"Chemistry itself knows altogether too well that - given the real fear that the scarcity of global resources and energy might threaten the unity of mankind - chemistry is in a position to make a contribution towards securing a true peace on earth"
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Chemistry doesn’t enter Fukui’s sentence as a lab-bound discipline; it arrives as a geopolitical actor with a conscience. Written in the long shadow of the 20th century’s resource shocks and nuclear dread, the quote turns scarcity into the real antagonist. The “real fear” isn’t abstract Malthusian hand-wringing: it’s the credible possibility that energy and materials bottlenecks fracture international cooperation, making “the unity of mankind” less a moral ideal than an infrastructural problem.
Fukui’s rhetorical move is subtle and strategic. He personifies chemistry as something that “knows” too well, as if the field has learned, through both invention and catastrophe, what it’s capable of. That “too well” carries an ethical sting: chemistry helped build the modern world’s abundance, but also its extractive habits, toxic legacies, and weapons. The line quietly acknowledges complicity while insisting on agency.
His subtext is a defense of scientific relevance that avoids triumphalism. Instead of promising utopia, he offers “a contribution,” modest language that makes the ambition sound credible. Yet the ambition is enormous: “true peace on earth.” Fukui ties peace not to diplomacy alone but to the material conditions that make diplomacy possible. If energy is cheap, clean, and reliable; if fertilizers, polymers, and medicines can be made with less waste and fewer contested inputs; if industrial processes stop treating the atmosphere as a free dump, then conflict pressures ease.
It’s a technoscientific version of peace-building: not naive about politics, but convinced that chemistry can change the baseline reality politics has to fight over.
Fukui’s rhetorical move is subtle and strategic. He personifies chemistry as something that “knows” too well, as if the field has learned, through both invention and catastrophe, what it’s capable of. That “too well” carries an ethical sting: chemistry helped build the modern world’s abundance, but also its extractive habits, toxic legacies, and weapons. The line quietly acknowledges complicity while insisting on agency.
His subtext is a defense of scientific relevance that avoids triumphalism. Instead of promising utopia, he offers “a contribution,” modest language that makes the ambition sound credible. Yet the ambition is enormous: “true peace on earth.” Fukui ties peace not to diplomacy alone but to the material conditions that make diplomacy possible. If energy is cheap, clean, and reliable; if fertilizers, polymers, and medicines can be made with less waste and fewer contested inputs; if industrial processes stop treating the atmosphere as a free dump, then conflict pressures ease.
It’s a technoscientific version of peace-building: not naive about politics, but convinced that chemistry can change the baseline reality politics has to fight over.
Quote Details
| Topic | Peace |
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