UNU Millennium Conference
UNU Headquarters, Tokyo
19 January 2000

I. INTRODUCTION

Coupled with this regrettable insight is a positive insight: that our environmental underpinnings are far more valuable in strictly economic terms than we had ever supposed. Because most environmental goods and services are not traded in the marketplace and hence have no price evaluations, they have been treated as not only price-less but worth-less. For this reason they have been mis-used and over-used as if with impunity. Fortunately we now have a surrogate evaluation of all environmental goods and services: $33 trillion worldwide per year, and thus larger than the global economy of $29 trillion (1997 figures) (Costanza et al., 1997). In short, global natural product is more valuable than global national product. Now that we have a firm grasp of the economic value of our environmental supports, they are more likely to receive proper care.

There is still better news. The clearer understanding of the vital role played by our environments means we may learn to benefit from them in ways that enhance our welfare in myriad ways. Thus we can embark on a shift from an approach that has over-exploited and under-utilized our environments, to a strategy that derives full and sustainable benefit from them. In this sense, we can look forward to a century ahead that is marked by an ecology and an economy of hope without precedent. Are we not a superbly privileged generation to be poised at what may eventually be viewed as the greatest watershed in the human enterprise since we came out of our caves ten millennia ago?

Of course many of these pressures reflect the lifestyles of a minority of humankind, viz. the industrialized nations, being those people who engage in disproportionate levels of resource consumption. Equally to the point, present consumption in developing nations is meagre indeed, and deserves to be increased steeply and swiftly, especially as concerns those three billion people (almost two thirds of the developing nations' total) who account for only five percent of the global economy.

Equally to the point again, today's disadvantaged people cannot count on ever achieving the sort of affluence exemplified by "the American dream," if only because of the sheer numbers of consumers both actual and potential. For an illustrative example, note the case of China with its 1.2 billion people today and 1.6 billion projected for 2050:

• If each of China's 1.2 billion people was to consume one extra chicken per year and if that chicken were to be raised primarily on grain, this would account for as much grain as all the grain exports of Canada, the second largest exporter.
• If per-capita consumption of beef, currently only 4 kg per year, were to match the 45 kg of the US, and if the additional beef were produced mainly in feedlots, this would take grain equivalent to the entire U.S. harvest, less than one third of which is exported.
• If China were to consume seafood at Japan's per capita rate, it would need 100 million tonnes, more than today's total catch.
• If China were to match the U.S. for per capita car ownership and oil consumption, it would need more than today's global output of oil, and its cars would emit roughly as much CO2 as from all the world's transportation today.
• If the Chinese were to consume wood products at the Japanese rate, their demand would exceed Japan's nine times over.
• China's economic growth rate has long averaged around 10 percent per year. But its environmental problems are taking 8-15 percent off GDP (Brown, 1998; Smil and Yushi, 1998).

Finally, let us bear in mind that the current decline of the environmental resource base worldwide may prove to be minor compared to what could well ensue given exploitation pressures ahead. Cropland is projected to fall from today's meagre 0.27 hectares per capita to only half as much within 30-40 years (Pimentel et al., 1995; Engelman and LeRoy, 1995). The amount of available freshwater runoff used could rise by three-quarters by 2025 through projected population growth alone, i.e. without allowing for any increase in per-capita consumption (Postel et al., 1996). Worse, the number of water-short people today, 500 million, may well soar to 2.5 billion by the year 2025--an outcome that would be especially critical for the prospects of feeding humanity in light of agriculture's dependence on water (Gleick, 1998; Postel, 2000).

Fortunately there are many opportunities to relieve environmental pressures, both present and prospective, and both through shifts in lifestyles and enhanced technologies, all of which can be promoted by a range of policy initiatives. To counterbalance the outlook for China, note a remarkable planning effort by Netherlands to establish itself on a track towards a firmly sustainable future. The nation aims to cut:

• CO2 emissions from 12 tonnes per person per year to 4 tonnes in 2010 and 1.7 tonnes in 2030;
• freshwater use by 38 percent;
• aluminium consumption by 80 percent;
• timber use by over 60 percent;
• cropland use from 0.45 ha. per person to 0.25 ha.; and
• meat consumption by 70 percent.

