Our problems meet in common solutions

Life is a picture that just keeps getting bigger. When I was just a little palooka, to cross Greenfield Avenue was not allowed. That side of Magee Field was the edge of the universe; go past there and you WILL get a whipping, and maybe something even worse might happen. When we humans still thought the world was flat the borders of maps sometimes said "There be dragons" - we just didn't know what was out there. Now we recognize there's no end to the universe. No matter how far you go, there's more farther out.

There's no end to our problems. And there are always solutions that end up causing other problems. In this time of great stress, breathtaking new techno-fixes coincide with problems that interact with with such complexity that we don't know what's going to happen from day to day - except that things are becoming more unstable.

Actually, we all have the same problems, but see them from different angles. Looking at the big picture can help find single solutions that help many problems.

Years ago, before many had heard of composting, people would complain that the food nowadays doesn't taste as good as it used to. Some of these same people would complain that I was causing a disease hazard when applying my farming experience to making organic garbage into fertilizer. But I knew that food grown in healthier soil not only tastes better - it is better and is really the best way to prevent people from getting sick. So treating a problem - garbage - as a resource kills two birds with one stone...Uh, maybe that's not a good analogy... let's say creates a win/win/win/win situation. We don't have to get rid of the garbage, we get a free fertilizer, our food tastes better, and we're better nourished and so more resistant to disease. There are even more wins to the deal: more quantity and variety of living things in the soil make for a more stable ecosystem, including for human beings.

You can define the problem as:
not enough food;
not enough fertilizer;
food that doesn't taste good;
people having weakened immune systems;
our landfills and air and waterways being sources of toxics and disease because we didn't let the organic wastes go back to the soil as it should;
or a shortage of plants to absorb more of that carbon dioxide we've way too much of already.

But, looking at the ecosystem as a whole (we humans included), composting shows itself to be a solver of so many problems that working together to compost more of the organic sector of our waste couldn't help but make a lot of people happy (or at least less unhappy) in the long run.

Perhaps our new leaders (once we get rid of the dividers who have been profiting from encouraging conflict in the world) will be uniters, helping to bring the world into a new sense of community. Because only by working together are we going to survive the changes ahead.