[RickC]

MSN today has a report about obesity around the world - how it's becoming a problem in all but the poorest African countries. So if the age-old physical problems of food and shelter are vanishing, the great problem must become "what then shall we do?"

At the end of the Pax Romana, Marcus Aurelius, the all-powerful Emperor, turned to a simple Stoic philosophy to make sense of the wealth, luxury and physical temptation around him.

That, or something like it, will need to happen to us here on this planet, or the 1990's/2000's may collapse into the chaos that followed the 1920's.

Such feelings seem at odds with the "American Dream." But I remember a description from Wallace Stegner about the early days of this country - how Europeans acted quickly on the land here, but how at the same time - slowly and quietly - the land and ways of the natives worked on the Europeans too. Hence the National Parks, the environmental movement, and the free spirit of the West.

We are an adaptable species. We should be able to change (with some trouble and resistence, of course) with the situation we've created.