III. FOUR ILLUSTRATIVE SECTORS

1. Energy

During 1970-90 the world's energy consumption increased at an annual average of 2.3 percent. Extrapolated, this rate means that during just the next half century there would be a four-fold increase to 50 TW or so, followed by still greater increases thereafter (Holdren, 1991). If energy continues to derive primarily from fossil fuels, then for climatic reasons alone this would tax the ultimate limits of the Earth to maintain environmental viability. Fortunately there is an alternative scenario, based on stringent but practicable measures of energy efficiency and conservation during the period 1990-2025. This would plausibly lead to a modest rise in per capita energy use from 1 to 2 kW on the part of developing nations and a graduated decline from 7.5 to 3.8 kW for industrialized nations, with both parties converging on 3 kW late next century, thus closing the rich/poor gap. Factoring in population growth as well, this would result in global energy use of well under 20 TW in 2025 and around 30 TW in roughly 100 years' time, based on a world with roughly 2.3 times its present level of economic activity as measured by energy use (Holdren, 1991). This scenario is eminently attainable provided there is an urgent and vigorous policy commitment to greatly reduce per capita consumption by affluent communities in particular, and to use more non-polluting and renewable sources of energy.

The energy problem is epitomized by cars. In 1950 2.5 billion people owned 50 million cars. Today, with rather more than twice as many people, there are ten times as many cars. Within another 25 years and with 40 percent more people, the motor vehicle population may well top one billion (Tunali, 1996). OECD nations, with 16 percent of the world's population, own 81 percent of all cars (the United States 35 percent, Europe 37 percent), and emit two-thirds of all CO2 emissions from motor vehicles worldwide. But in 1997 as many cars were sold in Asia as in Western Europe and North America combined. Global energy use for transportation is predicted to rise by at least 50 percent during the period 1993-2010, and by twice as much in developing nations (World Resources Institute, 1998). Were the world to match Americans' present car ownership by 2025, the global total would be 13 times greater than today's. Motor vehicles account for over 15 percent of all CO2 emissions (23 percent in Britain and 25 percent in the United States).

Surely within 100 year's time--and hopefully within just a few decades--we shall achieve the transition from the highly polluting fossil fuels that dominate our energy systems today, to an array of clean and renewable energy sources. Indeed there are strong signs that the transition is well underway already, as witness the solar- and wind-power investments of British Petroleum, Shell and Arco as they shift from being oil businesses into energy enterprises. Such is the promise of the "clean and renewables" that, to cite the energy expert Amory Lovins (in Hawken et al., 1999), "Oil will soon become uncompetitive even at low prices before it becomes unavailable even at high prices." Equally promising are the many emergent shifts in the "car culture" (see below).

2. Water

Water is a renewable resource. It is available for repeated recycling, and thus it contrasts strongly with other natural resources such as topsoil and fossil fuels. But from the United States and Britain to Mexico and India, water is mis-used and over-used, largely because of government subsidies that discourage people from making improvements. Fortunately, and primarily through slashing of subsidies, developing countries--these being where water shortages are likely to become most pronounced--could eliminate almost two-thirds of their present water losses due to wasteful use of water. This would be equivalent to increasing their actual water supplies by fully one quarter (Postel, 1999; see also Falkenmark, 1999; Gardner-Outlaw and Engelman, 1997; Serageldin, 1998).

Water is becoming scarce in many parts of the world. Global consumption has tripled during the four decades 1950-90, and demand is expected to double again during the two decades 1991-2010. The number of people experiencing water shortages is already 500 million or almost one in ten of humankind, and it is projected to reach 2.5 billion by 2025 or three persons in ten (Gleick, 1998; Postel, 2000; Seckler et al., 1998). These people use no more water for all purposes each day, viz. cooking, washing and sanitation, than an affluent person uses with every flush of the toilet. In parts of the north China plain around Beijing and Tienjin, over-pumping of groundwater means that water tables are dropping by 1-1.5 metres a year. The region contains nearly half a billion people or almost 40 percent of the country's populace. It also encompasses half of China's croplands, yet it features only one fifth of the country's surface water (Postel, 1999).

