.
> 12. See Vidal and Vaughan, “Arctic sea ice shrinks to smallest extent ever
> recorded,” The Guardian, 14 Sept. 2012.
> 13. For some impressive photos of declining ice cover see <http://www.nasa.
> gov/arcticice_decline>. The Arctic ice cap has diminished from 7.5 million square
> kilometers in 1980 to only 4.3 million in 2007.
> 38            The Journal of Bahá’í Studies 22. 1/4. 2012
> 
> achieved during the past half-century. Key among these factors is popula-
> tion growth and its corresponding pressures on resources. According to
> World Energy Outlook 2012 published by the International Energy Agency,
> energy demand will grow by a third by 2035, reflecting the addition of 2.2
> billion people to the world’s population and the corresponding needs for
> housing, transportation, heating, illumination, food production and waste
> disposal, as well as the push for sustained increases in the standards of liv-
> ing.14 Because the mothers who will bear these 2.2 billion children are
> already alive today, this expected increase in the world’s population—bar-
> ring some unexpected calamity—will materialize and will be largely con-
> centrated in urban environments in developing countries.
> Beyond the inevitable pressures on resources, rapid population growth
> in the next couple of decades will lead to a broad range of challenges for
> governments, businesses, and civil society. For instance, in the Middle
> East and North Africa, high fertility rates and the highest rates of popu-
> lation growth in the world will put enormous strains on labor markets.
> These countries already suffer from the highest rates of unemployment in
> the world. Simply to prevent these levels from rising further it will be
> necessary to create well over 100 million new jobs within the next decade
> and a half, an extremely tall order. The failure to significantly increase the
> number of jobs so far has led to major political and social instability in the
> region.15 In sharp contrast, the populations of countries such as Italy,
> Japan, and others in the industrial world will continue to shrink, a demo-
> graphic trend which, in turn, will put a huge strain on public finances as
> states attempt to cope with growing numbers of pensioners putting major
> pressures on budgetary resources.
> Powerful demonstration effects are also at work. The spread of instant
> communication through the Internet has led billions of people in China,
> India, Latin America, and other parts of the developing world to aspire to
> lifestyles and patterns of consumption similar to those prevailing in the
> 
> 14. See World Energy Outlook 2012, Executive Smmary, p. 1. <www.iea.org.>.
> 15. This was anticipated in Lopez-Claros and Pletka, “Without reforms, the
> Middle East risks revolution,” International Herald Tribune, 8 Apr. 2005.
> Challenges of Sustainable Development                 39
> 
> industrial world. Furthermore, these populations are often unwilling to
> postpone such aspirations and increasingly expect their governments to
> deliver rising levels of prosperity, implicitly pushing for a more equitable
> distribution of the world’s resources. At present, 20 percent of the world’s
> population, living in the thirty richest countries, consume over 80 percent
> of the world’s goods and services.
> As if these demand pressures were not enough, there are emerging sup-
> ply constraints as well. World cereal production per person has been on a
> downward trend since the late 1980s. It is estimated that by 2025 the
> number of people living in regions with absolute water scarcity will have
> risen to 1.8 billion. Climate change, soil erosion, and overfishing are
> expected to diminish food production and are known to have been a driv-
> ing force in the major surge in food prices during the past years.
> Thus, the fundamental development question we face is how to recon-
> cile the legitimate aspirations of citizens in the developing world with the
> high economic growth rates that in the postwar period have led to such
> remarkable improvements in the global standards of living, and with the
> challenges of an economic system under severe stress as a result of the
> pressures put on it by that very economic growth. Paul Collier persuasive-
> ly argues that “development is about giving hope to ordinary people that
> their children will live in a society that has caught up with the rest of the
> world. Take that hope away and the smart people will use their energies
> not to develop their societies but to escape from it—as have a million
> Cubans” (12).
> 
> SEARCHING FOR A SOLUTION
> Not surprisingly, there is a raging debate in policymaking circles, in the
> pages of academic journals, and in the international press about how to
> confront the challenges of economic development. In particular, how can
> resolution be found between the tensions caused by pressures on the envi-
> ronment resulting from scarce resources associated with economic
> growth, and the unsatisfied needs of millions of poor people all over the
> 40              The Journal of Bahá’í Studies 22. 1/4. 2012
> 
> world?16 One popular approach in this debate argues roughly as follows:
> “The planet is not salvageable as long as international capitalism prevails,
> with its focus on growth and profits at all costs and predatory resource
> capture. If we are truly concerned about helping the poor rather than the
> rich, we need a new development model.” (George 50)17 Susan George,
> for instance, advocates “ecological Keynesianism” (50), drawing parallels
> with the Allied response to fascism during the Second World War and the
> swift transformation of the economy to a war footing. A massive shift of
> resources and priorities by governments to deal with the upcoming envi-
> ronmental catastrophes is necessary, a sort of third way “between red-in-
> tooth-and-claw capitalism and a worldwide uprising as unlikely as it is
> utopian” (50).
> Too often the debates about the enormous limitations of the present
> economic system take place against complete ignorance of the awful his-
> torical record of the alternatives tried during the past century. This point
> was well made by John Gray, a professor emeritus of economics at the
> London School of Economics and author of False Dawn: The Delusions of
> Global Capitalism, during a fascinating online conversation sponsored by
> the Templeton Foundation titled “Does the Free Market Corrode Moral
> Character?” Gray writes:
> 
> The moral hazards of free markets do not mean that other economic
> systems are any better. Centrally planned systems have corroded
> character far more damagingly and with fewer benefits in terms of
> efficiency and productivity. The planned economies of the former
> Soviet bloc only functioned—to the degree they did at all—because
> 
> 16. The Growth Report addresses this issue thus: “Preventing climate change (or
> ’mitigation’ as the experts call it) is better than palliating its effects. But how can
> we cut carbon emissions to safe levels by mid-century while also accommodating
> the growth of developing countries? At the moment, the debate has reached a con-
> ceptual impasse” (p. 10).
> 17. For further insight see, for instance, the articles by Susan George and
> Andrew Simms, New Scientist, spec. issue. 18 Oct. 2008.
> Challenges of Sustainable Development                  41
> 
> they were riddled with black and grey markets. Corruption was ubiq-
> uitous. In the Marxian model, the greed-fuelled anarchy of the mar-
> ket is replaced with planning based on altruism. But actual life in
> Soviet societies was more like an extreme caricature of laissez-faire
> capitalism, a chaotic and wasteful environment in which each person
> struggled to stay afloat. Homo homini lupu—man is wolf to man—was
> the rule, and altruism the exception. In these conditions, people with
> the most highly developed survival skills and the fewest moral scru-
> ples did best. (Gray n. pag.)
