Thus Dr. Szent-Gyorgyi, one of America’s leading biologists, says that man can choose as to which course he will take: “Toward a bright future or toward exterminating himself? At present we are on the road to extermination.” Yes, according to him, the outlook is “very bleak.” And he speaks as an eminent scientist with more than fifty years of experience. Biophysicist Dr. John Platt expresses himself similarly. He urges that scholars, such as natural and social scientists, doctors, engineers, teachers and those with inventive ability all be enlisted to save the environment. But even with the help of all of these, he warns, “there is no guarantee that these problems can be solved, or solved in time, no matter what we do.”

Why are these men so pessimistic? Because man is losing the battle against pollution. More and more harmful products are being dumped into the oceans, and their contamination by oil spills is increasing. In some cases efforts to decrease one cause of air pollution have resulted in a pollution of another and even more serious kind. An example is California’s fight against air pollution. Though its laws are the strictest in the country, news reports say that it is “loosing the battle against pollution on all fronts,” and “the sad fact is that air pollution” there “is worse than ever.”

Why?

Why is the overall outlook so bleak? What accounts for it? Without a doubt one of the reasons is that the matter of keeping man’s environment livable is not just something of national concern; it is of international interest. Authors Ward and Dubos, in their book Only One Earth, explain: “Concerns with global air pollution lie beyond the effective protection of individual governments.” According to them, “man’s global interdependence begins to require . . . a new capacity for global decision-making and global care,” that is, “it requires a new commitment to global responsibilities.” But what prospect is there for such assuming of global responsibilities and for global cooperation? Little indeed, judging by the past record.

The Encyclopædia Britannica (1974) shows why this is the case. After telling that man has the technological know-how to prevent ruination of the earth, it goes on to show that the problems of the 1970’s “are not problems of science and technology but of the arrangements and functioning of human institutions and of the attitudes of individuals.”

J. F. Cassel, writing in Environmental Ethics, puts it more bluntly: “The basic problem of contemporary human ecology is selfishness​—and selfishness is in. The wages of sin is death. The biotic world is dying!” And what shortsighted selfishness it is! Scientist Szent-Gyorgyi concludes that the trouble is that the people “are under the terrible strain of idiots who govern the world and [are] moving inexorably and insanely toward ultimate calamity.”

From what you have observed, you likely can agree with one prominent and concerned American official who stated: “If, by a selfish act, a man can benefit himself while harming the community, he is likely to perform that act.” Illustrating that fact is a report that showed why public utilities were so slow in complying with government orders to install pollution-control equipment. Every year that one such utility delayed in installing a million dollars’ worth of such equipment they saved a quarter million dollars. This helps to explain why American public utilities spend eight times as much in advertising as in research to help to solve the pollution problems to which they themselves contribute! Well did Lord Ritchie-Calder say: “Pollution is a crime compounded of ignorance and avarice.”a

But for one reason or another the vast majority of people on earth do not respond to the preaching of God’s kingdom. All such will perish when God takes the second step against the crime of pollution by means of a “great tribulation” in which he will “bring to ruin those ruining the earth.”​—Matt. 24:21; Rev. 11:18.