 The author of numerous books, Barbara Ward is Albert Schweitzer Professor of International Economic Development at Columbia University. It is possibly the beginning of an era in which this vision of the planet that you see from the moon, a single, alone, full of light, full of life, and the only single planet that's got these qualities, that that vision, especially among the young, can mean a redirection of how people think about this problem because you will not create a community unless you've got some moral commitment. And moral commitment needs some very stern underpinnings because we ain't moral easy. Now it seems to me that the biosphere in which we share a climate, we share systems, and we cannot escape it. It could be the physical, scientific, and technical underpinnings of a moral community because we tend to be moral when we have no further choice. I mean it is inconceivable for any Western democracy to subsist even for 10 years more if we didn't have, through progressive taxation, a steady transfer of resources from rich people to poor. Well I consider that we can begin to talk about the world environment and about safeguarding our planet. When we, the rich nations, are giving in perfectly formal, institutionalized tax assistance. Oh, at least 1% of our gross national product in development capital for the poorer nations, I would go higher myself and say, we've got to stop lecturing them while we sit back and in gross, 80% of the world's income for 20% of the world's people. And that I think is the critical thing on this development environment issue. What worries me is that so great is the shortage of capital, so obstructed are the means of development, that they won't even be able to learn from our mistakes. That would be the ultimate tragedy. I mean for us to go and make the mistakes and then no one to learn from them, that really would be a cosmic bad joke, wouldn't it? When we reach the ultimate of power which we've done, we can only respond by having the ultimate of community which is a single planet. And that is where self-interest, moral interest and sheer technical fact coincide. Many politicians are frightened to face their constituents with this kind of a truth. They have a fear that if they support the idea of a more equitable distribution of the world's resources and so forth, that they would not be voted back into office. What do you say to them? Well, I would say first of all that if you take some of the western democracies, Canada, my own country, Britain, Holland, all the Scandinavian countries, France up to a point, all these countries have now formally agreed that by 1975 they will give 1% of gross national product in aid to development. And one reason why they're doing that is because their electorate would no longer accept the idea that you shouldn't do it. So on the one hand I'm enormously optimistic because I feel that there's a whole generation growing up that is tired of the more blatant forms of materialism, but is bewildered by the lack of institutional innovation and invention. And it's all very well to say, well, go ahead and innovate yourselves. But you need experience and you need an actual sense of how things are organized to be able to do this kind of creative innovation.