> 
> Equally insightful are the comments by the French philosopher
> Bernard-Henri Levy:
> 
> First, if the market corrupts, the various negations of the market cor-
> rupt absolutely. Look at fascism. And look at that other hatred of the
> market that preceded and followed it: Communism. I doubt that any-
> one would posit Communism as the fulfillment of character and soul
> for its victims or agents. Second, if it is necessary to choose, if these
> corruptions must be ranked, it is patently obvious that the
> Communist or the fascist corruption through the negation of the
> market is significantly deeper, deadlier, and more irreparable than the
> first. That was obvious for fascism from the start, and it eventually
> became obvious for Communism too. I think back to the long journey
> I made through Central and Eastern Europe just after the fall of the
> Berlin Wall. I can still hear my Czech, Polish, Bulgarian, Hungarian,
> and East German friends explaining to me that the Communist era,
> those long decades in a society not at all governed by the rules of the
> market, had caused them, in their hearts and souls, to develop a cer-
> tain number of vices, even defects—and that they themselves did not
> know how long it would take to get rid of them. (Levy n. pag.)
> 
> As someone whose work took him to Russia within a few months of the
> collapse of the Soviet Union and who lived and worked there for the next
> four and a half years, I can fully support the assessments made by Gray
> 42             The Journal of Bahá’í Studies 22. 1/4. 2012
> 
> and Levy. Of course, the Bahá’í writings themselves are unequivocal in
> highlighting the inadequacies of communism as a system for the organi-
> zation of human affairs. Shoghi Effendi, the Guardian of the Bahá’í Faith
> during the period 1921–1957, writes eloquently about the huge costs for
> humanity associated with theories and policies “which deify the state and
> exalt the nation above mankind, which seek to subordinate the sister races
> of the world to one single race, which discriminate between the black and
> the white, and which tolerate the dominance of one privileged class over
> all others…” (Promised Day 113).
> It is imperative that we refrain from fruitless debates about the relative
> merits of particular economic “systems” and not succumb to the tempta-
> tion of seeing contemporary problems (for example: poverty, income dis-
> parities, and climate change) as being purely manifestations of systemic
> failure. The reality is considerably more complex. Countries which have
> been successful in boosting income per capita, in broadening the range of
> available opportunities for their respective populations, and in reducing
> the incidence of poverty are those where successive governments have
> taken a pragmatic approach to policy formulation and implementation,
> taking the best of an otherwise rich menu of options and doing so in a con-
> text fairly free of useless, tired debates about whether the approach being
> followed was faithful (or not) to a particular ideology� capitalist, Marxist,
> or otherwise.
> One can characterize as “unjust” the fact that South Korean citizens
> today have an income per capita that is fifteen times higher than that of
> their fellow brothers and sisters in Ghana, but one cannot neglect the
> equally sobering fact that as recently as 1960, Ghana was actually ahead
> of South Korea in this key indicator.18 To attribute these differences to
> 
> 18. In 1950, income per capita (in 1990 US dollars) in Ghana was equivalent to
> $1,122, but only $770 in South Korea. By 1998, income per capita in Ghana was
> $1,244, but had risen to $12,152 in South Korea. By 2012, the gap had widened at
> a rapidly accelerating pace. (See Maddison, The World Economy: A Millennial
> Perspective). No reliable data is available for the Democratic Republic of Korea
> (North Korea), the last and longest centrally planned totalitarian nightmare. With
> Challenges of Sustainable Development                      43
> 
> “injustice” or to try to explain them in light of some inherent flaw in the
> “capitalist” system is misleading and not particularly helpful. It is mislead-
> ing because it fails to explain why some economies, such as those of Chile,
> Ireland, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and all
> the Nordics—the list is much longer—have done so well, “capitalism”
> notwithstanding.19 This approach is unhelpful because it neglects the
> role of good governance and policies in precipitating constructive process-
> es of change. For example, to say to any of the heads of state of Bolivia
> during the past thirty years that the country’s poverty is the result of
> grave injustices in the capitalist system begs the question of why its next-
> door neighbor, Chile, has done so much better in improving living condi-
> tions. Furthermore, the comparison completely sidesteps the issue of poor
> governance and corruption and the extent to which those factors are
> largely responsible for Bolivia’s poverty.20
> South Korea is a developed country, and Ghana and most of the sub-
> Saharan African countries are not. The human beings living in these
> countries are all God’s creatures. But the key challenge of development is
> identifying the factors, policies, and institutions that have led, in the case
> 
> famine estimated to have caused in excess of three million casualties during the
> past decade and a half and thousands of young women sold into prostitution
> across the border in China, the contrast with South Korea is painfully eloquent.
> 19. I deliberately use the word in quotes because I am not sure that the term
> can be defined meaningfully, just as I cannot say, for example, if Sweden is a “cap-
> italist” country.
> 20. According to a report in The Economist (“Chile: Destitute No More,” 18 Aug.
> 2007), “poverty has fallen further, faster, in Chile than anywhere else in Latin
> America. Sustained economic growth and job creation since the mid-1980s are the
> main explanations, though it helps that poorer Chileans are having fewer children
> than in the past.” The data show that while poverty rates in Latin America
> between 1990 and 2006 fell from about 48 percent to 39 percent, the drop in Chile
> over the same period was far more dramatic: from 38 percent to 13 percent. The
> authors add: “Chile has a chance of all but abolishing poverty in the next few
> years.”
> 44             The Journal of Bahá’í Studies 22. 1/4. 2012
> 
> of South Korea, to high levels of per capita income, highly educated pop-
> ulations with skilled labor forces that are able to operate on the frontiers
> of technology, where economic activity takes place in a context of relative
> openness and transparency, with clear and predictable rules, where cor-
> ruption is relatively rare, and where the government is periodically legit-
> imized through the electoral process. In the case of Ghana, the opposite of
> the foregoing factors has led to all the ills and tragedies that are in full evi-
> dence when one travels throughout the “developing” world. It is useless to
> pretend that there is no difference. It is important to distinguish between
> the individual (all are equal before God as Bahá’u’lláh wonderfully
> expresses in the phrase, “The earth is but one country and mankind its cit-
> izens,” 250) and the policies or systems they live under, which range from
> the enlightened to the deplorable, and which go a long way to explaining
> why some countries are rich and prosperous and others are poor and lack-
> ing in opportunity. From this perspective, poverty and underdevelopment
> have little to do with culture and more with what happens when
> economies malfunction or when the technological infrastructure that
> drives them has broken down or is no longer relevant for the time and the
> place.
