The purposes of the United States should not be doubted. The Security Council resolutions will be enforced - the just demands of peace and security will be met - or action will be unavoidable. And a regime that has lost its legitimacy will also lose its power.

All that a good government aims at... is to add no unnecessary and artificial aid to the force of its own unavoidable consequences and to abstain from fortifying and accumulating social inequality as a means of increasing political inequalities.

A very Faustian choice is upon us: whether to accept our corrosive and risky behavior as the unavoidable price of population and economic growth or to take stock of ourselves and search for a new environmental ethic.