However, as I toured around the South Slope, I found that I was not thinking of the Highway controversy, but simply of what a beautiful, unspoiled bit of Colorado lies just over the Mountain from Colorado Springs. I think we can never afford to forget that the battle for the environment is not simply an exercise in political activism or a debate between preservationist versus exploitationist values. Nor is it simply a struggle to save some modicum of the world's resources for future generations. That struggle is important, and where we stand in that battle is what future generations will judge us upon. But it is not the be-all and the end-all of environmentalism. Environmentalism is also about our home: about the place we live now and the place where we will spend the rest of our lives: how it is and how we would like it to be. We are small creatures in a big world, and restoring Beaver Creek's East Fork to look like Boehmer Creek is as important to us, and to the world that we daily live in, as staving off global warming.

Perhaps the thing to do on New Years Day, by way of a Third Millennium Resolution, is just to go out into the back yard, look around, look up at the mountains, and decide what needs to be done here to start to fix the world's problems.