> The problems of poverty, lack of opportunity, and lack of concern for the
> environment have little to do with the presence or absence of “capitalism”
> and much more to do with weak institutions and systems of incentives
> that often misdirect resources or create huge, wasteful distortions.
> Honest and thoughtful leaders are needed who will have credibility with
> the public and who will build institutions, improve the regulatory frame-
> work, manage scarce resources more effectively, and so on. The following
> example is a useful illustration. The primary mechanism of distribution in
> most modern societies is the government budget and the tax policy that
> underlies it. One of the more interesting experiences in this area is how
> the Nordic countries have managed to develop an economic model based
> on the provision of an extensive safety net (which involves relatively high
> levels of taxation) and managed to remain among the most competitive
> economies in the world, thereby disproving the fallacy that “less govern-
> ment” is always better because high taxes will discourage private initia-
> Challenges of Sustainable Development                  45
> 
> tive. Not at all; what matters is how the collected taxes are used. If they
> are often stolen or otherwise misused, then, yes, high taxes will kill the
> private sector which, in turn, will find ways not to pay them. But if, as in
> the Nordics, the tax revenue goes to supporting education, to improving
> the country’s infrastructure, to enhancing the skills of the population, and
> to providing basic services, then not only will people and businesses pay
> the taxes, but societies will flourish, as the case of South Korea illustrates.
> While good governance is obviously critical at the national level, the
> issue does highlight one significant institutional failure in the globalized
> economy of today. There is no international mechanism to define ethical
> parameters or otherwise regulate the behavior of multinational corpora-
> tions at the global level. Since the economies of the largest companies and
> financial institutions are larger than those of most national economies,
> this lack of regulation is a significant gap as it leaves room for rapacious
> resource extraction, neglect of the environment, tax avoidance, and
> exploitation of poor workers, among other vices. The power of business
> lobbies is even hard for the governments of large countries to resist, not
> to mention for governments that are weak, ineffective, or open to corrup-
> tion. As a result, the private sector is often excluded from participation in
> governance mechanisms. Yet business needs a level playing field at the
> global level for its innovation and competitiveness to work effectively in
> support of sustainability.21
> It is simplistic just to call for a new development model. Quite aside
> from the practical problems associated with giving operational meaning to
> such calls, we have learned by now that not only is there no “magic bullet”
> to ensure sustainable development, but the ingredients of success are
> many in number, vary from country to country in their relative impor-
> tance (depending on their stage of development), and evolve over time.
> Furthermore, the issue has nothing to do with “capitalism”—a useless and
> stale concept in terms of its ability to help us understand better how to
> 
> 21. See Dahl, “The competitive edge in environmental responsibility,” pp.
> 103–10, in Lopez-Claros et al., The Global Competitiveness Report 2004–2005.
> 46            The Journal of Bahá’í Studies 22. 1/4. 2012
> 
> tackle world poverty or many of the large number of global problems we
> currently face.
> A more promising approach to this subject is to frame the discussion of
> world poverty—how to reduce it and how to do so in a context of respect
> for the environment—in terms of the identification of critical factors
> needed to generate processes of growth for the poor within a sustainable
> framework, without entering into a largely fruitless debate about the role
> of “capitalism” in helping (or not helping) us to get there. That debate may
> have been relevant and perhaps even interesting thirty years ago, but the
> world has moved on and governments are increasingly judged by voters
> not for the extent of their ideological purity but rather for the real results
> of their policies, just as Shoghi Effendi suggested they should be. This we
> should all celebrate. His eloquent call for setting aside ideological disputes
> in discussion of social and economic development in favor of pragmatism
> and common sense is captured in his statement that “legal standards,
> political and economic theories are solely designed to safeguard the inter-
> ests of humanity as a whole, and not humanity to be crucified for the
> preservation of the integrity of any particular law or doctrine” (World
> Order 42).
> In the longer term, we do need research into new economic policies that
> are more altruistic and cooperative, create meaningful employment, and
> reduce poverty. Such principles imply a profound transformation, not so
> much in the mechanisms of the economy but in the values that underlie it
> and in the institutions, both private and public, through which it operates.
> At the moment, a greater focus at the community level, with new econom-
> ic models and experiments for development and poverty elimination driv-
> en from the bottom up, may be more fruitful than the present aid approach
> to development that is driven from the top down.
> 
> A CREATIVE AGENDA
> 
> At present, creative solutions are far more likely to focus on practical
> actions that can be taken to address the core challenge of sustainable
> development as defined earlier in this article. In particular, in our view,
> they are likely to involve actions on at least four fronts.
> Challenges of Sustainable Development                     47
> 
> CONSERVATION
> 
> First, we will have to invest in conservation and in redressing some of the
> damage done to the environment through decades of neglect. According
> to the Earth Policy Institute, about US$100 billion should be spent annu-
> ally to protect topsoil in croplands, to stabilize water tables, to restore
> fisheries, and to protect biological diversity. This sum of money is not par-
> ticularly large in relation to the size of the global economy—it is less than
> one-seventh of 1 percent of world GNP—and it is certainly not large in
> relation to the huge amounts of money made available by governments in
> some of the largest countries to deal with the short-term effects of the
> 2008–2009 global financial crisis. It is also less than 6 percent of annual
> world military expenditure.22
> A key finding of the latest scientific work on climate change is that the
> annual cost of introducing control measures for greenhouse gases is far
> smaller in comparison to the potential cost of uncontrolled climate
> change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of the
> United Nations estimates that stabilizing greenhouse gases by 2030
> would slow global economic growth by slightly more than 0.1 percent per
> year. The risks of inaction, however, are huge, and estimates of the eco-
> nomic cost associated with an increase from 2.5 to 4.5 degrees Celsius in
> temperatures suggest economic damage approximating 1.5 percent of
> global GDP annually by 2100, with some estimates going even higher.23
> Furthermore, the impact is significantly different across some regions,
> with India and Africa being most affected. There will also be a need to
> invest in energy infrastructure not only to replace aging capacity and to
> meet growing global energy demand but also to boost efficiency.
