Most of the human race lives in misery. We
are told--it may or may not be true--that the resources of the land will be
insufficient to correct this, even if inequity of distribution should be
radically reduced or disappear. But most of the earth--the World-Ocean--is
unknown, its resources virtually untapped. The development of the oceans may
well be the most urgent of all material needs; but the ocean cannot be
civilized without world peace. Until the land is civilized, the sea will remain
as it is.
On the sea we travel as on deserts,
wishing only to cross to the destination. On the sea we fish and fight battles.
On the sea, then, we are hunters and gatherers, sometimes warriors: the most
primitive stage of social evolution. We carry our industrial-age artifacts
there to do our stone-age work, tools too advanced for such primitive
enterprise. Our fishing fleets take fish that are too small with nets that are
too fine, for mature fish have become scarce. Much-hunted whales are
endangered. Life forms are disappearing. The seas are ever more polluted with
our leavings.
In a few places near the shore we farm
kelp, farm shellfish, raise fish. In a few places we drill for oil and collect
manganese nodules. Scientists have unraveled mysteries of the seabed and
comprehend something of ocean layers, currents and ecologies. And politicians
and entrepreneurs have begun to think of potential riches.
The World-Ocean covers seventy-one percent
of the earth's surface; but ocean is not only surface; it is volume, layer upon
layer. All this tremendous three-dimensional space awaits mankind's civilizing
hand. What wonders, what agriculture, husbandry, minerals, sources of power,
will be found or created there? In this frontier things yet undreamed of will
be done. Whales, dolphins and myriad other creatures await domestication. We
will discover or create food plants. Imagine a field, ready for harvest, whose
volume is one thousand or ten thousand or one hundred thousand cubic
kilometers. We will come to understand and use the minerals of the depths.
Great volumes will be set aside as nature reserves. No doubt some people will
make the sea their home.
At present, these vast areas and enormous
volumes remain effectively outside our world. International law has it that,
beyond territorial limits ("the Area" in the United Nations Convention on the
Law of the Sea), the seas are the common heritage of all mankind; but mankind
is hard put to it to claim such a heritage, for no sovereign body yet speaks
for mankind with an authoritative voice. The International Seabed Authority,
struggling to establish a practical jurisdiction, must seek the acquiescence of
powerful states for the regulations it is able to promulgate. The U.N.'s
sovereignty over the sea is weak, indeed does not exist, for the U.N. is not a
government. Civilization has not come to the World-Ocean because the nations
cannot agree on the way it is to arrive there. In these days, the sea is not
developed, but despoiled. There is so far no coherent plan to make it an
integral part of our world, no plan to civilize it. For that matter, so far as
most of the world can see, there appears to be no plan to finish civilizing the
land. There exists a hope or a wish, while the rulers use the marvels of
science for the most evil and barbarous of practices.
The problem of the undeveloped World-Ocean
is one with the problem of the land. The world is the world.
We need coherent world order. Mankind is
trapped in a shifting, warring anarchy of independent states. There is one
mankind; but this oneness has not yet crystallized in a sovereign institution
that can effectively unite and govern mankind's diverse elements. That is why
the oceans, and the land too, remain uncivilized. Without such sovereignty,
"the common heritage of all mankind" is only a string of words, and the
potential of the World-Ocean remains unknown and unrealizable. Without a
peaceful, integrated world our race, on land and sea, will surely continue its
present decline, its murderous wars.
Every war is fratricidal!
The existence of independent sovereign
units gives rise to conflict. Several thousand years of tragic experience has
proved that a single nation or group of nations cannot impose lasting peace,
much less peace with justice; nor can persuasion, exhortation, or the simple
need for it cause it to appear.
Nothing can occur unless the conditions
for its occurrence exist. A pot of water will not boil without heat, however
long one waits. A pile of bricks will not become a house without a builder and
a plan. And a house built on sand will not withstand the storm, whatever the
real estate agent may claim. The world will have peace only when the conditions
for peace are established.
The minimum condition for world peace is
this: that all the nations unite in ceding key elements of their sovereignty to
a central sovereign Institution. This is what the most powerful nations have
thus far refused to do, what the founding members of the United Nations
Organization rejected. Peace has not come, not because the human race is
incapable of it, but because the leaders of the nations have been unwilling to
do what is required for it to exist.
There have been two relatively serious
moves toward peace, each after a ruinous war. The League of Nations would
probably have failed even without the fatal decision of the United States,
whose legislature rejected what its President had promoted and in large measure
created. The United Nations Organization, with all its imperfections, has sometimes
prevailed; has created numerous functioning world institutions and ameliorated
or solved a number of vexing problems. Much greater than the League, it is
admirable as a move toward what is needed; but the U.N. is doomed to failure in
its present form, a central institution without sovereignty. It has not
established world peace because it cannot.
The United Nations Organization is like a
one-armed pianist. It may perform brilliantly, but its repertoire is very
limited.
The sense that the world is one, that all
mankind is a single, complex, diverse and beautiful thing, has grown ever more
prominent. Protests against "globalization" arise, not out of a rejection of
the fundamental oneness of the human race, but rather out of a terrible
disappointment, on realizing that the people who arrogate to themselves the
control of the world belong to the same bands that made fortunes on the slave
trade and stole whole countries and their resources, not caring about the
injustice and the misery their actions created. The protests turn out to be
protests against the violation of the oneness of mankind, against the ongoing
attempts to divide mankind into ruling and subject nations, races, and classes,
against the contemptuous and murderous arrogance of those who claim the right
to rule.
If the horrors and disasters of two World
Wars have brought us only to this place, we cannot realistically expect the
world's present leaders to create the conditions for peace, although it is
within their power to do it. It appears that more suffering is required.
Events will finally force the nations to
accomplish it. Some at least of the people who are alive today--or if not they,
then their children or grandchildren--will see the beginning of the longed-for
universal peace, the inevitable next step in human evolution. When it comes,
the resources and wealth of the earth will no longer be sucked up for war and
the satisfaction of greed at the expense of most of humanity. When it comes,
the undiscovered material and spiritual resources of the earth will gradually
reveal themselves. The whole planet will be our home. The civilizing of the World-Ocean will take
place.
It is a terrible pity that we do not have
this already and that suffering will, for now, only increase.