Over-pumping of aquifers in several regions of the world now totals at least 160 billion tonnes of water per year. Some 1000 tonnes of water are needed to produce one tonne of grain. So if over-pumping were to be stopped, world grain production would decline by at least 160 million tonnes, or enough to provide the grain needs of 600 million people (Brown et al., 2000). While India's population has tripled since 1950, water demand has climbed to where it may now be double the sustainable yield of the country's aquifers. Water tables are falling by as much as two metres per year in much of the country and wells are running dry in tens of thousands of villages (Seckler et al., 1998). As further result, there will eventually be reduced supplies of irrigation water on a scale to cut the grain harvest by as much as one quarter (Brown et al., 2000). In a country where more than half of all children are underweight, and a country that takes on board an additional 18 million people each year, a shrinking harvest could likely increase hunger-related mortality.

3. Biodiversity

According to evidence from mass extinction in the prehistoric past, evolutionary processes would not generate a replacement stock of species within less than five million years. This would be twenty times longer than humans have been a species. Suppose that the average global population during those five million years is not the six billion people of today but a more supportable 2.5 billion. This means the total over five million years will be in the order of 500 trillion people, or 10,000 times more than all the humans who have existed to date. Even one trillion is a large number; consider the length of time made up of one trillion seconds. All in all, the present mass extinction implicitly represents the biggest "decision" that has ever been taken by one human generation on the unconsulted behalf of future generations.

Conservationists are far from able to assist all species under threat, if only for lack of funding. The problem is set to grow worse rapidly because of the rapid acceleration of extinctions, even if support funding were to be increased several times over. This places a premium on conservation priorities: how to support most species at least cost? One principal way is to identify "biodiversity hotspots", being areas where exceptional concentrations of endemic species are undergoing exceptional loss of habitat. As many as 44% of all vascular plant species and 35% of all vertebrate species except fish are confined to 25 hotspots comprising merely 1.4% of Earth's land surface. These hotspots also feature at least 60% of all species whether endemics or not, and some 70% of all species known to be threatened. Similar proportions surely apply to insects and other invertebrates as well, allowing the hotspots analysis to cover virtually the entire planetary spectrum of species (Myers et al., 2000; see also Mittermeier et al., 1999).

Thus the hotspots strategy opens the way for "silver bullet" responses on the part of conservation planners, focusing on the hotspots in proportion to their share of the world's biodiversity at risk. Thus the strategy makes next century's prospect much less daunting and far more manageable. Indeed an earlier and much more limited version of the strategy, formulated in the late 1980s (Myers, 1988 and 1990), has attracted over $400 million in conservation funding around the world. This is far and away the largest sum ever mobilized for a single conservation measure, and reflects the world's perception of its stake in biodiversity.

4. Environmental surprises

The potential surprises of the future deserve priority attention from environmentalists. Yet a library computer check reveals few substantive efforts to broach them even in exploratory terms. They remain black holes of research. We constantly claim to be surprised by the "sudden" onset of a discontinuity, even though in the cases of global warming and ozone layer depletion our most advanced atmospheric models tend to discount, by virtue of their very structure, the possibility of discontinuities. We should anticipate, moreover, that as human communities continue to increase their numbers, consumption demands and over-exploitative technologies--a redoubtable triad--they will exert ever-expanding pressures on ecosystems and natural resource stocks. In turn, certain of these ecosystems and stocks will prove ever less capable of supporting the needs of humans.

The plausible upshot is that environmental discontinuities will become more frequent. To illustrate the scope of potential impacts, the human triad can readily overwhelm the environmental underpinnings of agriculture, leading to a downturn in the capacity of agriculture to sustain human communities at their erstwhile level (Brown, 1998). As a result, established farmlands will no longer be able to do their job of feeding humankind with its burgeoning numbers.

1. General

2. Expanding eco-technologies

There are success stories along these lines in Sweden, Denmark, Colombia, Namibia, Kenya and Fiji. The Ebara Corporation in Japan and DuPont in the United States are formally committed to zero waste, while the Asahi Beer Company in Tokyo already recycles 98.5 percent of its raw materials. Bristol-Myers Squibb claims that the economic benefits of pollution prevention exceed costs four-fold. Much the same applies to energy efficiency. The U.S. Energy Star Program enables televisions and videos to reduce by 75-95 percent the energy used in standby mode, which currently costs Americans more than $1 billion a year.

