Elisabeth Mann Borgese:
Letter by a great-grandmother
to future generations.
Elisabeth Mann Borgese is also called „The Mother of the Oceans“.
She was the originator of the international United Nations Treaty regarding the sustainable use of the oceans, ratified by more than 60 nations. Central Institution is the „Internationale Seegerichtshof“, Hamburg.
She was a founding member of Club of Rome.
She was director of International Ocean Institute, Halifax, Canada.
She was the youngest daughter of famous german writer, Nobel Priced Thomas Mann.
The following letter was written by her, in handwriting, as a support to the project BIG TREASURE CHEST FOR FUTURE KIDS, before she passed away in 2002.
Dear future generations:
The person on this picture are: myself with my great-grandson Thomas. He is one of you, one of those to whom this message is directed.
Let me begin with apologizing...you may well be alienated by our apparent obsession with the environment, while, at the same time we are busyly mixing poisons and preparing explosives with the potential of blowing the earth out of its orbit and sending millions of people to miserable death. You may marvel at our preoccupation with global warming which did not take place. You may wonder about our concern for future generations while butchering our own generation without qualms. You may smile at our „technology forecast“ which turned out to be all wrong; our population forecast which failed to take into account a number of factors which you are aware of but we were not.
Contemporaries are poor judges of what is important in history and where it is going. While apologizing for our errors, I am rather confident however, that you will commit your share of errors too. Such is life.
Perhaps you understand the future better, we have to look at the past.
There is, in a long term, more continuity than change. Breaking points are often illusory and will be overgrown by the tendrils of time. And this continuity extends not only to human society but to nonhuman life as well. We are part of nature, not outside or above it, and if we hurt nature, we hurt ourselves.
There is, on the long term, more co-operation than conflict. Or else we would still be a bunch of struggling unicellar protozoa. Yet conflict may get out of hand, and species, including ours, may simply disappear.
