Do We Care Enough to Share?

A sermon delivered at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation (Blacksburg, VA), April 6, 2008, by the Reverend Christine Brownlie.

The picture on the cover of the report from Doctors Without Borders has been on my mind for weeks. It’s a black and white photo of African women in a line. It’s obvious that they are waiting for something. Almost every woman has a young child in her arms or on her back. Their faces bear the stamp of weariness. Perhaps they’ve had to walk for miles, and now they’re standing in a long long line in the heat. Waiting.

Looking inside the report, I learn that what they are waiting for is nutrient-dense ready-to-use food for their children. These kids aren’t severely malnourished — they don’t have the grotesque bellies and drooping eyes that we see in photos of children who are in advanced stage of starvation. But they’re in danger of this tragic fate, and Doctors Without Borders has decided that it makes sense to provide the special food to these children at this stage, so that their bodies can make good use of the nutrients and ward off some of the diseases that kill young children at a horrifying rate in this part of the world. Doctors Without Borders is certain that millions of children can be saved by these measures. Surely this is good news! So good that I increased my monthly contribution to this worthy cause by a few dollars, and that felt pretty good — for a while. What changed, was that I remembered the text that was above the picture. It said,

“Food is not enough. How Millions of Malnourished Children Could Be Saved.”

That’s right, this new feeding program that I’d supported was going to save millions of children. Millions! Wow! And I began to wonder what adding millions of lives would mean for the future of Africa, Asia, and South America. What would millions of young lives mean for the future of our already struggling planet. What if even half of these children survived and then had two or three or four children of their own??

I was starting to doubt the wisdom of my generosity, and this doubt felt very uncomfortable and hard-hearted. But I began to wonder how these children and their offspring manage to eat, to have healthy lives, to support themselves given the reality of the over-population of our planet? Can we assume that some kind of new technology will come along and take care of these problems? Aren’t there scientists hard at work, developing high-yield crops, new ways of treating water to make it fit for human use, new drugs against diseases like malaria and HIV-AIDS?? These seemed like reasonable possibilities — maybe. I pushed the worry away, and in a Scarlet O’Hara moment decided that I’d think about it tomorrow.

The problem, as Scarlet and I both know, is that tomorrow does come around. Just the other morning, I came across a report about the rising middle class in Africa. The crux of the report was that as the personal wealth of families in certain African countries increases, the rate of sales of consumer goods also rises. People want cars, refrigerators, televisions, computers, tractors, and a host of other items. Just like us, they want to eat hamburgers and fried chicken and enjoy an icy soft drink on a hot day. They want cars and nice clothing and TVs and computers with Internet access and cell phones. They want better homes and cars instead of bicycles. They want good health care and schools for their children. Why shouldn’t they live like we do? How can we claim that we’re the ones who get the biggest and best, and everyone else will have to get in line and make do with what’s left over?

This is not surprising: we’ve seen the same pattern in India and China and South America. People all over the world see the Western standard of living as they watch TV or a movie. They see the pictures in print media or on the Internet, and what they see looks pretty good. The problem is that our planet can’t sustain our lifestyle for millions of more people. In fact, we are already seeing some worrisome signs that tell us that the planet can’t sustain this resource-intense lifestyle much longer for anyone. There are a multitude of indicators that tell us that we a are facing some very difficult problems on a global scale I think that many of us live with a vague but persistent anxiety that within a very few years, life on our planet will change drastically. Those of us who live in the so-called developed nations will be faced with some difficult choices. But I suspect that we really don’t know the half of it, and that we are profoundly unprepared.

You may be aware of some of these problems, because over the last decade or so some of the signs and symptoms are popping up very close to home. A trip to the grocery store tells us that food prices are rising. The cost of products that depend on grain production such as bread, cereal, milk, meats, and eggs, seem to be going up every week. Fuel costs are at an all-time high in our country and going up four-to-six cents every few weeks. We hear about drought in the American West and Southeast, and we shudder at the costs to the people who live in these regions: empty swimming pools, dead grass, using grey water to keep trees alive — not to mention the rising cost of water. We wonder when or maybe if this will end. Or will there be some miraculous escape pod? I think that the answer is that these trends are here to stay for a long time.

I know that many of us are carefully examining the way we live and making changes that will reduce our “footprint” on the planet. We try to help those who are already caught up in the terrible problems of climate change. We are serious and sincere and willing to spend some money to do this. But it can be very difficult know what’s really going to help, and what might actually create more serious problems. Let’s go back to my decision to support that feeding program sponsored by Doctors Without Borders. Was this a good choice?

Professor John Carins, a highly regarded researcher and writer in the field of sustainability, gives a qualified “no.” In his opinion, feeding children who live in areas of the world that are already overpopulated may be “exceedingly cruel.” He goes on to write that death control without birth control will, in the long term, result in more misery for a larger number of people. He notes that

“Providing assistance is widely regarded as compassionate, even noble. However, the ethics of resource allocation should not include enabling acts that ultimately lead to continually exceeding carrying capacity.”

Whoa! This sounds very harsh to a softhearted person like me. But I understand his reasoning. I don’t want to feed a child only to have her face death by starvation a few years later. With guilt slowly creeping up, I decided to do a quick check on the Web site of Doctors Without Borders. To my relief, I learned that the non-governmental organizations involved in these programs offer family planning and counseling to women. I’m hoping that along with those special meals for the children, the mothers received good information about limiting the size of their families. I pray that they will use it.