> 
> 22. The United States accounts for 57 percent of total world military expendi-
> tures. Between 1998 and 2012, its military spending rose from $280 billion to
> $682 billion.
> 23. For instance The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern Review commis-
> sioned by the United Kingdom government concluded that a rise in temperatures
> of 2 to 3 degrees Celsius could reduce global economic output by 3 percent,
> whereas a rise of 5 degrees Celsius would result in up to 10 percent of global out-
> put being lost, with the losses in developing countries being even higher.
> 48             The Journal of Bahá’í Studies 22. 1/4. 2012
> 
> TECHNOLOGY
> 
> Obviously, technology can play a key role. More efficient use of energy has
> reduced the size of energy consumption in global GDP by more than 30
> percent in the past 20 years. Much more can be done in this area, particu-
> larly by resorting to new technologies of energy renewal and conserva-
> tion, including greater use of solar and wind power and alternative fuels.
> There is encouraging evidence that the auto industry is finally catching up
> to rapidly changing consumer demand as evidenced by an increasing num-
> ber of electric and hybrid cars on the market, since the rewards could
> potentially be very large. Simultaneously, a number of studies, under the
> general heading of “geo-engineering,” are underway in leading research
> centers to identify human interventions that could either remove carbon
> dioxide from the atmosphere or reduce the amount of sunlight that comes
> to the earth. These new technologies have a strong potential for unintend-
> ed consequences, but could, after careful assessment, play a necessary,
> complementary role in other measures aimed at precipitating inevitable
> changes in human behavior that have been too slow in coming.24
> Of course, given the magnitude of the challenges we face—particularly
> climate change—care must be taken not to overstate the case for new
> technologies and the time it will take for these new technologies to have a
> measurable impact. Indeed, many in the scientific community think that it
> is quite misguided to think that a combination of greater energy efficien-
> cy and the development of appropriate green technologies will allow eco-
> 
> 24. Among the many novel alternatives being explored is the use of peridotite,
> a carbon-eating rock that, in the case of the Omani desert, for instance, is known
> to absorb tens of thousands of tons of carbon dioxide every year. Scientists at
> Columbia University argue, in a recent issue of Proceedings of the National
> Academy of Sciences, that drilling and fracturing of the rock could increase its
> absorption rate 100,000-fold. (See “Eating Carbon,” The Economist, p. 87).
> Challenges of Sustainable Development                       49
> 
> nomic growth to continue unimpeded in coming decades.25 There is the
> additional danger that undue emphasis on “technological fixes” will result
> in complacency, since politicians will always be receptive to solutions that
> do not appear to involve sacrifices on the part of voters, unlike carbon
> taxes, or changes in patterns of consumption or lifestyles.
> Defining progress in terms of technological breakthroughs that only
> benefit privileged minorities at the expense of the well-being of humanity
> as a whole and the planet itself is not only unjust, but it ignores the poten-
> tial that can come from making science and technology accessible to the
> poor and from empowering them to set their own priorities and to use
> technological innovation to resolve their own problems. Clearly, there is
> tremendous potential associated with indigenous technologies that will
> help communities create their own technological breakthroughs in keep-
> ing with local conditions. Strengthening communities at the grass roots
> has enormous potential to stimulate myriad forms of development from
> the bottom up.
> The Growth Report lucidly defines our challenge: “We do not know if lim-
> its to growth exist, or how generous those limits will be. The answer will
> depend on our ingenuity and technology, on finding new ways to create
> goods and services that people value on a finite foundation of natural
> resources. This is likely to be the ultimate challenge of the coming century.
> Growth and poverty reduction in the future will depend on our ability to
> meet it” (12). In this respect it is noteworthy to highlight Shoghi Effendi’s
> allusions to the scope of further advances in “human inventions and tech-
> nical development” (World Order 204) including those aimed at “the
> exploitation of the unused and unsuspected resources of the planet” (204).
> 
> 25. See the interview with environmental activist David Suzuki, who unhesitat-
> ingly states: “They [the economists] believe humans are so creative and produc-
> tive that the sky’s the limit, that if we run out of resources, we’ll go to the moon,
> mine asteroids or harvest sunlight in space and microwave it to Earth. They think
> the whole universe is there as a potential resource.… Limitless resources are a
> fool’s dream that we can never achieve.” (“We Should Act Like the Animals We
> Are,” New Scientist 44).
> 50            The Journal of Bahá’í Studies 22. 1/4. 2012
> 
> He makes specific reference to the earth’s “unimaginably vast resources”
> (204), which “[a] world federal system … liberated from the curse of war
> and its miseries” (204) will be able to exploit and put at the service of
> mankind. He also refers to “the exploitation of all the available sources of
> energy on the surface of the planet” (204), acknowledging the essential
> role that energy plays in economic development, and thus the challenge to
> our present economy from the rising costs and risks of shortages from our
> over-dependence on unsustainable fossil fuels.
> While this technological potential undoubtedly exists in the long term,
> its development will require global institutional arrangements, efficiencies
> of governance, financial resources, and a culture of change in political and
> social systems, all of which are lacking at the present time. The immedi-
> ate issue for sustainability is not so much the ultimate limits and techno-
> logical possibilities, but rather it is our present slow pace of change when
> faced with growing social and environmental challenges. There are tech-
> nological solutions for most environmental problems, but they are not
> being applied at anywhere near the speed necessary to avoid future crises.
> Environmental degradation continues and social tensions are rising, espe-
> cially among the young.
> 
> INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION
> 
> The third crucially important element of a strategy aimed at generating a
> sustainable development path will have to be a significant strengthening
> of the current mechanisms of international cooperation, which have
> turned out to be completely inadequate to the global challenges that we
> face. The process of globalization is unfolding in the absence of equivalent
> progress in the creation of an international institutional infrastructure
> that can support it and enhance its potential for good. There is no global
> environmental authority. Policy in this area is being set via ad hoc
> approaches involving elements of international cooperation, voluntary
> compliance, and large doses of hope.