Much can be done to promote eco-technologies for energy efficiency, recycling, closed-loop systems of manufacturing, and zero-emissions industry. There is huge potential for clean and renewable sources of energy. Wind power has become a $3-billion per year industry that serves as a cornerstone of a new solar economy to replace fossil fuels. Denmark generates 8 percent of its electricity through wind power. It is partly due to the rise and rise of wind power among other clean and renewables that oil and natural gas consumption has increased by only 2 percent during the 1990s, while coal consumption has not increased at all (Brown et al., 2000). Wind power and photovoltaic cells, both being climate-benign energy sources, have been expanding by 22 percent and 16 percent a year respectively. India aims by 2012 to provide 10 percent of its electricity from renewables. With 900 megawatts of generating capacity, India is the leader in the developing world for its potential in wind power (Brown et al., 2000).

To achieve sustainable economies, we need to reduce our materials and energy intensity (the amount used per unit product) by 50 percent worldwide. Given that developing countries will be reluctant, let alone able, to do so for a while to come, developed nations should aim to cut theirs by 90 percent. A 90 percent reduction should not be so difficult as it might appear. When we learned to substitute coal, machines and technologies for human muscle, we expanded worker productivity 200 times within half a century.

The strategy is known as "Factor Ten". It is entering the vocabulary of government officials, economist planners, scientists and business leaders around the world. The governments of Austria, Netherlands and Norway have already committed themselves to pursuing 75 percent or Factor Four efficiencies, meaning that by using existing technologies we could enjoy twice as much wellbeing while using half as many materials and causing half as much waste. The same strategy has been endorsed by the European Union as the new paradigm for sustainable economies. Better still, Austria, Sweden and the OECD have urged the adoption of Factor Ten, as has the World Business Council for Sustainable Development. Leading corporations such as Dow Europe and Mitsubishi Electric see it as a powerful approach for gaining competitive advantage.

Illustrative of the radical new approach is the so-called hypercar conceived by Amory Lovins. Because it would be largely made of advanced polymer composites, especially carbon fibre, it would use one third less aluminium, three fifths less rubber, four fifths less platinum, and nine tenths less steel. Hence it would weigh only one third as much as today's car. Thanks to these and other design efficiencies, notably a hybrid-electric drive, it would get 80-200 miles per gallon, it would be 95 percent less polluting, and it would be almost entirely recyclable (Hawken eal. 1999). Hypercars could eventually save as much oil as OPEC now sells. They would be not so much cars with microchips, they would be computers on wheels.

Among other techno-breakthroughs already in view are: diodes that emit light for twenty years without bulbs; ultrasound washing machines that use no water, heat or soap; deprintable and reprintable paper; plastics that are both reusable and compostible; roofs and roads that do double duty as solar energy collectors; extra-light materials stronger than steel; and quantum semi-conductors that store vast amounts of information on chips no bigger than a dot (Hawken et al., 1999).

Over visionary as this may appear to some eyes, the advance towards economies based on "natural capitalism" is surely as inevitable as it is possible. We live at a time when by force of environmental circumstance there is a strong convergence between the idealistic and the realistic. In short, we have hitherto sought to exploit the resources of the planet in support of the human cause. Now we need to exploit human resources, also known as brain power, in support of the planetary cause--and thereby give ourselves an expanded prospect of securing the human cause as well.

3. Cutting perverse subsidies

Perverse subsides are prominent in six leading sectors: agriculture, fossil fuels/nuclear energy, road transportation, water, forestry and fisheries. Subsidies for agriculture foster over-loading of croplands, leading to erosion of topsoil, pollution from synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, release of greenhouse gases, and grandscale loss of biodiversity habitat. Subsidies for fossil fuels aggravate pollution effects such as acid rain, urban smog and global warming, with all the profound impacts these will generate for wildlands. Subsidies for road transportation promote pollution at local, national and global levels, plus excessive road building with loss of landscapes. Subsidies for water encourage mis-use and over-use of supplies that are increasingly scarce in many lands. As noted, subsidies for fisheries foster over-harvesting of depleted fish stocks. Not only do these environmental ills entrain economic costs in themselves, but the subsidies serve as direct drags on the efficient functioning of economies overall.

Subsidies in these sectors total around $1.9 trillion per year, and perverse subsidies almost $1.5 trillion. Plainly, perverse subsidies have the capacity (a) to exert a highly distortive impact on the global economy of $34 trillion, and (b) to promote grand scale injury to our environments. On both counts, they foster unsustainable development. Ironically, the total of almost $1.5 trillion is two and a half times larger than the Rio Earth Summit's budget for sustainable development--a sum that governments claimed could not be found at all.

