Tony's brief introductory paragraph.  Incidentally, Tony also plays the mandolin.

Dear Friends,

In the early nineties, a group of the most educated and at the same time
among the most decorated men on Earth - physicists, scientists, and roughly
one hundred and ten of the one hundred seventy living Nobel Prize winners
from sixty nine countries - signed a document - largely ignored by the
corporate media - entitled "Warning to Humanity." In that text, the
undersigned admonished that, in the next twenty years, mankind would be
facing the most formidable of challenges. The combined results of the use of
the Earth's resources at extremely high levels of extraction and consumption
- air, water, and soil - and the effects of pollution, depletion of the
ozone layer, the biggest extinction of species in the fossil record ever,
the global planetary warming, the melting of the ice caps, and
overpopulation would pose a serious threat to the continuation of human and
other life on Earth, and cause severe irreversible damage to the eco-systems
that sustain and make life possible on the planet.
Around the same time, another set of remarkable and extremely prominent men,
Sir Michael Atiyah, president of the Royal Society of London, and Dr. Frank
Press, president of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, issued a joint
statement under the title - again largely ignored by the corporate media -
"Population Growth, Resource Consumption and a Sustainable World." The Royal
Society, founded in 1660, is sometimes called the United Kingdom's Academy
of Science. This joint statement, issued by two of the world's leading
scientific organizations, was unprecedented. The Royal Society, in
particular, has been always very reluctant to issue pronouncements on
matters of public policy that might stir controversy. Unfortunately, this
important joint statement was again almost entirely ignored by the world's
media. The statement says that if population growth continues and patterns
of human activity remain unchanged, "science and technology may not be able
to prevent either irreversible degradation of the environment or continued
poverty for much of the world." "The future of our planet is in the balance"
the statement says. "Sustainable development can be achieved, but only if
irreversible degradation of the environment can be halted in
time. The next 30 years may be crucial."
I am not the most pessimistic person. Actually I am very optimistic even
when faced with extraordinary odds as we all are in our human condition.
But, if three quarters of the brightest, most intelligent, scholarly,
well-taught, well-informed, erudite, and accomplished men on the planet tell
me something, I cannot possibly be so square or dense or both that the
message does not get through. Neither can I possibly, even for the flimsiest
of moments, think of trying to argue with any of them. If it was only one or
two, maybe it would be possible to dispute the conclusions, because he or
she could have made a mistake, but certainly not with seventy five percent -
an overwhelming majority - and from countries from all over the planet.
There's no angle here, none. What they are saying has to be the truth, and
must be taken at face value. Period.
So we are faced with the biggest challenge ever to confront the whole of
humanity, now that things seemed to be going so well. We conquered the
skies, oceans, and land. Standards of living, in spite of still enormous
contrasts, are improving almost everywhere around the globe. Yet we are
faced with the extremely delicate question of what are we going to do, as a
society as a whole, and as individuals at the personal level, to answer this
most difficult challenge.
How are we going to use the resources that we have at our disposal as
engineers, designers and average men and women - power, fuels, metals,
computers, food, air and water - in ways that are sustainable, renewable,
non-toxic, solar, and organic. Those are the answers that we must find in
this infinitesimal window of time, before the door of time closes inexorably
behind us.
This vast group of scientists from sixty nine countries that I mentioned
above - there's no plot here also of one nation above the other - called for
everyone to work on the solutions: teachers, educators, professors,
professionals, men and women, scholars, and laymen. I call on you to join me
in this quest, for our own sake, and for the sake of life on Earth.

Tony Pereira

PS: The complete text of the document "Warning to Humanity" can be read at
the "Union of Concerned Scientists" web site www.ucsusa.org. The joint
declaration of the National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Academy of
Sciences can be read at http://www.spiritone.com/~orsierra/rogue/popco/warn/

warn01.htm or at http://208.240.253.224/page7.htm.