Wanting again on his lengthy and luminous life at age ninety-three, the good cellist Pablo Casals held up one nice process earlier than humanity: “to make this world worthy of its children” — these inheritors of the current and residing emissaries of the long run, whose souls, in Kahlil Gibran’s memorable phrases, “dwell in the house of tomorrow.” To make of that home a harmonious house — for our personal kids, and the kids of each platypus and each redwood — is the one nice calling that unites us all throughout the infinite divides of our fractured current.
One small nation, by which 0.0002% of the world’s inhabitants lives in one of many planet’s most biodiverse habitats, has taken it upon itself to mannequin for the remainder of humanity an impressed step alongside the trail ahead.
In 1981, simply after a blinding new species of nautilus was found in its turquoise waters, the Republic of Palau — a tiny, vast-spirited Pacific island nation halfway between Australia and Japan, topped with coral castles and radiant with otherworldly jellyfish — voted for the world’s first constitutional ban on nuclear and organic weapons, overriding political stress from the titanic United States to proceed testing and storing its personal nuclear arsenal there.
A technology later, Palau revised its immigration coverage to change into Earth’s first nation with an ecological pledge, stamped into the passport of each customer.
In an particularly clever and soul-warming selection, the poetic pledge signed upon coming into Palau is addressed to the kids of the islands. It reads:
Kids of Palau,
I take this pledge, as your visitor, to protect and defend your stunning and distinctive island house.
I vow to tread evenly, act kindly and discover mindfully.
I shall not take what will not be given.
I shall not hurt what doesn’t hurt me.
The one footprints I shall depart are these that may wash away.
Complement the Palau pledge — which seems in Cynthia Barnett’s altogether magnificent eco-social serenade to the seas, sung by means of the evolutionary and cultural historical past of seashells — with the Einstein-Russell manifesto for therapeutic an ailing and divided world, then revisit this lovely French picture-book envisioning a extra doable world for the kids of tomorrow.
