I recently saw Amazing Grace, it was about the abolition of slavery in the UK. Like Amistad it left me feeling sick in the stomach. How could people profit from such misery? How could generation after generation be complicit in such an abhorrent institution? How is it possible that when La Amistad reached US soil it took years of legal battles to determine that the 53 souls aboard could not be claimed as salvage? The very concept seems alien and incomprehensible to me.

Or how about the Spanish inquisition - let’s torture people until they confess to their crimes and then burn them at the stake to save their eternal souls. Strange world view those folks had back then.

The abolition of the inquisition and slavery were some of the significant milestones in the development of our civilization. Signs that our species was coming of age - like giving women the right to vote and allowing people to choose their own religion. I wonder what other milestones are awaiting us before we can call ourselves all grown up? Here are a few suggestions

End War
End Poverty
End Pollution
Stable Human Population
100% Renewable Energy
100% Cradle to Cradle Industry

If any of these goals seem unrealistic or impossible then I challenge you to change your thinking. They only seem unreachable because we have never experienced them. For a second just imagine what such a world will look like, what it will feel like. How incomprehensible will our society look to people living then?

There is absolutely no reason that these sorts of goals are unreachable. None. Sure they are hard - they are harder than anything we have done before, but we are more capable than we ever have been before.

The minute we accept any of these goals as infeasible, impractical or just too damn big to tackle we have lost. As individuals we can only focus on fixing small parts of these problems, but we should never ever lose sight of where we want to be.