If perverse subsidies were to be reduced, there would be a double dividend. First, there would be an end to the formidable obstacles imposed by perverse subsidies on sustainable development. Second, there would be a huge stock of funds available to give an entirely new push to sustainable development--funds on a scale unlikely to become available through any other source. In the case of the United States, for instance, they would amount to over $300 billion, or more than the Pentagon budget. An American pays taxes of at least $2500 a year to fund perverse subsidies, and pays another $2500 through increased costs for consumer goods and through environmental degradation. Were just half of the world's perverse subsidies to be phased out, just half of the funds released would enable most governments to abolish their budget deficits at a stroke, to reorder their fiscal priorities in fundamental fashion, and to restore environments more vigorously than through any other single measure.

4. Curbing excessive consumption

Consider that during 1999 the 730 million people of Europe have emitted some six billion tonnes of CO2 to the global atmosphere, being 26 percent of worldwide emissions (CO2 is the gas that generates roughly half of global warming processes) (Myers, 2000b). Europe's contribution is double that of China's 1.2 billion people. All nations will be affected by global warming, whether they are major or minor sources of CO2.

Industrialized nations as a whole generate three-quarters of other wide-ranging pollutants, also toxic chemicals and hazardous wastes. Much the same applies to depletion of the world's non-renewable natural resources (Ehrlich and Ehrlich, 1996; Redclift, 1996; Serageldin, 1998).

Thus the consumption problem centres on the way people live and hence the amounts and kinds of resources they consume, whether directly or indirectly, plus the pollution and other wastes they generate. Since the middle of the last century, humankind has consumed more natural resources (and caused more pollution and waste) than in all previous human history. This consumption outburst can be illustrated by a few examples that also demonstrate the roles of the affluent sectors of the global community:

• Since 1950 the global economy has quintupled. Consumption of grain, beef and mutton has tripled, and the same for water, while paper consumption has risen six times. Burning of fossil fuels has grown nearly four-fold, carbon emissions likewise (Brown et al., 1999).

• The top one-fifth of the world's population owns 86 percent of the world's wealth, controls 82 percent of the world's markets, 68 percent of foreign investment, and 74 percent of telephone lines. The bottom one fifth score just one percent in each of the categories.

• Since 1950 the richest one fifth of humankind has doubled its per-capita consumption of energy, meat, timber, steel and copper, and quadrupled its car ownership, while the poorest one fifth of humankind has increased its all-round per capita consumption hardly at all (Durning, 1996). Today the richest one fifth consumes 45 percent of all meat and fish, the poorest one fifth 5 percent; 58 percent of all energy, versus 4 percent; and 84 percent of all paper, versus 1.1 percent. The richest one fifth owns 87 percent of the world's vehicles, versus 1 percent. As for CO2 emissions, the developing countries emit 37 percent of the total (United Nations Development Programme, 1998).

• With less than five percent of the world's population, the United States utilizes nearly 30 percent of the Earth's resources (Dower et al., 1996). Yet the "American dream"--the lifestyles of other affluent nations too--is becoming a model for new consumers in China, India, Brazil, Mexico, Turkey and Russia among several other leading nations. Indeed these new consumers already total 800 million, or as many as the long established consumers in rich nations (Myers and Kent, 2000; Naisbitt, 1997).

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with affluent communities consuming a large percentage of natural resources if those resources remain plentiful and can be recycled, as in the case of iron and steel (85 percent of which is consumed by the top 20 percent of people, and 55 percent of which is recycled; the top 20 percent do not thereby limit the consumption of poor people). Indeed, the affluent communities' conversion of natural resources into human capital often enhances human welfare all round. It is of scant consequence that the average American consumes 115 times as much paper as the average Indian, provided the American recycles most of the paper (at present, only 41 percent). Much more significant is that the average American consumes 227 times as much gasoline as the average Indian (United Nations Development Programme, 1998). The key question is whether consumption uses resources or uses them up.

