Strange, new worlds?

The success by numerous countries in reducing extreme poverty and hunger has run parallel a rapid expansion of inequality: a majority of the people around the world live in societies in which income is less equally distributed than it was decades years ago; over billions of people still live on less than a few petrodollars per day and, imagine have no access to electricity.

Those who have access, suffer mostly under another problem. They have begun more and more losing the sense of the nature. Talking of electricity and natural light reminds us of how art deals with the problem. Olafur Eliasson as an artist who loves nature integrated the above mentioned problem into one of his work letting us experience with our own eyes - how the brain and the mind can be easily - well, distracted, if not hi-jacked:

The experience of monochromatic light offers us an opportunity of imagining another perspective, of viewing the world with a recalibrated perceptual apparatus. It makes us aware of the limits of our senses and helps us to see the relativity of our colour perception. Understanding how we see colour can make us reconsider how we constitute the world. By reducing experience to the minimum, the monochrome allows us to reflect on what is happening when we perceive something, on how perception is also a type of world-making. For a moment, we can imagine what it might be like to become colour-blind or another species of animal or even more radically other. What strange, new worlds might emerge then?

Surely catastrophic health events, bad weather, climate vulnerability or crashes in commodity prices are eroding, if not destroying, decades of fragile gains of development for those who managed to lift themselves above the poverty lines but did not attain a consolidation above a social safety net. We need to remind those who have access to electricty and a healy way of enjoying natural light, and are not yet intrigued to self-distracting beliefs by the promises of the monochromatic light, that for us human beings, it is still not too late. We have something powerful what makes us human and we can re-activate it.

Using a rich body of evidence, economists of several renowned universities have concluded that the level of income is a necessary but not sufficient condition for an individual to overcome poverty, its destructive impact on health and access to opportunities. Income alone is too unstable to being enough. If people do not make enough money today to eat well, attend school, protect their health and live in decent conditions, the likelihood to earn more in the future is severely compromised, poverty becoming a trap impossible to exit. For people to reach the level of earnings that can limit vulnerability, education, healthcare, relevant skills and inclusion are fundamental. Without strong and productive human capital, restoring an up-trend in the world’s economy in the wake of the global crisis will be a difficult process, and a very slow pickup in demand will have a major negative impact on businesses.

United Nations Development Reports tell us that we need to be careful: If billions cannot consume to meet their basic demands, global supply will shrink, unemployment will continue to grow and instability can be expected to intensify.

Sustainable development requires a joint commitment to placing people at the core of progress and modernization so that we can overcome the prospective scarcity of resources through innovation and more knowledge-based growth. Such an endeavor cannot be achieved if opportunities are kept out of reach for billions of people forming the bottom of the income and social welfare pyramid. Such an endeavor cannot be managed under monochromatic light.