The global environment continues to be damaged in life-threatening ways and cannot sustain population growth at current levels, even though growth rates have been reduced. Hungry impoverished people continue to fuel overpopulation as insurance against infant deaths, even though progress has been made. Wars large or small, whether motivated by nationalism, terrorism or religious and ethnic strife in a world of spreading nuclear, chemical and biological weapons will continue to be aggravated by scarcity of resources. Disease increasingly respects no boundaries, whether devastating billions of people living in poverty or destroying lives in wealthy nations, while effective public health efforts are under-funded. Insufficient protection of human rights and the deficiency of economic opportunity for everyone remain at the core of our failure to create a world of peace and prosperity for all. And lastly, global evolution and the values which decide how we use our resources can never be separated from personal evolution and individual values.
These are the great issues of survival and social justice which have faced humanity throughout history. In some ways, considerable progress has been made on these issues. In other ways, these issues continue to cause enormous suffering and death every year and move inexorably toward overwhelming us.
These issues by definition impact the most vulnerable among us first and foremost, especially children. Depending on our actions today, the next generation could inherit a world in which we focus on new challenges in the human journey and finally leave behind the obscenities of killing and starving each other--or through our avoidance and denial commit the ultimate sacrilege of destroying all life on earth.
In the end we all breathe the same air, we are all at risk when violence turns to war, we are all demeaned when we let children anywhere go hungry, we are all threatened when human rights anywhere are not respected, and the quality of all of our lives will increasingly be determined by the quality of life in general on our planet. In the new millennium, these are the issues which will finally be resolved or which will increasingly cause global chaos at best and the destruction of life on the planet at worst. The new millennium is the metaphor for our last chance to have choice in this destiny.
The purpose of World Campaign is to provide an ongoing media presence to help make this choice conscious and participatory.
