We have to re-evaluate ourselves as the prime cause of the problems we are facing, and redefine the profound value inherent in every single human being. This is something that the United Nations conferences, as yet, have not really addressed.

A human Renaissance of thought, conscience and ethics is required if we are to survive
'The highest wisdom has but one science - the science of the whole - the science explaining the whole creation and man's place in it.' (Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace)

Thomas Kuhn introduced the idea that science functions under the control of a paradigm. For centuries science has been guided by a paradigm based on the intellectual achievements of Newton and Descartes, who saw the world mechanistically and reductively, with its division of inside and outside, subject and object. This has been overturned by the work of Einstein and his theory of relativity, the atomic physicists and others who have discovered laws that don't fit the old paradigm. The new paradigm which is emerging takes into account the observer as well as the thing observed, and the fact that the two cannot be separated. There cannot be objective knowledge without a knowing subject: what we see must be relative to and influenced by where we are and who we are.

In human affairs, objectivity on its own does not work because it contradicts what it means to be a human being. A human being is not an object. He or she is not only a thinking but a feeling person with emotions, values, hunches, intuitions, sensitivities which have a tremendous influence on what they do and how they perceive the world. He or she is both an individual, alone in their own private world, and also a member of a particular society; and, in turn, that society belongs to a wider community, the human family, with which every individual shares common experiences and aspirations and a common global environment.