> In the absence of a body having jurisdiction over the global environ-
> ment with corresponding legal enforcement authority, the international
> Challenges of Sustainable Development                 51
> 
> community has, de facto, abdicated management of the world’s environ-
> ment to chance and the actions of a few well-meaning states. The global
> economy has no lender of last resort. There is no reliable, depoliticized
> mechanism to deal with financial crises. Whether a country receives or is
> refused an IMF bailout in the middle of a financial meltdown is a function
> not of a transparent set of internationally accepted rules but rather of sev-
> eral other factors, including whether the IMF’s largest shareholders con-
> sider the country to be a strategic ally worth supporting. Furthermore,
> there is no international legal framework to ensure that global business
> enterprises are socially, environmentally, and economically responsible.
> There is no agency charged with the responsibility for giving legal mean-
> ing to the noble principles enshrined in the Universal Declaration of
> Human Rights. According to the United States Department of State, there
> are forty-four nations with the capacity to build nuclear weapons. Nuclear
> proliferation remains yet another example of global institutional failure.
> Whether we focus our attention on climate change and the broad range
> of associated environmental calamities, nuclear proliferation, the work-
> ings of the world’s financial system, or focus on growing income dispari-
> ties, the fact is that major planetary problems are being neglected because
> we do not have effective problem-solving mechanisms and institutions
> strong enough to deal with them. Or, put differently, a range of inherent-
> ly global crises cannot be solved outside the framework of global collec-
> tive action involving supranational cooperation and a fundamental
> rethinking of “national interest.”
> The reality is that existing institutions are incapable of rising to the
> challenges of a rapidly changing world because they were designed for
> another era. Indeed, the United Nations itself and its associated infra-
> structure of specialized agencies, which were created to attend to a variety
> of global problems, find themselves increasingly unable to respond to
> crises, sometimes because these agencies lack the appropriate jurisdiction
> or mandate to act, at times because they are inadequately endowed with
> resources, and often because they simply do not know what to do. Shoghi
> Effendi characterized this dilemma with penetrating insight when he said,
> as far back as 1931, that “the fundamental cause of this world unrest is
> 52            The Journal of Bahá’í Studies 22. 1/4. 2012
> 
> attributable . . . to the failure of those into whose hands the immediate des-
> tinies of peoples and nations have been committed, to adjust their system
> of economic and political institutions to the imperative needs of a rapidly
> evolving age” (World Order 36).
> The nation state is in deep crisis. At its core, the nation state is defined
> by a geographical border within which elected governments—at least in
> the context of democracy—are responsible for safeguarding the interests
> of citizens, improving the quality of available services, managing scarce
> resources, and promoting gradually rising living standards. However, as
> made abundantly clear by recent events in the financial markets and, more
> generally, by the onward march of globalization, the economic system is
> now no longer confined to national borders but straddles them in a way
> that is increasingly forcing governments to relinquish control in a grow-
> ing number of areas. Indeed, one of the main lessons to emerge from the
> 2008-2009 global financial crisis, as noted by Peter Mandelson, a former
> European Union Commissioner, is that “a global economy needs global
> economic governance” (n. pag.). The same can be said for the environment.
> Alongside the stresses put on institutions by the accelerating pace of
> global change, people everywhere are showing growing dissatisfaction
> with the inability of politics and politicians to find solutions to wide
> ranges of global problems. This trend is likely to intensify and is giving
> rise to a “crisis of governance,” the sense that nobody is in charge, that
> while we live in a fully integrated world, we do not have an institutional
> infrastructure that can respond to the multiple challenges we face.26
> Shoghi Effendi summarizes this predicament: “The world, to whichever
> continent we turn our gaze, to however remote a region our survey may
> extend, is everywhere assailed by forces it can neither explain nor control”
> (World Order 31).
> Indeed, existing mechanisms to tackle global issues are woefully inade-
> quate. Treaties and conventions—which are very much at the core of how
> 
> 26. See the excellent discussion of these issues provided by Rischard, High
> Noon: 20 Global Problems and 20 Years to Solve Them.
> Challenges of Sustainable Development                 53
> 
> the international community has confronted global challenges in the
> past—have proven generally ineffective to address urgent problems. For
> example, the Kyoto Protocol was negotiated in 1997 but only ratified in
> 2005. The United States, until 2008 the largest emitter of global-warm-
> ing gasses in the world, now overtaken by China, is not a party to the
> Protocol. It was, therefore, a foregone conclusion that the goals it set for
> global emissions by 2012 would not be reached. Where enforcement
> mechanisms exist at all, monitoring and enforcement of these treaties are
> lax and painfully slow.
> During the 1990s the United Nations took the lead role in organizing
> major intergovernmental conferences, beginning with the Earth Summit
> held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. This was followed by conferences on social
> and economic development (Copenhagen), women (Beijing), population
> (Cairo), human rights (Vienna), and so on. These conferences, however,
> while generally good for raising awareness of the underlying problems,
> have proven to be inadequate for problem-solving. Long on declarations
> and in some cases deteriorating into circus-like chaos (e.g., the 2001
> Durban conference on race), they have long ceased to be mechanisms for
> effective cooperation on the urgent problems confronting humanity. The
> Rio+20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development held in
> 2012 was intended to reaffirm government commitments, to define a
> green economy that would alleviate poverty and work for sustainability,
> and to obtain agreement on new international institutional arrangements.
> But this gathering only succeeded in making minor adjustments to exist-
> ing institutions and in proposing a high-level political forum whose func-
> tion is still being defined. This experience demonstrated once again that
> governments are incapable of addressing urgent global problems effec-
> tively within the present system.
> Yet another attempt at reinforcing existing mechanisms of internation-
> al cooperation was the creation in the mid-1970s of the G7, a club com-
> prised of the world’s seven largest economies. The motivation was to cre-
> ate a high-level body to discuss “major economic and political issues fac-
> ing their domestic societies and the international community as a whole”
> (“What Is the G8?”) The G7 has been a good forum for open debate about
> 54            The Journal of Bahá’í Studies 22. 1/4. 2012
> 
> global problems but not a particularly effective problem-solving group. In
> the public imagination, its semi-annual meetings are largely perceived as
> excellent photo opportunities, not as brainstorming sessions focused on
> particular problems requiring urgent solutions. Unlike, for instance, the
> 1944 Bretton Woods conference, which lasted three weeks and resulted in
> the creation of a new world financial system, G7 meetings are actually
> intended to preserve the status quo. Its communiqués are negotiated by
> deputies ahead of the Summit itself and much time is spent in getting the
> wording of these declarations just right. Over time, critics have pointed
> out some obvious deficiencies, the first being, of course, that now the G7
> membership is no longer comprised of the world’s seven largest
> economies. Italy, for instance, the industrial world’s slowest-growing
> economy during the past twenty years, has now been overtaken by many
> others, including China and India.27 In 1999, recognizing that the global
> economy had evolved since the mid-1970s, a broader grouping was creat-
> ed—the G20—but neither the Swiss nor the Dutch nor the Spanish were
> particularly happy at being excluded. Switzerland is the world’s most
> competitive economy; the Netherlands is one of the most generous donors
> and, according to the Center for Global Development, one of the countries
> with the most development-friendly policies.28 Spain, a country whose
> economy is three times the size of that of Argentina (a member of the
> G20), took great exception to being excluded from the G20 Summit,
> which was called by President George W. Bush for November 14–15,
> 2008, to discuss the global financial crisis.
