The Context

The world we live in is not the world into which we were born. It is a hotter world where floods, fires, tsunami, earthquakes and other sudden and unannounced disasters are increasing in their frequency. It is a world in which these sudden disasters cause billions of dollars worth of damage that take years to rebuild and draw heavily on already scarce resources.
The world we live in is a world challenged by Rapid Resource Depletion (RRD), Pollution and Global Climate Change (P&GCC), Global Monetary Collapse (GMC) and the increasing incredibility of the Growth Model of Development (GMD) and the very nature of aid has to change in response to these hitherto ignored phenomena.

Our models of aid are old and outdated and do not meet the requirements of the world we live in today and the one we are likely to make for ourselves tomorrow...


Humanitarian Aid

Humanitarian Aid was never designed to respond to the kind of disasters that we have faced in recent times and will likely face more frequently in the future. Humanitarian aid has always been emotionally driven and this emotional drive rests on the understanding that disasters are random un related events to the occurrence of which we contribute nothing and whose victims are in effect the victims of misfortune and therefore worthy of the sympathetic assistance of those who have not thus been afflicted. But today we are all afflicted by these four dynamics that have arisen out of our own greed based and desire driven actions over the last two centuries or so and there is no one who stands un affected and in a position to sympathise with us and help us.

We have to prepare to help ourselves and so humanitarian aid must be transformed into a component that responds to emergencies within a larger process that is consciously engineered to engage the disasters that appear to lie ahead and mitigate their impact with the clear and conscious objective of ensuring the survival of as many human individuals as possible so that the human species itself may survive and regenerate itself.

The human species cannot however survive or regenerate itself without ensuring the survival of its environment and its regeneration as well as ensure the survival of life on Earth, as we know it. The survival of the human species, the survival of life as we know it on Earth and the survival of the planetary environment, cannot be looked at separately but as a single indivisible whole.


Development Aid

This would render our growth model of development both destructive and dangerous so that our development aid would then have to be a holistic process that devotes the bulk of energy and resources to environmental repair and regeneration while channeling a significant quantum into research into new less dangerous technologies and into the designing of new ways to live, new habitats, new relations with food and nutrition, new ways of enhancing human health and wellness, new attitudes to death and new ways by which human knowledge can be passed down generations.

Initially and for a very long time to come, a large amount of development aid will have to be devoted to disaster forecasting and warning systems, community training in disaster mitigation, the preparation of responses to likely disasters and the maintenance of stockpiles of food water and medicines as well as the training of communities in new ways of living and relating to each other for survival.


Aid re-conceptualized

As you can see, within this context aid ceases to be aid and becomes instead a vital component of the emerging model of development. It ceases to be a "one third of one percent" effort and instead it becomes the central force of the drive to ensure the survival of the human species and it is generated not by emotion but by clear and calm perceptions of what has occurred and what lies ahead of us and how we may respond with the objective of ensuring the survival of our human species.

The understanding of this need for change is what we must bequeath the young of our species. We must ensure that the wisdom we have gathered through the eons of evolution of our species in the course of which so much energy has been expended and so many resources consumed must be handed over to them. Wisdom must become the mark of youth so that our young may survive the turbulence ahead.

We have perhaps clumsily and perhaps crudely and perhaps blindly and perhaps unthinkingly clawed our way along the evolutionary pathways we were able to perceive until today at least some of us are able to perceive the price we have paid and the price we may be called upon to yet pay and who know that the extinction of the human species within whom such a high level of autonomy has been evolved, and life as we know it on earth and earths planetary environment which generates and sustains such life, cannot be permitted.


The new developmental mission

Life as we know it on earth can survive to continue its evolution through and beyond human being and to spread throughout the universe. It is up to us to ensure that it is facilitated in its attempts to survive and realize its potential to do so.

Our context now demands much more than the Millennium Development Goals. It demands that we concentrate our every effort on the survival of our species and the survival of all that its survival requires.