With great simplicity and comprehensive detail, "The Sacred Balance" describes how our world and its contents were formed, our impact on nature and how we must rediscover our place in nature and live in balance with our surroundings in order to avoid the fate warned of by the worlds’ leading scientists.

On November 18, 1992, a document titled "World Scientists Warning to Humanity" , signed by more than sixteen hundred senior scientists, including more than half of all the Nobel Prize winners, from 71 countries was released.

In effect, the document declared that no more than a few decades remain before the chance to avert the threats we now confront will be lost and the prospects for humanity immeasurably diminished. Some of the crisis points highlighted by the document include;-

• We are poisoning our life support systems of soil, water, and air with toxic waste such as fumes, chemicals, sewage, detergents, pesticides, and radioactivity.
• Through burning, logging, or industrial showers of acid rain we are destroying the earth’s forests, ruining the trees that create and purify the air we breathe.
• Through the chemicals used in refrigeration, air conditioners, and several industrial processes that serve the life-styles of the rich nations, we have torn a hole in the protective ozone layer that shields life on earth from the ultraviolet rays of the sun
• The oceans are littered with plastic and laced with sewage; Many fish and mammals are being hunted to extinction; Wetlands that provide their spawning ground are being drained or overbuilt.
• We are turning fertile soil into deserts. Agricultural productivity has been achieved by overriding the natural limits of the soil and the living system that makes the soil so productive. We are depleting our topsoil up to 300 times faster than it can be replaced. Agriculture provides more than 98% of human nutrition. The loss of productive arable land and the increase in population is why deforestation is occurring at such a rapid rate - 80% of forest loss is to grow food. The world is running out of usable farmland; starvation looms.
• We are fortunate to have evolved when biological diversity has been at the greatest level ever achieved. Biodiversity is still life’s major defence against changing conditions, There are 1.4 million known species of organisms - including all plants, animals and microorganisms - this is less than one tenth of the number that actually live on earth. With what we know being miniscule compared to what we don’t know about life on earth, it is suicidal to destroy entire species and life forms given that some of them may be the cures for our ills.

My Dad always says, "You are what you DO, not what you say." Well, what you do makes me cry at night. You grownups say you love us. I challenge you. Please, make your actions reflect your words." (spoken by Severn Suzuki, aged 12, at the Earth Summit, Rio de Janeiro, June 1992)

Instead of the 1990’s being the Turnaround Decade, this has been the decade the media have dismissed environmental issues as matters of minor interest. The media encourages the idea that our productive economy demands we make consumption a way of life - we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction in consumption. We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced and discarded at an ever increasing rate. In the U.S 98% of teenage girls list shopping as their favourite activity.

According to David Suzuki, our challenge today is -

• to avoid the cycle of boom and bust that results from short term exploitation of a resource or industry but create opportunities that provide long term employment and relative freedom from the uncertainty of the global economy and market forces. We need to prevent increases in the numbers of poor as poverty and need have a very close relationship with a degraded environment.
• We need to ask ourselves what is an economy for? How much is enough? What are the things in life that provide joy and happiness, peace of mind and satisfaction? Is spending time with the people you love more important than going shopping? Is making more money, owning a bigger car or possessing the latest technological gadget necessary to fulfill your real biological, social and spiritual needs? What is the real value of community, justice, wilderness and species diversity to you, your children and your grandchildren?

David Suzuki’s book explores our biological nature, our physical, social and spiritual needs and describes how the way we live today is threatening our ability to meet all these needs. The book provides concrete suggestions for how we can meet these basic needs and create a way of life that is ecologically sustainable, fulfilling and just. It offers new direction for us all no matter how insignificant we think our contributions are. There is no single right way that works - there will be hundreds - the most powerful survival principle of life being biodiversity.

"We must convince each generation that they are transient passengers on this planet earth. It does not belong to them. They are not free to doom generations yet unborn. They are not at liberty to erase humanity’s past nor dim its’ future."

Bernard Lown & Evjueni Cazov quoted in

P. Crean and P Kome, eds., "Peace. A Dream Unfolding"

Patrice Guterres

Member of the Study Committee for AMASC World Congress 2002