> 
> 27. According to the World Bank’s development indicators (www.
> worldbank.org), Italy’s GDP in 2012 is estimated to be US$1,834 billion, com-
> pared to China’s (US$12,406 billion), India’s (US$4,184 billion), Russia’s
> (US$2,513 billion), and Brazil’s (US$2,356 billion), using a purchasing-power-
> parity measure.
> 28. See Commitment to Development Index 2012, issued by the Center for Global
> Development, which reports that Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Luxembourg,
> Austria, and the Netherlands occupy, in that order, the top six ranks.
> <www.cgdev.org>
> Challenges of Sustainable Development                    55
> 
> Moreover, both the G7—or the G8 with Russia—and the G20 remain,
> in fact, official government bodies. Their deliberations bring to the table
> heads of state and a small coterie of civil servants, but there is no repre-
> sentation from the business community, and civil society representatives
> do not participate. Given the global nature of the problems being faced
> and the increasingly shared perception that their solution will require
> broad-based collaboration across various stakeholder groups, many of
> these groups suffer from a deficit of legitimacy.29 They are not a fair rep-
> resentation of humanity, and, as such, they cannot be expected to make
> any important decisions on its behalf.
> The multilateral agencies associated with the United Nations system
> have acquired a critically important role in recent decades. These agencies
> are repositories of knowledge and expertise and, in some cases, they have
> essentially taken over jurisdiction in a central area of economic gover-
> nance, such as international trade through the World Trade Organization.
> However, they remain hampered in many other ways, including lack of
> access to adequate resources to finance their activities and the reluctance
> of many of the larger countries to cede national sovereignty in particular
> areas. In this respect, the European Union has, without doubt, gone fur-
> ther than any other country grouping in creating a supranational institu-
> tional infrastructure to support an ambitious process of economic and
> political integration.
> Effective, credible mechanisms of international cooperation that are
> perceived to be legitimate and capable of acting on behalf of the interests
> of humanity—rather than those of a particular set of countries—are
> absolutely essential if the world is to meet the challenge of striking the
> correct balance between concern for the environment and the policies that
> must underpin such concern. There is also the need to ensure that the
> global economy develops in a way that provides opportunities for all, par-
> 
> 29. The population of the G7—746 million, according to the latest World Bank
> estimates—accounts in 2010 for 10.8 percent of the world’s population, that is, a
> small minority.
> 56             The Journal of Bahá’í Studies 22. 1/4. 2012
> 
> ticularly the poor and the disadvantaged.30 It is an open question whether
> the existing intergovernmental system of nation states is capable of
> achieving this level of cooperation, or if such a system will require a more
> fundamental restructuring of the relationships between countries and
> peoples.
> 
> HUMAN VALUES
> 
> Finally, no strategy aimed at fostering the emergence of a sustainable
> development path would be complete without a fundamental rethinking of
> the human values that have driven much of the development process dur-
> ing the past century. A considerable body of academic research in recent
> years has examined the issue of the correlation between growing incomes
> and human happiness. The question itself might have appeared slightly
> quaint a couple of decades ago, when economists in academia and policy-
> makers in government and international financial organizations more or
> less accepted as an article of faith that higher growth and income would
> always be desirable, would increase human welfare and, along with it, hap-
> piness.
> Several insights, however, have contributed to a gradual change of per-
> spective. First, however beneficial the several decades of robust, postwar
> economic growth might have been in improving living standards, the real-
> ization grew that the global economy was beginning to confront environ-
> mental constraints that could actually be measured. Second, psychologists,
> newly empowered with analytical tools developed in other sciences, were
> able to show that human happiness was correlated with income only up to
> a certain level. Money seemed to be crucially important for happiness
> when basic material needs had not been met. But once these needs had
> 
> 30. For a sensible set of reform proposals aimed at enhancing the efficiency and
> responsiveness of the United Nations to some of these global challenges, see
> Turning Point for All Nations, a statement prepared by the Bahá’í International
> Community on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the United Nations, New
> York, 1995.
> Challenges of Sustainable Development                      57
> 
> been satisfied, the sources of happiness shifted to other concerns, reflect-
> ing deeper spiritual aspirations, including friendship, love, relationships, a
> sense of purpose in life, and security, among others. The level of income at
> which the correlation with happiness disappears has been estimated at
> around US$10,000 to US$13,000, using 1995 United States dollars and
> adjusting for differences in purchasing power across countries.31
> Nobel laureate Amartya Sen suggests that societies operate better on
> some presumption of trust. Here we refer to the need for openness, “the
> freedom to deal with one another under guarantees of disclosure and
> lucidity” (Sen 39). Trust is tremendously important for preventing cor-
> ruption and other abuses, and it is behind the frequent calls for improved
> transparency in governance. Experience has shown that where there is
> trust, citizens and businesses pay their taxes, which, in turn, enables the
> government to formulate policies to achieve various social ends because
> the resources are available to invest in these areas. As societies see the
> fruits of these efforts, trust in the government is reinforced and the coun-
> try enters into what one can call a “virtuous cycle” of development. Of
> course, “vicious cycles” are also possible, such as those that have occurred
> 
> 31. The interested reader can see, among others, the work by Easterlin, “Will
> Raising the Incomes of All Increase the Happiness of All?” Journal of Economic
> Behavior and Organization, 27 (1995), pp. 35–47; and Inglehart and Klingemann,
> “Genes, Culture, Democracy, and Happiness,” chapter 7 in Diener and Suh, ed.,
> Culture and Subjective Well-Being, pp. 165–83. Further insightful discussion is pro-
> vided by Homer-Dixon, The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal
> of Civilization, pp. 192–93, and McKibben, Deep Economy: The Wealth of
> Communities and the Durable Future, pp. 30–42, 109–12. For a more technical treat-
> ment the reader may refer to Kahneman and Krueger, “Developments in the
> Measurement of Subjective Well-being,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 20.1,
> (Winter 2006), pp. 3–24. Kahneman is a professor of psychology at Princeton
> University and is the 2002 Nobel laureate in economics. The Earth Institute of
> Columbia University and partners recently issued the World Happiness Report, ed.