Current consumption patterns will change if only through factors of environmental constraints, which are becoming ever-more forceful (as witness global warming, to cite just the most prominent of a multitude of constraints) (Myers and Kent, 2000). That is to say, consumption will change by design or by default. Some observers maintain that humans are unwilling to change their urge to consume more and more. After all, throughout their history humans have believed that more of anything must be better; and they have had good reason to believe so. Now we need to move on to "More is better, enough is best". Fortunately there is evidence that consumption behaviour is more plastic than one might suppose: during a recent 20-year period, almost 40 million Americans have given up smoking (nearly half of all living adults who ever smoked). This has been a seismic shift in consumption.

5. Role of the United Nations system

At the same time, the United Nations system supplies our principal mode for the international community to come together and address those diverse challenges that (a) affect many or all nations, and (b) cannot be resolved except through collective action. Obvious examples include ozone layer depletion, marine issues and global warming. The system possesses comparative advantage without parallel to pursue its work via partnerships among nation-states, international organizations, commercial bodies, and civil society actors (NGOs).

The United Nations also features exceptional capacity for research and other scientific endeavours, primarily through its University in Tokyo with its associated bodies such as the Institute for Advanced Studies. The next century will surely throw up an entire agenda of new environmental problems such as the surprise phenomena described above. What better body to undertake the exploratory research than the UNU?

VI. SUMMATION AND CONCLUSION

First, we face unprecedented problems in the environment arena writ large. These problems are closely interlinked with issues of population, technology, consumption, equity, sustainable development, and North/South relations.

Second, these problems invoke opportunities of parallel scope. There is much cause for hope--the most precious and often the scarcest resource of all. To hearten us on our way as we seek to live in better accord with our environments and with each other, let us note some recent success stories:

• Sales of solar PV cells jumped 21 percent in 1998. Wind power added 2100 MW, 35 percent over 1997, with sales of $3 billion.

• Fluorescent lightbulb sales have now topped one billion, cutting electricity demand by the equivalent of 100 coal-fired power stations and thus reducing CO2 emissions.

• Sales of cellular phones increased in 1998 by 48 percent to 2.4 million, saving on huge amounts of copper wire for conventional phone systems.

• In China, both good and bad environmental practices are publicised through a TV programme reaching tens of millions of viewers.

• In Brazil's Curitiba city, low-cost bus services have cut car traffic by 30 percent even while population has doubled.

• In Japan, the Green Purchasing Network, with over 1000 companies, public agencies and citizen groups, promotes sustainable goods and services, e.g. copiers, printers, PCs, and refrigerators.

• In South Korea, the Waste Collection Charge has cut waste by 20 percent in just three years, and greatly reduced packaging.

• In Germany, the anti-packaging project has caused a 17 percent reduction, while the Blue Angel Eco-Label has been awarded to almost 1000 manufacturers for 4100 products in 76 categories.

• In the United States, the Energy Star program sets an energy efficiency standard met by two thirds of computers and monitors and all laser printers. New criteria for TVs and videos will reduce by 75 percent the energy in standby mode, which currently costs more than $1 billion a year.

• In the United Kingdom, the Sustainable Timber Buyers' Group has 80 members ranging from general shops to DIY stores, accounting for 18 percent of wood products.

• In Denmark, a waste tax doubles the cost of landfilling and incineration, causing a 30 percent increase in reuse and recycling.

• In Colombia, new toilets cut water consumption by over half.

• More than 100,000 people in 230 European cities now participate in car sharing (not car pooling).

These various forms of resource efficiency point up a key factor. The environmental cause often saves us money right away: what supports the environment supports the economy. The development cause is different in that it usually entails outlays with no payoff for lengthy periods. Fortunately the costs of a paradigm shift to sustainable development need not be so costly at all. Just as it will not cost the Earth to save the Earth, so our efforts to safeguard our world and our global community will demand no great expenditures. Some examples (United Nations Development Programme, 1998):

Shall we choose to operate as one human collectivity worldwide? This is surely the foremost challenge of the new century. We shall either witness an Earth and a world impoverished to unprecedented degree, or enriched to unprecedented degree. We can avoid an environmental debacle with extensive sectors of the biosphere undergoing terminal threat; and instead we can fashion a world with an end to hunger, illiteracy, pandemic diseases and absolute poverty. Most important of all, we shall live in a world where we shall function as one global community. After all, we shall all work together to stem global warming, or we shall all find we suffer the consequences together. Either way, and for the first time in humanity's course, we shall all experience the future together: globalization indeed. What an exhilarating prospect as we take our first steps into the next century!

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