The lesson here is that we have to ask ourselves the hard question: Is this agency really helping by looking at the whole problem? Or does it offer charity that actually makes the core problems worse? I will certainly look more closely at the total services that are provided by the agencies that I support, and I will try to avoid unintended consequences by doing my best to look at the whole picture. And if I decide to give to a cause that focuses on saving lives, I will balance that with a contribution to an agency that promotes population control.

I want to share another example of unintended consequences with you, because I was so startled by the hostile response that has flared up. To prepare for this sermon, I read a number of articles about “the global food crisis.” This phrase is alarming all by itself, and it’s one that I don’t often see or hear in American news. But my quest led me to a number of articles by foreign journalists who were very critical of our use of corn for ethanol production. Several writers were outraged that we are using food to feed our need for fuel, when people in these countries are starving to death. The words “genocidal energy policy” was used by a few journalists from Africa, and Asia to describe the impact of this new trend on people in their parts of the world. This is a discouraging trend at a time when our country’s image is not very good in many parts of the world. I was aware that Americans are seen as hogs when it comes to the allocation of resources. Now we can add a cold-hearted and self-serving indifference to the pressing needs of people who desperately need food. Now I cringe every time I see a promotion for ethanol as an answer to expensive gasoline.

We’re not the only nation that operates on the premise that if we want it and can pay for it, we should have access to whatever resources that are available whether it’s land, water, minerals, oil, timber, or food. Witness the anxiety about the growing economies in China and India, and the pressure that this will put on the limited resources of our globe. But again, I have to ask why should the American standard of living be so high and other countries forced to settle for less? Why do we become so anxious when other countries begin to approach our level of consumption?

There is an old phrase that’s coming around again, and I hope we pay attention. It’s “the tragedy of the commons.” The idea is based on the ancient tradition in Great Britain that allowed villagers access to land for grazing. This land was known as the commons. In villages where there was no oversight or community management, overgrazing that occurred as herders added animals to their flocks quickly destroyed the commons. The phrase “tragedy of the commons” comes from William Foster Lloyd, who lived from 1795 to 1852. A British economist, he used the destruction of the commons as an example of our human tendency to be driven by immediate self-interest rather than a consideration for the long-term needs of the larger community.

This phrase was revived by another British author, Garrett Hardin, who used it in an article published in the journal Science 40 years ago. Hardin’s thesis is clear and painful. He says that at the heart of all of our shortages of food, fuel, water, and land that can be farmed, is the indisputable truth that we have very nearly reached the carrying capacity of our planet. He claims that there is no technological solution that will make this problem disappear so that we can continue our current life-style and not face disaster. Science and technology can only go so far. Human beings must accept hard choices. But most of us aren’t willing to even consider what must be done.

He writes,

“It is fair to say that most people who anguish over the population problem are trying to find a way to avoid the evils of overpopulation without relinquishing any of the privileges they now enjoy. They think that farming the seas or developing new strains of wheat will solve the problem — technologically.”

Hardin and others contend that despite the clear dangers that we face, humankind will not be able to reach a population level that can be supported indefinitely. Nor can we agree on the best allocation of resources in a way that will suit everyone’s interests. Our own human tendency to serve our own interests at any cost will doom us.

He offers us two examples that are easy to grasp:

“Cattlemen leasing national land on the Western ranges demonstrate no more than an ambivalent understanding, in constantly pressuring federal authorities to increase the head count to the point where overgrazing produces erosion and weed-dominance. Likewise, the oceans of the world continue to suffer from the survival of the philosophy of the commons. Maritime nations still respond automatically to the shibboleth of the ‘freedom of the seas.’ Professing to believe in the ‘inexhaustible resources of the oceans,’ they bring species after species of fish and whales closer to extinction.”

Hardin believes that saving our planet will require some very harsh measures. The most urgent is limiting the number of children in a family. This must be accomplished on a global scale, and sadly many countries resist this idea. Another means of population control is limiting the medical treatments that are available to those over a certain age — say 70. Even now, this option is debated within the medical community. I doubt that this would become policy in our country, although it seems that Great Britain and Canada are approaching some type of system that limits care based on age.

It may be that in the future, there will be mandated limits on family size or other imposed controls. But for now, we must encourage people to take whatever steps they can to make their own impact on the planet as small as possible. As both my own contribution to Doctors Without Borders and also the anger over corn-based ethanol show, it is critical to look at the unintended consequences of our actions.

The complexities of the information that’s out there and the worry that we are approaching a tipping point can overwhelm us. It’s not easy to know what to do, and it’s certain that our actions will have unhappy consequences for some segment of the economy. For example, I’d like to prohibit the production of potato chips and corn chips and carbonated soft drinks so that the basic foods used to produce these items could be used to feed the hungry of the world. But this would be a catastrophe for millions who work for Frito-lay, Coca-cola and other companies. And here we go with another example of death-control without birth-control.

There will be no easy answers, and those of us who enjoy so many privileges may find ourselves hard pressed. It helps to know that there are other thoughtful caring people who find themselves in the same frame of mind. Barbara Kingsolver, the author of the very popular book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, A Year of Food Life offers this confession.

“I share with almost every adult I know this crazy quilt of optimism and worries, feeling locked into certain habits but keen to change them in the right direction. And the tendency to feel like a jerk for falling short of absolute conversion. Small stepwise changes in personal habits aren’t trivial. Ultimately they will, or won’t, add up to having been the thing that mattered.”

We can only act on our best information, our best intentions, and our deepest hopes. And when we err, we make a correction and go on. As Unitarian Universalists, we claim to respect the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part. We must act boldly with commitment and determination, caring and sharing so that the web of life can continue and even heal.

May it be so!