Editorial May 15, 1989 Issue

Preservation

Ann Kenrick

Richard von Weizäcker, the President of the Federal Republic of Germany, says that his agenda for the twenty-first century has one central item: "the preservation of nature." "We have been brought up... to understand that nature is serving mankind," he explained in an interview for The Christian Science Monitor, but in the future, "we will have to realize, in our daily decisions and forms of behavior, that finally we are ... but a little part in the history of nature. And either we learn to preserve nature ... or we will not survive."^{Rushworth M. Kidder, An Agenda for the 21st Century (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1987), p. 185.}

Physically considered, our world does look pretty vulnerable. It's subject to disasters such as earthquakes, flooding, creeping desert, and tropical storms. In addition to these calamities, many people today worry about mankind's mismanagement and exploitation of natural resources in some parts of the world: the destruction of the rain forests, the erosion of topsoil through poor farming practices, the pollution of drinking water. Then there are problems of acid rain, air pollution, and the possible destruction of the ozone layer, to name just a few.

But President Weizäcker's warning, and others like it, perhaps hold indications for us of something more than stark predictions of disaster. After all, the physical facts are not entirely new. What is new, however, is the sense of human responsibility, the awakening to moral obligations-the recognition that we all have a responsibility to conserve the useful and good that are so much needed by everyone on earth.

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