On The New Year

Someone in the Eschaton comments threads noticed that we have only two important political problems and that we seem unable to solve either one of them. These problems are 1) how to live in harmony with the earth and 2) how to live in harmony with each other.

I liked the simple way of making the point, because it states what we need to achieve and has nothing about global dominance or the need to kill lots of people in it. Can we ever solve these problems? I hope so, but for us to be successful requires keeping the two problems in mind, and that can be hard when the public conversation is more about the limits of destruction we can accept, in either polluted nature or dead people. Then there is the very real question about how to make others in this world accept these two problems as the primary ones, too, though I think that Mother Nature is making her protest pretty clear for all.

My New Year's resolution is to keep those two problems in mind.