Gandhi: A Man for All Seasons
What we still need to learn from the example of Gandhi.
by Bill McKibben
"And so we've built ever-bigger houses and driven ever-bigger cars and taken ever-longer vacations and eaten ever-more and ever-finer food. And by every measure we can find, it hasn't made us any happier. Rather the reverse. Americans' satisfaction with their lives peaked in 1956, and our ever-rising standard of living has done nothing to slow our steady decline in happiness.
We need scientists and policy-makers and engineers to help us out of the trouble in which we find ourselves-global warming is the biggest mistake humans have ever made, and it will require many kinds of minds to fix it.
But Gandhi was our scientist of the human spirit, our engineer of political courage. The other advice from the 20th century seems stale now: central planning, endless economic expansion. We've hardly started to explore the possibilities that spring from Gandhi's example. We better get going."
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/12/29/6049/