The Seto Inland Sea, viewed from Kozai in Takamatsu City, Kagawa Prefecture, Japan. (Photo by Satoshi Murayama)

Where have florae, faunae, and humanity lived in the past? Where do they live today? Where will they live in the future?

Whatever we understand and enjoy in human products instantly becomes ours, wherever they might have their origin. I am proud of my humanity when I can acknowledge the poets and artists of other countries as my own. Let me feel with unalloyed gladness that all the great glories of man are mine.

Rabindranath Tagore, Letters to a Friend, London: Allen & Unwin, 1928, extracted from Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999.