> Helliwell, Layard, and Sachs. The study of happiness (“subjective well-being”) is
> now considered an entirely respectable academic discipline.
> 58            The Journal of Bahá’í Studies 22. 1/4. 2012
> 
> during the past half-century. Thirty years ago, there was very little debate
> about the role of corruption in the development process. It was certainly
> a taboo subject in the corridors of the IMF and the World Bank, where
> there was a tendency to separate technical judgments about the intricacies
> of macroeconomic policy from value judgments about the domestic polit-
> ical dimension. Fortunately, there is now broad understanding that open-
> ness and transparency are key drivers of prosperity, although there is no
> need to frame the debate in moral, ethical, or religious terms. It is enough
> to see this debate as an economic efficiency issue. Where corruption is
> rampant, for instance, companies and individuals see paying taxes as a bad
> business proposition. In contrast, as noted earlier, everybody pays taxes in
> the Nordic countries, which have the lowest levels of corruption in the
> world and the highest tax burdens, because the benefits of doing so are
> immediately visible: superb infrastructure, a highly trained labor force, an
> extensive social safety net, excellent education, and so forth.
> Bahá’ís would argue that the above observations suggest the need to
> broaden the definition of what constitutes “well-being” and investigate
> more closely the relationship between increasing market activity and the
> welfare of the people participating in the economic system. One starting
> point would be to establish a clearer mental demarcation between the con-
> cepts of “growth” and “development.” The first is essentially a quantita-
> tive concept that captures the expansion in the scale of the economic sys-
> tem, while the latter refers to qualitative changes in this system and in its
> relationships with the environment and other aspects of life in the com-
> munity. Properly understood, economics should concern itself less with
> how to add to the physical dimension of the economic system and more
> with the long-term welfare of the community whose interests the “sys-
> tem” is ultimately intended to serve.
> This distinction is quite fundamental. Herman Daly and John Cobb
> argue that the global ecosystem will change in coming decades “because it
> will be physically forced to change” (21). To give a sense of the scope for
> additional expansion of the global economy, they observe that, as of the
> early 1990s, human beings were appropriating 40 percent of the total
> world product of photosynthesis. An additional doubling of the human
> Challenges of Sustainable Development                    59
> 
> scale would leave very little energy for all nonhuman species. Since
> “humans cannot survive without the services of ecosystems which are
> made up of other species,” it becomes clear that another doubling of the
> human scale would put unbearable pressures on the earth’s ecosystem, if
> not actually become an ecological impossibility. The doubling time of
> human population is projected to be about forty years. However, as cur-
> rently formulated, the aim of development policy is to increase the average
> per capita consumption of global resources, thus reducing, in the absence
> of some major technological breakthrough, the length of time needed to
> double the scale of the global economy and its claims on world resources.
> Daly and Cobb conclude that “unless we awaken to the existence and near-
> ness of scale limits, then the greenhouse effect, ozone layer depletion, and
> acid rain will be just a preview of disasters to come, not in the vague dis-
> tant future but in the next generation” (144).32
> The deep interconnection between spirituality and care for the environ-
> ment has been the subject of increasing exploration. James Gustave Speth,
> retired dean of the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale
> University, believes the economy to be “an inherently rapacious and ruth-
> less system” and that “it is up to citizens to inject values that reflect human
> aspirations rather than just making money” (48). Al Gore dedicates an
> entire chapter in his extraordinarily prescient book Earth in the Balance to
> the role of spirituality in the cause of environmentalism and had this to
> say about the Bahá’í view:
> 
> Perhaps because its guiding visions were formed during the period of
> accelerating industrialism, Bahá’í seems to dwell on the spiritual
> implications of the great transformation to which it bore fresh wit-
> ness: “We cannot segregate the human heart from the environment
> outside us and say that once one of these is reformed everything will
> be improved. Man is organic with the world. His inner life molds the
> 
> 32. One should derive some comfort from the fact that depletion of the ozone
> layer has ceased to be a serious global environmental threat, reflecting effective
> international cooperation, as envisaged in the Montreal Protocol.
> 60            The Journal of Bahá’í Studies 22. 1/4. 2012
> 
> environment and is itself deeply affected by it. The one acts upon the
> other and every abiding change in the life of man is the result of these
> mutual reactions.” (262)
> 
> The challenges posed by the above are further elucidated in The
> Prosperity of Humankind, a statement issued by the Bahá’í International
> Community in 1995:
> 
> A culture which attaches absolute value to expansion, to acquisition,
> and to the satisfaction of people’s wants is being compelled to recog-
> nize that such goals are not, by themselves, realistic guides to policy.
> (14)
> 
> As the experience of recent decades has demonstrated, material ben-
> efits and endeavors cannot be regarded as ends in themselves. Their
> value consists not only in providing for humanity’s basic needs in
> housing, food, health care, and the like, but in extending the reach of
> human abilities. The most important role that economics must play in
> development lies, therefore, in equipping people and institutions with
> the means through which they can achieve the real purpose of devel-
> opment: that is, laying foundations for a new social order that can cul-
> tivate the limitless potentialities latent in human consciousness. (13)
> (emphasis added)
> 
> NEW HOPES FOR A CHANGING WORLD
> 
> Bahá’u’lláh’s admonition that civilization, if carried to excess, “will prove
> as prolific a source of evil as it had been of goodness when kept within the
> restraints of moderation” (World Order 194) is an eloquent statement of
> mankind’s most pressing contemporary predicament. One’s assessment of
> how far humanity has evolved in the path of progress and in creating the
> conditions for the emergence of “an ever-advancing civilization”
> (Bahá’u’lláh 215) depends on the choice of the starting point. Viewed in
> the context of the past century, however, there can be no doubt that our
> Challenges of Sustainable Development                 61
> 
> achievements have been without parallel and have set the basis for a new
> stage of human development, one that will greatly test our will, our intel-
> lectual resources, our ingenuity, the maturity of our political systems, and
> our collective imagination.
