I spend a lot of time thinking about food. Interesting how this thought journey and my practical experience with food shapes my perspective about so many things in life.
I’m considering my last post, Your Cooperation Required: Food Choices. Since writing helps me think, I don’t always know where a post is going to end up when I begin it. That one ended up focusing on the practical necessity of cooperation if we are going to save the planet and ourselves.
It all hinges around a little number: 3.5. 3.5 degrees Centigrade. If the planet warms to that extent, various forces will likely push that to 4 or 5 or even 6 degrees, at which point, plants cannot adapt to the change quickly enough, we will not be able to feed 9.7 billion human beings, and we will die. It is a real possibility within this century.
The practical necessity of cooperation is an imperative in every religious tradition: yes, we are our brothers’ keepers. And I also want to say, they are ours.
In fact, this reciprocal relationship is an imperative in every domain of our lives. The requirement for cooperative relationships suggests, for example, the primary goal of education in this age: to learn to cooperate with others in a way that produces achievement and satisfaction for all.
Cooperation is also a political imperative, both within nations and across borders. The idea of reciprocal cooperation and all it implies, this basic necessity for sustaining life on the planet, helps me find my place with regard to political issues that have long been a source for me of a certain amount of moral schizophrenia.
We are our brothers’ keepers…and they are ours. The first part of that statement seems easy. It informs the progressive agenda. The second part of that statement is more difficult. Consider it in today’s world: allowing others to be your “keeper”. This requires trust. Not an easy thing among human beings, individual human beings, groups of human beings, nations. Yet 3.5 compels us to find a way.
At the very least, the second part of the statement helps us understand the worldview of the other side, of those whom we “keep” and who sometimes seem to react negatively or ungratefully to the ways we choose to keep them.
We have a tendency to distrust each other, and human history, with its oppression and wars, has given us all plenty of reasons. Even religious traditions recognize the necessity of placing our full trust in something other than human beings. What our fellow human beings require of us is love and compassion. Yet 3.5 is an imperative to go further, to find some way to trust our fellow human beings enough to cooperate.
And for every example of how we fail each other, there are other examples, more examples, of how we reach out to each other with compassion. Today it is clear, more than ever, whatever our religion, or no religion, we must find that sometimes convoluted path to trust in all realms, trust but verify as some say. Without a willingness to trust at some level, to some degree, we cannot cooperate. And without cooperation, we probably will become extinct, if not in our lifetime, in the lifetimes of our children and grandchildren.
3.5 degrees Centigrade. That little number represents an apocalypse. It demands that every person and every nation on the planet reach deep inside to find the strength and determination to trust and cooperate. We cannot afford to assign these possibilities to the dustbin of pie-in-the-sky impracticality and religious idealism.
We have to redouble our determination to find inroads toward trust and cooperation at every level of our lives. We have to question any project, any political or religious leader, who doesn’t make cooperation a top priority and who doesn’t actively seek it in real world ways. 3.5.
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