News ≫ Speech & Video Attached of the Keynote Speaker, Nandi Jasentuliyana at the INTERNATIONAL DAY OF HAPPINESS HOSTED BY CHURCH OF SCIENTOLOGY, PASADENA WAS A GREAT SUCCESS!!

Speech & Video Attached of the Keynote Speaker, Nandi Jasentuliyana at the INTERNATIONAL DAY OF HAPPINESS HOSTED BY CHURCH OF SCIENTOLOGY, PASADENA WAS A GREAT SUCCESS!!

Apr 14, 2022
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On Saturday, April 2nd, 2022 many gathered to celebrate Way to Happiness International Day at the Church of Scientology in Pasadena.

The Way to Happiness is helping to reverse this decline and restore integrity and trust to mankind.L. Ron Hubbard authored the 21 precepts of the Way to Happiness to provide a road map for any individual to follow in making choices toward a happier, more decent and fulfilling life.

They addressed the issue of a deepening moral crisis in the world and right here in Pasadena. But we don’t just focus on the issue. We also address “What can be done about it? At the root of this crisis is a lack of basic morals and values.

The keynote speaker was Mr Nanadi Jasuntiliyana, he was formerly the Deputy Director-General of the United Nations and Director of the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs. He is President Emeritus of the International Institute of Space Law & Policy.

He received the NASA Award for Service to the International Community. He was selected by the United States National Space Society to its unique world-wide list of “100 space people who have had the greatest impact on our lives”. He was the Recipient of the 1982 Testimonial Award of International Astronautical Federation (IAF) awarded annually in the recognition of important contributions to space law and policy and the 1989 Leadership Award of the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA). He is also the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Sri Lanka Foundation International, awarded at the Foundation’s inaugural awards ceremony.

He is the author or editor of six space related books including the four volume Manual on Space Law and several other non-academic books listed on Amazon. He has been a visiting lecturer at Princeton, Stanford, Columbia, and McGill Universities and had been a guest lecturer at several universities in Europe and Asia. He is a member of the Board of Directors of International Space University (ISU).

He is an old boy of Richmond College, Galle where he captained the cricket, soccer and athletic teams and won the All-Round Student of the Year Award in 1958.

HIS SPEECH:

Good Afternoon everyone,
I wish to thank The Way to Happiness Foundation and Karla for inviting me to speak today at this commemoration of the International Day of Happiness.

When I was asked to deliver this lecture, the prompt I was given was to address the issue of safeguarding our environment. At first, with missiles flying across the China Sea and the Baltic Sea even as we meet here today, I thought the topic assigned to me was about the fate of our Earth, and I should be focussing on the threat of nuclear annihilation. Then I realized my task is more vital than what is happening in Ukraine. Instead of looking at the fate of Earth from our anxious human perspective, I’d like to try to look at it from the viewpoint of the millions and millions of non-human species, with which we share the planet. This represents a different kind of imaginative exercise.

It requires us not to imagine events that might happen, but to look at events that have happened, through different eyes—or even without eyes, since so many of our fellow creatures lack them. We will always fall short in these exercises, but I think it’s important to try, so I hope I will have your indulgence.

The Way to Happiness Foundation aims to promote a way towards a much safer and happier life for you and others. Among its doctrine is the belief that “If others do not help safeguard and improve the environment, the way to happiness could have no roadbed to travel on at all.” That being the case, I believe I have been asked to address precept number 12 of the 21 precepts enunciated in the Way to Happiness Foundation booklet, which says, “safeguard and improve your environment.”

It is a fitting topic considering that World Earth Day, established by United Nations General Assembly in 1972, is being celebrated next week to further its mission to educate and activate the environmental movement worldwide.

Whether it is hurricanes or droughts or flooding or wildfires, like the sort raging often throughout California now, we’re already seeing the destabilizing effects of global warming that many consider is “The End of Nature.” Yet, this planet is our only home, and Humanity must safeguard its finite resources. And that calls for transformative changes to policies, as well as, our own choices and individual behaviors to enable cleaner, greener, and sustainable living in harmony with nature.

The environment is the basis of our survival and the Earth’s existence. It sustains life on the planet and provides an abundance of resources. And therefore, It is essential for our environment to stay clean and life-sustaining as we as individuals have to be, as pointed out in the Way to Happiness Guide for better Living. Unfortunately, this is not the case the way we treat our environment.

In simple words, the environment refers to everything that surrounds us – air, soil, water, forests, plants, hills, oceans, rivers. They collectively are the natural environment. Unfortunately, this natural environment is under threat due to human activities. Damaged daily by our own deeds, it is crying out to be protected and saved from the dire impact of human and human-made activities. Humanity’s responsibility is on a collision course with reality, and that is a global challenge. We have less time than we imagine to make real change, so we need to scale up our actions for the planet.

Biodiversity may be disappearing at a rate that we may see something akin to a biological meltdown. In the name of development, we have consumed our natural resources ruthlessly and polluted our atmosphere posing a significant threat to the environment. The demand for natural resources is increasing day by day as the population increases, putting pressure on our natural resources. The Ice Ages mercifully spared the tropical forests, but humanity’s chain saws do not. Inverting a famous Churchill dictum, the falling of a tree may be a statistic but the falling of a forest is a tragedy.

Oceans cover approximately seventy-five percent of Earth’s surface and are vital to this planet and all forms of life that inhabit it. Oceans have been receiving a mass of pollutants, including oil spills, toxic waste dumping, and industrial dumping. These pollutants will have negative impacts on the wildlife in the ocean. Soon enough, it will begin to affect our lives as well. We must explore the considerable challenges we face in maintaining their capacity to regulate the global climate.

