Abstract
Is it possible for the world to become one as the UN World Commission on Environment and Development suggests in the very first sentence of its report? As statesmen begin to declare that ‘our country is the planet’ and economic and political systems become metanational, a global perspective enters the agenda of the human race. Yet it is still not clear whether such a change will lead to a more balanced world or one fraught with environmental hazards and fragmented into islands of wealth in seas of poverty both between North and South and within nations. Will it be driven by conscious, collective action of humankind, or impelled by short term, destructive processes? The way in which it goes will depend, partly, on how quickly and accurately science is able to cope with the challenge of thinking and analysing phenomena from a global perspective.
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Notes
- 1.
‘The Earth is one but the world is not’ is the expression used by the UN World Commission on Environment and Development at the beginning of their report to highlight the need to build sustainable forms of development for the future.
- 2.
This text was published first in: Global Environmental Change. International Social Science Journal, XLIII,4 (Blackwell Publishers. UNESCO, 1991): 599–608. This text is used by permission of UNESCO and the permission was granted on 4 July 2013 by Isabelle Nonain-Semelin on behalf of UNESCO.
- 3.
The French sociologist Daniel Bertaux discussed this at one of the meetings of the Human Dimensions for Global Change Committee of the International Social Science Council. I am indebted to the participants in the Committee for the discussions which gave rise to many of the thoughts put forth in this article: Dr. Harold Jacobson, co-ordinator; Daniel Bertaux, Leszek Kosinski, Robert Worcester, Kurt Pawlik, Renat Perelet, Takashi Fujii, Ashish Bose and Martin Price.
- 4.
I am indebted to Benjamin Mayer for the discussion of the next three sections.
- 5.
This study on ‘Perceptions of social and environmental change in the Lacandon rainforest in Southwest Mexico’, directed by Lourdes Arizpe, is funded by the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).
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Arizpe, L. (2014). The Global Cube. In: Lourdes Arizpe. SpringerBriefs on Pioneers in Science and Practice, vol 10. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01896-6_5
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