YET economic insecurity, poverty, disease, wars, and blighted childhood are as old as human existence. The world is a better, richer, more vibrant, and thrilling abode since coal came than it was before. The indictment of our coal age can be justly based, not upon what it has destroyed, but rather upon what it has missed — upon its spiritually-blind, its bungling and inadequate use of a gift more magnificent than any allotted to man since grain was first sown to the harvest and ground at a mill.
An indictment that involves all mankind is hardly an indictment at all. It is rather a confession of our common human limitations, a recognition of the tragic circumstances of our spiritual growth.* It will be answered when we as individuals and nations and groups of nations, set ourselves to turn the wisdom of experience to account in building a civilisation worthy of a world that moves through infinite space with the sun and the marching stars.
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* Although Bruère recognised coal would eventually run out he viewed petroleum, gas, hydroelectric and even solar power with misgiving because in his opinion mankind had not learnt the lessons of the Coal Age. “Unless we have the spiritual capacity to make the technique of science obedient to the commandment to love our neighbour as ourselves, superpower systems, high-voltage transmission, the internal-combustion engine, may again intensify the exploitation of man by man, the clash of groups for power, the brutality of international wars for possession.”