Tomorrow is too late
By Fidel Castro
Ocean Press 1992
54 pp. $9.95
Reviewed by Sean Malloy
Tomorrow is too late presents an overall analysis of world environmental problems and necessary solutions from a Third World perspective.
The opening chapter of Tomorrow is too late is a speech by Cuban President Fidel Castro to delegates of the Earth Summit, held in June this year at Rio de Janeiro. The following chapters are the text of the Cuban document distributed at the summit.
Written in a concise and explanatory manner the book draws together many strands of discussion, debate and contradictions around the environment. The north south divide, underdevelopment, sustainable development, debt for environment, energy, greenhouse are just a few of the issues taken up by the book.
Discussing underdevelopment and the environment, for example, the document says "if the deterioration of the environment is analysed from an historical perspective, it can be appreciated that the greatest harm to the global ecosystem has been done by the development patterns followed by the most industrialised countries. For their part, the conditions of poverty in which the majority of the world's population lives also have serious effects on the environment and generate an alienating vicious circle between underdevelopment and poverty, on the one hand, and environmental deterioration on the other".
Concepts and ideas that have been at the heart of ongoing debates about the environment, and sometimes difficult to pin down, are articulated with clarity in this book. Various aspects of environmental problems are not schematically kept isolated from each other, the links between them are explained and put into context.
On the issue of bio-diversity for example the Cubans highlight the contradiction that "just when science and technology are allowing us to explore and exploit to a much greater extent the genetic variability of all vegetable and animal species, this natural variability should find itself so threatened".
"At the current rate, countless species will disappear before humans can even know them or benefit from their unknown potentials", it adds later.
Tomorrow is too late ranks with the UN's Our Common Future and the DSP's Socialism and Human Survival as essential reading for developing a rounded grip on environmental issues and makes an excellent introduction to the environment for anyone who is interested in learning more about these issues.