But the real challenge of our “emerging” interdependence has more recently manifested itself in the international food shortages effecting countries across the globe. What began in Australia with farmers planting fewer crops for consumption because of the effects of global warming (and the commercial benefits of cash crops such as grapes and bio fuels) coupled with farming subsidies in other industrial countries has resulted in food shortages and an 83% increase in food prices in developing countries around the world. Follow the logic. More of us must buy our food because for the first time in human history more of us live in cities; a fact which implicitly has come to mean that fewer of us have the capacity to feed ourselves. That is to say, for the first time in human history most of the world’s population does not have the aptitude or the capacity to produce the food we need to survive. Consequently, more of us will have to depend on fewer of us to keep the rest of us alive.

We are such fragile creatures. If we don’t wash we stink. If we get sick we die. In the summer the heat drives us out and in the winter the cold drives us in, proving that we are still slaves to forces the Mastodon mastered ages ago. And yet the pretense of human arrogance is astounding. We live as if our existence is in no way predicated upon the presence of other people and yet we silently hope that the coming of age will in no way find us alone. But this is beyond needing each other. There are millions of people who can’t afford to eat because the potential profit associated with bio fuels has exacerbated our propensity for greed. People are starving because the production of grain and rice for human consumption is not as profitable as the production of bio fuels. And while it is true that we need to produce alternative energies for the sake of the planet (and perhaps even for national security?) it is no less the case, however, that saving the planet at expense of its people is not a solution to the problem!

But in spite of the apparent cruelty of the moment, I still believe that there is still another word. This is not the final statement about us. We are, in a phrase, so much better than this. And although history is repeat with the bleached bones of civilizations who failed to subdue the darker impulses of our humanity, there have always been a few committed individuals who resisted the power of this common temptation and appealed the angels of our better nature. I still believe that somewhere in the bruising darkness there is still light—you are that light. And wherever you see greed, selfishness, and cruelty reducing men into statistics, women into tragic cycles of poverty, and children into dust, we need you to shine. A new day is coming; and each of us in the particularities of who we are by virtue of our distinctive genius must act as midwives to this moment. Something is happening. And what though the fields be lost, all is not lost where there is still life, where there is still love, where there is still you. So keep shining like the sun—the world needs you.