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.