Sunny on a Dark Night (screen print)

Sunny on a dark night

The world’s population is steadily increasing. In the Western world, on the other hand, population growth is declining. It is in the poorest areas of the world, like many countries in Africa, that most children are born. One solution to this problem could be to pull all the people living in poverty up to our standard of living. However, this will create a new problem, as there are not enough resources for them to have the same products as we have. At the same time, there are also a lot of unused human resources in these slums. Here there may be Einstein’s and Curies, who can help solve this problem before we cut down the last tree and we end up as Easter Island, which was an outstanding civilization that cut down all vegetation and to this day there is not a single tree on that island. In principle, this can happen to the earth as well, that we fish up all the fish and cut down all the trees so that the resources are unable to regenerate themselves.

At the beginning of the last century, about four hundred Norwegians lived in a garbage dump called Desert Sour in New York. These were able-bodied guys, but because of racism and not knowing the language, they went unemployed and lived in deep poverty. But one day there was a rowing competition between the different nationalities in the city. It was won by a great length by the Norwegians and it was said that it did not matter which of their compatriots had been in the boat, they had won anyway.  At least they boasted about that themselves. It shows that this was unused labor, just as the people living in the slums today are unused brainpower.

We see Norway as a very poor country a hundred years ago, but in fact the second cinema film in the world was shown in Oslo and the first city with electric street lighting was Hammerfest. So just as we underestimate ourselves, we also underestimate the people that are living in the slums and what they have to contribute. And one of the biggest reasons we’ve gotten out of this poverty we think we were in is the nationalization of resources and the distribution of those resources among the population. This is one of the biggest problems of many countries in Africa. They are rich in natural resources, but this is often accumulated in very few hands and then acquired by foreign actors such as China. In the helicopter, we, therefore, see a Chinese buying up the last tree, the tree of life itself, as it is cut down.