I always thought our island to be tiny and insignificant on a world scale, especially after travelling overland in Africa, India, Brazil and Australia. But it took one satellite picture from NASA to make Mauritius and Réunion appear as the two eyes of the southern half of this Planet! By comparison, London and Birmingham, Paris, Brussels and Lille all merge together.

So do all the cities of the Eastern seaboard of the USA, by far the world?s biggest user of electricity: New-York, Washington, Philadelphia, Boston all merge as one in this view of Earth from space, taken at night. But we stand in Splendid Isolation, as only other islands do (e.g. Japan, Hawaii, Taiwan, the Canaries, Iceland).

This is an occasion for the Mauritius Tourism Promotion Authority (if it can muster adequate funds) to get to BBC World and other top international media with a presentation of Mauritius and a message from us, rather like the extremely successful (if extremely expensive) existing models, e.g. Amazing Thailand, Incredible India, Go Goa, Red Sea Riviera, the one on the Maldives. We deserve this sort of coverage, probably based on our fantastic natural environment and our people. Only top professionals in this field should handle such a project. A possible title? What about ?Delicious Mauritius?.

In his book Small is beautiful, E. F. Schumacher, the European, argues for a Buddhist approach to economics, namely ?that the essence of civilization is not in a multiplication of wants but in the purification of human character, which is formed primarily by man's work. And work, properly conducted in conditions of human dignity and freedom, blesses those who do it and equally their products?.

Schumacher was a respected economist who worked with the likes of J. M. Keynes and J. K. Galbraith. He directed a major British industrial sector, the National Coal Board and yet in 1973 published his Small is beautiful where he, the economist, is in tune with us, the ecologists. He argues against ?ever bigger machines, entailing even bigger concentrations of economic power and exerting ever greater violence against the environment? since these do not represent progress: they are a denial of wisdom. Wisdom demands a new orientation of science and technology towards ?the organic, the gentle, the non-violent, the elegant and beautiful?.

Schumacher then asks whether such a system could conceivably deal with the problems we are facing today? The answer is self-evident: greed and envy demand continuous and limitless economic growth of a material kind, without proper regard for conservation, and this type of growth cannot possibly fit into a finite environment. He concluded that we must therefore study the essential nature of the private enterprise system and the possibilities of evolving an alternative system, which might fit the new situation. His thinking recalls that other monument of the environmental movement, the Club of Rome?s report Limits to Growth (D.Meadows et al, 1972)

Dr Michael ATCHIA