> The postwar period has witnessed a rapid expansion in the scale of the
> global economy. This process has been fueled by rapid population growth,
> by a significant acceleration in the pace of scientific and technological
> development, and by our enhanced abilities to tap into the planet’s natu-
> ral resources. An additional factor that, during the past three decades has
> had a particularly powerful influence, has been the information and com-
> munications revolution, which has boosted productivity and catalyzed a
> remarkable process of global economic and social integration. Of course,
> reflecting the absence of adequate mechanisms for international coopera-
> tion, to say nothing of an infrastructure for global governance, these
> processes have been disorderly, and have coexisted with a number of
> trends that have brought humanity to its present predicament—the emer-
> gence of environmental limits to the very economic growth that has con-
> tributed to the alleviation of human suffering, to pulling hundreds of mil-
> lions of people out of extreme poverty, and to creating greater opportuni-
> ty for vast segments of the world’s population.33
> Yes, the prevailing economic paradigm has serious flaws. Left to its own
> devices, it can lead to episodes of instability and can coexist with other
> perturbing trends, such as growing income disparities or the unsustain-
> able use of non-renewable resources. There is little comfort in suggesting
> that, notwithstanding its shortcomings, capitalism has proved to be a far
> superior economic system—in terms of improving overall living stan-
> dards—than its main competitor during much of the past century. The
> mindless Marxist experiments, which ultimately collapsed with the Berlin
> Wall in 1989, had turned the Soviet Union into a superbly efficient
> machine for the destruction of wealth.
> A “new development model” may indeed be necessary but, pending its
> 
> 33. About 65 percent of the world’s population today lives in high-income or
> high-growth economies, compared to less than 20 percent in 1978.
> 62            The Journal of Bahá’í Studies 22. 1/4. 2012
> 
> formulation, we would be well advised to work within the current system,
> which has features that, while far from perfect, have proved resilient and,
> it is not difficult to guess, would in any event transfer over to any new
> development paradigm. Among these one would include respect for prop-
> erty rights, progressive taxation, the use of the government budget as a
> key mechanism for income distribution, universal primary education, gen-
> der equality, and, most important, the maintenance and further develop-
> ment of the institutions that underpin our increasingly complex global
> economy.
> In The Secret of Divine Civilization, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá draws a parallel be-
> tween the world of politics and the physical evolution of man. Just as the
> latter evolves from the embryo to higher stages of complexity, “the polit-
> ical world in the same way cannot instantaneously evolve from the nadir
> of defectiveness to the zenith of rightness and perfection. Rather, qualified
> individuals must strive by day and by night, using all those means which
> will conduce to progress, until the government and the people develop
> along every line from day to day and even from moment to moment”
> (107–8).
> From a Bahá’í perspective, the starting point must be the consciousness
> of the oneness of humankind, which will lead to the creation of laws and
> institutions that are universal in both character and authority.34 In terms
> of the evolution of institutional arrangements, the most immediate need is
> to increase the level of trust among governments, many of which have
> been remarkably untrustworthy in respecting their international agree-
> ments. Without trust, international cooperation cannot advance. A focus
> on transparency and reduction of corruption to achieve more effective
> governance will also help governments to move in the right direction and
> reduce the significant level of tax evasion among the wealthy and busi-
> nesses. Within the economic system, a stronger focus on ethical behavior
> and social and environmental responsibility needs to be included in corpo-
> rate charters and government regulations in order to widen the account-
> ability of business leaders. This standard then needs to be extended to the
> 
> 34. See Bahá’í International Community, The Prosperity of Humankind.
> Challenges of Sustainable Development                       63
> 
> international level where multinational corporations and financial institu-
> tions presently escape essential controls and much national taxation.
> Recent efforts to develop social enterprises and alternative economic rela-
> tionships are encouraging signs that change is taking root in many parts
> of the world.
> This article has argued that in confronting the challenges of climate
> change and the other threats which cast a shadow over mankind’s future
> prosperity, concerted action will be necessary on a number of fronts. Some
> of these will demand political leadership, particularly those that may
> require a reallocation of government-spending priorities (e.g., toward con-
> servation, other forms of mitigation, greater investment in the develop-
> ment of green technologies and alternative fuels). No strategy, however,
> will bear fruit without the support of others outside government. The
> twenty-first century has delivered a “new diplomacy,” one in which the
> search for solutions to global problems will increasingly involve coalitions
> of enlightened governments, civil society organizations, and the business
> community.35
> Of course, failure to act will increase our vulnerability to multiple,
> interrelated crises with unforeseen costs for human welfare. Whether we
> find the collective will to act now to stem the tide of future crises or wait
> for catastrophe to force change upon us is, perhaps, the central question of
> our time. While it is not clear today whether we will have the wisdom to
> act now, a close examination of the vision of world order offered by
> Bahá’u’lláh shows that we certainly have the capacity to move to a sustain-
> able development path and that, in doing so, we could well usher in a new
> stage in the evolution of the human race, one that is likely to involve a
> 
> 35. In this respect it is noteworthy that the three most important initiatives of
> international cooperation during the past decade and a half (the Kyoto Protocol
> on global warming, the creation of the International Criminal Court, and the rat-
> ification of the treaty to ban land mines) have all involved close collaboration
> across these three key stakeholder groups. Without doubt, this will be the wave of
> the future.
> 64            The Journal of Bahá’í Studies 22. 1/4. 2012
> 
> quantum leap in terms of our collective achievements as a human family.
> Shoghi Effendi provided a glimpse of that magnificent potential:
> 
> National rivalries, hatreds, and intrigues will cease, and racial animos-
> ity and prejudice will be replaced by racial amity, understanding and
> cooperation. The causes of religious strife will be permanently
> removed, economic barriers and restrictions will be completely abol-
> ished, and the inordinate distinction between classes will be obliterat-
> ed. Destitution on the one hand, and gross accumulation of ownership
> on the other, will disappear. The enormous energy dissipated and
> wasted on war, whether economic or political, will be consecrated to
> such ends as will extend the range of human inventions and technical
> development, to the increase of the productivity of mankind, to the
> extermination of disease, to the extension of scientific research, to the
> raising of the standard of physical health, to the sharpening and
> refinement of the human brain, to the exploitation of the unused and
> unsuspected resources of the planet, to the prolongation of human
> life, and to the furtherance of any other agency that can stimulate the
> intellectual, the moral, and spiritual life of the entire human race.
> (World Order 204)
> 
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