"In politics we have so firm a faith in the manifestly unknowable future that we are prepared to sacrifice millions of lives to an opium smoker's dream of Utopia or world dominion or perpetual security. But where natural resources are concerned, we sacrifice a pretty accurately predictable future to present greed. We know, for example, that if we abuse soil, it will lose its fertility, that if we massacre the forests, our children will lack timber and see their uplands eroded, their valleys swept by floods. Nevertheless we continue to abuse the soil and massacre the forests. In a word, we immolate the present to the future in those complex human affairs, where foresight is impossible; but in the relatively simple affairs of nature, where we know quite well what is likely to happen, we immolate the future to the present."

     ALDOUS HUXLEY

(Fragment taken from the epilogue to his novel: "Time Must Have a Stop")