• The mother welcoming her newborn in Baghdad breathes the same air as all young mothers, whether they be in Baltimore, Berlin or Beijing.
• Scientific experts on climate change predict rising waters could radically alter the lives of islanders on New Guinea, Galapagos, Madagascar and Manhattan.
• And meanwhile, traces of radiation from a nuclear accident in Russia are discovered embedded in the teeth of little children living in South America, North America, Africa, Australia, Asia and Europe.

From these examples and many more, we know our earth has one unique, fragile, life-support system. All of us depend upon it. None of us can live without it. We are bound, beyond ideologies and religions, by an overwhelming number of universal biological and physiological needs. But this understanding was not always common knowledge.

It was just forty years ago that the view of earth from space made a profound imprint on the human psyche. But earlier than that, in 1948, the noted British astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle predicted that “Once a photograph of the earth, taken from space is available … an idea as powerful as any in history will let loose.” Hoyle’s prophecy was realized as we looked back and saw the earth, our home, from the new perspective of space:

“What strikes me, is not only the beauty of the continents … but their closeness to one another … their essential unity.”
---Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin

“From where you see it, the thing is a whole, and it is so beautiful.”
---American astronaut Russell Schweickart

Science confirms it and we can peer all the way around the whole globe, or simply look deep into our own hearts, to know we are one, interdependent human family -- and all war is civil war.

Our species has been on a journey for thousands of years. It’s the destiny of our generation to make a global shift of momentous proportions. The opportunity we now have to fully grasp the implications of “we are one on this planet” goes way beyond arms control. It’s a call to a new level of understanding: a higher, more compassionate plane of human maturity.