Ringing in 2024: The Year Humanity Reaches an Agreement to Live Together

By Kirk Boyd

Happy New Year! Earth has made it around the sun yet another time. That’s over 4,000,000,000 times!

That’s good reason to be happy and celebrate! We have been blessed with a truly remarkable planet, and I mean that in both a spiritual and non-spirtual way: simply, we are fortunate.

So in 2024 and beyond, how do we preserve the gift we have for future human generations and life on Earth? People, NGOs, businesses and government need to link and work collaboratively. Individual acts are not enough. This is not to say that recycling or a host of individual acts are unimportant, but they need to be supplemented with collaborative action.

How do we collaborate? By making law, and creating courts to enforce it - specifically enforceable environmental and human rights. And 2024 is a great opportunity to get this done!

Law is an agreement to live together. Laws can be local, state, national, regional or international - all are needed - like our planet, it’s a tapestry. When combined, this range of law comprises a core part of our social contract, which is also an agreement to live together on a global scale.

As you can tell, as we spin around the sun, rightfully celebrating each time we make a full orbit, our ability to keep doing so without turning Earth into a despoiled heap that continues to circle the sun depends on our reaching an enforceable agreement to live together

Here’s the hard question: Is humanity ready to reach an agreement to live together? The answer is that the people on Earth are more ready to reach an agreement to live together than their governments. The result is that the people, including the people within NGOs and businesses, which are run by people, need to lead - they need to show that an agreement to live together, based on the rule of law, can be reached, then governments, which derive all of their power from the people, can follow.

Thanks to the Secretary General’s leadership, and the participation of civil society, such as the Coalition 4 the UN we need, Stop Ecocide International, Citizens for Global Solutions, and thousands more inside and outside of the UN, the Summit of the Future, held in New York City in September 2024, creates an opportunity for humanity to reach an agreement to live together.

With war and ruin of the biosphere of Earth on our doorstep, the people are ready to discuss such an agreement as part of the Pact for the Future outcome document for the Summit. Still, some U.N. member states can be resistant, and such an agreement will not be discussed at the Summit without a collaborative international social movement now to insist that the Summit of the Future discuss judicially enforceable environmental and human rights, including the stregthening and expansion of the Regional Courts and the International Criminal Court, among others.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!