People and responsibility

The world's population has grown at a frightening speed. It took mankind over a million years to reach the first billion. By 1994, there were 5.7 billion people, and a million more were being added every four days.

Experience shows that people have fewer children as incomes, education and health care improve. So development is the best contraceptive. But there is a catch: if numbers keep rising too fast, development itself may fail.

India, with about 920 million people at the time, faced this problem sharply. The author says population control must be a top priority, through voluntary family planning, not force.

For the first time in history, people are worried not just about their own country or business, but about the survival of the planet itself. This new view has begun what the author calls an 'Era of Responsibility', in which industry must take the lead in protecting the environment.

The article ends with the words of Margaret Thatcher: no generation owns the earth. Each generation only rents it for its lifetime, and must hand it on in good repair. We have not inherited the earth from our fathers; we have borrowed it from our children.