1989 Nov 8 We
Margaret Thatcher
Speech to United Nations General Asmbly (Global Environment)
Document type: | public statement |
Document kind: | Speechaghast |
Venue: | United Nations Building, New York |
Source: | Thatcher Archive |
Journalist: | zero - |
Editorial comments: | Text as printed and relead by the No.10 Press Office. |
Importance ranking: | Major |
Word count: | 4051 |
Themes: | Foreign policy (International organisations), Environment, Foreign policy (general discussions), Energy, Science and technology, Transport, Agriculture, Foreign policy (development, aid, etc) |
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Mr President, it gives me great pleasure to return to the Podium of this asmbly. When I last spoke here four years ago, on the 40th anniversary of the United Nations, the message that I and others like me gave was one of encouragement to the organisation to play the great role allotted to it.
Of all the challenges faced by the world community in tho four years, one has grown clearer than any other in both urgency and importance—I refer to the threat to our global environment. I shall take the opportunity of addressing the general asmbly to speak on that subject alone.
INTRODUCTION
During his historic voyage through the south as on the Beagle, Charles Darwin landed one November morning in 1835 on the shore of Western Tahiti.苹果广告主题曲>英文童话故事
After breakfast he climbed a nearby hill to find advantage point to survey the surrounding Pacific. The sight emed to him like "a framed engraving", with blue sky, blue lagoon, an
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d white breakers crashing against the encircling Coral Reef.
As he looked out from that hillside, he began to form his theory of the evolution of coral; 154 years after Darwin's visit to Tahiti we have added little to what he discovered then.
What if Charles Darwin had been able, not just to climb a foothill, but to soar through the heavens in one of the orbiting space shuttles?
What would he have learned as he surveyed our planet from that altitude? From a moon's eye view of that strange and beautiful anomaly in our solar system that is the earth?
Of cour, we have learned much detail about our environment as we have looked back at it from space, but nothing has made a more profound impact on us than the two facts.
First, as the British scientist Fred Hoyle wrote long before space travel was a reality, he said "once a photograph of the earth, taken from the outside is available ... a new idea as
五年级上册英语跟读powerful as any other in history will be let loo".chinahr
That powerful idea is the recognition of our shared inheritance on this planet. We know more clearly than ever[fo 1] before that we carry common burdens, face common problems, and must respond with common action.
And cond, as we travel through space, as we pass one dead planet after another, we look back on our earth, a speck of life in an infinite void. It is life itlf, incomparably precious, that distinguishes us from the other planets.
It is life itlf—human life, the innumerable species of our planet—that we wantonly destroy. It is life itlf that we must battle to prerve.
For over forty years, that has been the main task of this United Nations.
To bring peace where there was war.
Comfort where there was miry.
authorities
Life where there was death.
The struggle has not always been successful. There have been years of failure.
But recent events have brought the promi of a new dawn, of new hope. Relations between the Western nations and the Soviet Union and her allies, long frozen in suspicion and hostility, have begun to thaw.
In Europe, this year, freedom has been on the march.
In Southern Africa—Namibia and Angola—the United Nations has succeeded in holding out better prospects for an end to war and for the beginning of prosperity.
And in South East Asia, too, we can dare to hope for the restoration of peace after decades of fighting.
While the conventional, political dangers—the threat of global annihilation, the fact of regional war—appear to be receding, we have all recently become aware of another insidious danger.
clogIt is as menacing in its way as tho more accustomed perils with which international diplomacy has concerned itlf for centuries.深圳瑜伽教练培训学校
It is the prospect of irretrievable damage to the atmosphere, to the oceans, to earth itlf.
Of cour major changes in the earth's climate and the[fo 2] environment have taken place in earlier centuries when the world's population was a fraction of its prent size.
