I wonder how it is that Homo sapiens with his majestic achievements in the arts, philosophies and technologies, has paid so little attention to the preservation of his species that he continues, more vicious than almost all other animals, destroying his own breed, for power or pride or pelf. I wonder why he underrrates the uses of decency and compassion while overrating machinery and its mystiques, devoting half a billion dollars and inestimable energies to a ballyhooed handshake in the sky - Apollo-Soyuz - while fumbling its meaning on Earth's surface. I wonder how it happens that the great brains of the U.S.A. have felt so little responsibility for the lesser brains that nineteen million of us are now discovered to be illiterate, that our vaunted economies have permitted deficit spending programs to enclose us in a mighty tower built mostly of sand and false reliance on the future, that with six percent of Earth's population we heedlessly consume forty percent of its goods. Where has foresight gone?
I wonder if H. sapiens harbors an unrecognized built-in self-destruct mechanism, or if scattered warnings and the Club of Rome - altruism is not charity but necessary - wills serve to correct our atrocious housekeeping. Can heuristic research and global action save one-third of our planet's people from malnutrition, with damage to brain as well as body, or starvation; prevent disastrous climate changes - deserts spreading - or arrest the pollution of oceans, rivers and air, and the damage to Earth's ozone buffer? Will twentieth-century despoilers leave anything to posterity except our sphere's - oval's - empty shell?
Since the beginning of this century, man has devoured more natural resources than in all previous history. Can he or will he reverse that course? Who will instigate such global action? Are there members of our species broad enough of perception, deep enough of concern for mankind and strong enough in determination to persuade warring neighbours to live and let live and join an effort to rescue Earth?

Good questions all, born of the musing of an intelligent, well-experienced and perceptive mind. This is the mind-expressions of Mary Welsh Hemingway, from the concluding chapter of her memoire, "How It Was", published in mid-1970, in which she describes her life as the third wife of America's iconic Nobel Prize winning writer, Ernest Hemingway.

Paradoxically, these are the musings of a woman whose writing ability paralleled that of her infinitely far more famous husband. Improbably, these are the musings of a woman who enthusiastically shared both her husband's vaunted passion for big-game hunting, and his less-elaborated love of companion animals, along with a 'respect' for wildlife. This is also a woman who became knowledgeable about bull-fighting, accompanying her husband on his many trips to Spain and Mexico for the bull-fighting seasons, glorying in the gore and mystique of baffled bull versus deadly-skilled matador.

Finally, this is a woman who became accustomed to the luxurious leisure of living surrounded by a coterie of servants, in their Cuban mansion, for whom caviar and champagne, partying and drinking became a delectably privileged way of life, along with a multitude of friends and admirers and hangers-on.

An entitled, literarily aristocratic woman, who lived the good life, who consumed far more of her share of Earth's bounty than most, but who laments the burden humankind has placed upon the planet, our abuse of its largesse, our propensity to violence. Violence against others of our species, needless to say, choosing to ignore the violence perpetrated against other animals, not of our species.

Isn't that always the way? That revolutionary action is so often undertaken not by the poor and the dispossessed but by the bored and the wealthy and the entitled...