Two examples of events within the last week are suffice to illustrate the gravity of the situation. I refer to the news this week of the danger of the bleaching of the corals due to rising ocean temperatures in the Great Barrier Reef, considered one of the world’s seven wonders,. And the second, is the dismay over the World’s largest iceberg break off the Greenland’s ice cap. A huge chunk, an area of 160 sq. miles, twice the size of Los Angeles, with a melt massive enough to cover entire California in more than 4 feet of water. What is thought-provoking as scientists have noted is that “if we had seen such events 30 years ago, we would have called it extreme and sprung to action but in recent years, we have become accustomed to such disasters.”

Climate change is the big environmental problem humanity will face over the next decade, but it isn’t the only one. World hunger, global warming, increasing natural disasters, polluted air, water, and soil, pesticide use in the fields, species extinction, crop failures, loss of biodiversity, the list goes on.

At this time of tragedy with a raging war that threatens to be the harbinger of a global war, we must recognize that the environmental damage caused by war amplifies the human toll. Conflicts with a strong resource and environmental dimension tend to affect a broader population. For instance, the damage caused by wiping out the wheat harvest in Ukraine, considered the breadbasket of Europe affects several countries in the region indicating how climate change, and natural resource management in violent conflict impacts all countries. As the only living beings on a sick planet, we must not believe that we remain healthy. In nature, everything is finite. Indiscriminate exploitation of the environment causes an enormous problem for generations to come.

There are, of course, reasons for optimism, reasons to believe that we can reverse this disastrous situation. That is because, we have the solutions, knowledge, and, more importantly, the technology to limit the adverse effects of our misuse and avoid ecological collapse.

Spectacular developments in space technology applications, such as, remote sensing from space has made a difference. That is because of its unique capability in providing timely, repatative, and synoptic coverage over large areas across various spatial scales, making it a very powerful tool for continuous monitoring of the environment, both in space and on Earth. Space technology inputs have already become vital for tackling urgent environmental problems related to deforestation, desertification, land degradation, coastal erosion, floods, drought, and manmade pollution at local, regional, and global scales. Spaceborne observations combined with theoretical modeling efforts provide a clear understanding of the variability in climatic and weather parameters due to both natural and manmade activities. These technological advances need to be adopted for sustainable strategies that promote developmental activities consistent with preserving the natural environment.

Since the launching of Sputnik in 1957, space science and technology have developed exceedingly rapidly. Equally true, however, is the fact that the number of launchings increased, and man had begun to pollute his last frontier. There are 5,500 operational satellites functioning in space and over 130 million pieces of debris smaller than 1 cm, which are harmless. And about 34.000 larger pieces of debris big enough to be potentially troublesome and possibly have caused the malfunction of satellites.

There are several legal provisions in international treaties that I had the honor of lending a hand in drafting, which relate to the environmental impact of space activities. The first category of such legal norms are meant to prevent adverse ecological impact from space activities, while the second category covers any damage caused from space activities to the environment. The body of international space law also includes both national and international rules and regulations similar to those governing motor traffic, shipping, and aviation. Our interaction with the environment is shifting with the improvement of technology such as space technology. Therefore, the ability of Humanity to stop the problem is in its power. First of all, a change in our attitudes will be required, with a better awareness that implies not only having knowledge about the environment, but also, our moral values and necessary education to solve environment-related problems. Having Environmental awareness is the responsibility of every citizen.

I firmly believe that individual citizens cannot sit back and say it is someone else’s responsibility to protect the environment. We must all play our part– governments, big businesses, and above all, we as individual citizens. We can save our environment from the small steps taken by every person on Earth to reduce the amount of garbage, to stop the use of poly bags, recycling of old items in a new way, reduce waste of water, save energy, and reduce electricity usage.

I would like to urge all of us present here today to consider contributing in some small measure to the protection of the environment. And also make other people aware of this as well. If we do so, “the way to happiness could indeed have a roadbed to travel on.”

Thank you, and I would like to conclude with a brief video message I received from an astronaut friend who I had the privilege of lecturing to many years back when he joined the astronaut training program in Germany. This message is especially recorded and sent to be screened at this meeting by some of my colleagues who learnt that I was going to speak to you on the environment. The message is from Astronaut Mahtias Maurer, a member of the space law Institute that I headed. I He is sending it from space from the International Space Station, where he has been orbiting during the last six months and due to return to Earth later this month.

Thank you, and I would like to conclude with a brief video message I received from an astronaut friend who I had the privilege of lecturing to many years back when he joined the astronaut training program in Germany. This message is especially recorded and sent to be screened at this meeting by some of my colleagues who learnt that I was going to speak to you on the environment. The message is from Astronaut Mahtias Maurer, a member of the space law Institute that I headed. I He is sending it from space from the International Space Station, where he has been orbiting during the last six months and due to return to Earth later this month.

Click on the link to watch the video:

https://nam12.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.dropbox.com%2Fs%2F2qg9lxam3u1uytm%2FIISL%2520%252B%2520ECSL.mp4%3Fdl%3D0&data=04%7C01%7C%7Cf3f4f998cd6841508d3208da0b0d9f34%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C637834450397784880%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000&sdata=Ew1zAFHB3Yy4vRREgSxyM3LoRxdtMjAdyZzYBkYS5ms%3D&reserved=0

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