Kolkata, Jan 6 (IANS) The world must go back to harnessing the powers of the sun as it was done at the beginning of human civilisation to deal with global environmental changes, Taiwanese Nobel laureate Yuan Tseh Lee said here Sunday.
"We must return to sunshine to develop a more harmonious role with nature," he said.
"Once in history we were the children of the sun and were dependent on it for our needs, but we shifted to fossil fuels. We must dissociate ourselves from them and turn back to the sun to deal with global environmental change," Lee said at the centenary session of the Indian Science Congress here.
Laying emphasis on the East's view of nature, the laureate brought to the fore flaws in the Western way of looking at nature.
"Eastern society has historically seen man and nature as one. The relationship between man and nature is that of harmony but since the industrial revolution, the Western view has become dominant which seeks to study, control and use nature," said Lee.
Terming global environmental change as the biggest enemy of man, he said: "We face the biggest security threat not from armies on our borders but from global environmental change."
"Globally we are spending $1.7 trillion a year on militaries, trying to protect our cities from enemies, but we are creating our enemy ourselves from global economic damage," he added.
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