large numbers of the employed in every land and
the demoralization of the growing armies of the unemployed.

Not surprisingly, therefore, there is increasing recognition that the
world is in urgent need of a new "work ethic". Here again, nothing less
than insights generated by the creative interaction of the scientific and
religious systems of knowledge can produce so fundamental a reorientation
of habits and attitudes. Unlike animals, which depend for their sustenance
on whatever the environment readily affords, human beings are impelled to
express the immense capacities latent within them through productive work
designed to meet their own needs and those of others. In acting thus they
become participants, at however modest a level, in the processes of the
advancement of civilization. They fulfill purposes that unite them with
others. To the extent that work is consciously undertaken in a spirit of
service to humanity, Baha'u'llah says, it is a form of prayer, a means of
worshiping God. Every individual has the capacity to see himself or
herself in this light, and it is to this inalienable capacity of the self
that development strategy must appeal, whatever the nature of the plans
being pursued, whatever the rewards they promise. No narrower a
perspective will ever call up from the people of the world the magnitude
of effort and commitment that the economic tasks ahead will require.

A challenge of similar nature faces economic thinking as a result of the
environmental crisis. The fallacies in theories based on the belief that
there is no limit to nature's capacity to fulfill any demand made on it by
human beings have now been coldly exposed. A culture which attaches
absolute value to expansion, to acquisition, and to the satisfaction of
people's wants is being compelled to recognize that such goals are not, by
themselves, realistic guides to policy. Inadequate, too, are approaches to
economic issues whose decision-making tools cannot deal with the fact that
most of the major challenges are global rather than particular in scope.

The earnest hope that this moral crisis can somehow be met by deifying
nature itself is an evidence of the spiritual and intellectual desperation
that the crisis has engendered. Recognition that creation is an organic
whole and that humanity has the responsibility to care for this whole,
welcome as it is, does not represent an influence which can by itself
establish in the consciousness of p