Isilion

John Locke says: “[T] he earth and all inferior creatures be common to all men.” I don’t know how much weight I or anyone else would or should put on his contention “[I]it is very clear that God, as King David says (Psalm 115. 16), ‘has given the earth to the children of men,’ given it to mankind in common,” and I’d argue about whether or not living things, at least those with central nervous systems, can be owned, but insofar as the concept of property is acknowleged, I accept that it was all originally “in common” and that its division and appropriation as individual or private is the core question of economics.

While reading an entry in The Arthurian Encyclopedia about a poem called Alliterative Morte Arthure I came across this:

Though the poem celebrates the heroic virtues of courage against odds, of loyalty to leader and fellows, of desire for fame, the poet appears at the same time to be ambivalent, even ironic (it has been argued), about war in general. Perhaps he is simply displaying the medieval ability to hold conflicting viewpoints in tension without their invalidating each other. (Empasis added)

And I remembered I read once the genius is the ability to hold two mutually exclusive thoughts in your mind at one time. I make no pretense at genius, but I will allow I might be a bit medieval. I grew up in the Sixties and early Seventies. Like most of my generation at some point, I considered myself some sort of happy revolutionary. We were going to create a world full of peace and love where everyone and everything would be free. Again like most of my generation, with the passage of time those dreams and visions faded as reality set in.

One of the things that managed to stick was my sense of myself as an environmentalist. I have a sense of the Earth as a living thing comprised of all that is alive and the places where life exists.