In 1965, Adlai Stevenson managed to give a more poetic treatment, in an address before the United Nations Social and Economic Council in Geneva:
We travel together, passengers on a little space ship, dependent on its vulnerable reserves of air and soil; all committed for our safety to its security and peace; preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work, and, I will say, the love we give our fragile craft. We cannot maintain it half fortunate, half miserable, half confident, half despairing, half slave—to the ancient enemies of man—half free in a liberation of resources undreamed of until this day. No craft, no crew can travel safely with such vast contradictions. On their resolution depends the survival of us all.
If the transhumanist [e.g., Ray Kurzweil] represent one extreme in the diversity of evolutionary visions in this book—the transcend-at-all-costs, techno-positive, biology-is-for-wimps, let’s-engineer-the-universe sense of optimism—then [Thomas] Berry represents perhaps the other side of the picture, a corrective argument for a radically biocentric approach to the future, a deconstruction of human arrogance, and a deeper embrace of our immanent spiritual connection with the natural world.
In the last few years, the conventional wisdom has emerged that eating animal products results in a greater contribution to greenhouse warming of the planet than does eating plants. Because we worry with good reason that global warming is a major threat to planetary health and humanity’s future, we believe we should do whatever we can personally to mitigate it. This has led newspapers to publish analyses of “how to shop, cook and eat in a warming world,” as The New York Times did in April 2019, and to suggest that the fewer animal products we consume (and certainly the less beef, lamb, and dairy, as these seemingly have the greatest climate footprints), the healthier the planet will be.
This may indeed be true. While acknowledging that livestock can be raised in ways that are relatively climate friendly and much of it is (in the United States, for instance, more, say, than in Brazil), the implication is that the most climate-friendly eating pattern is one that omits these foods—a vegan diet—and that that’s how we should eat. For those who don’t think they can become a vegan, the Times suggests, then “another approach would be to simply eat less meat and dairy, and more protein-rich plants like beans, legumes, nuts and grains.”
The problem, of course, is that this thinking once again assumes that the conventional healthy diet—or even an unconventional and arguably unnatural diet, per Geoffrey Rose’s thinking, like the vegan diet—is indeed healthy for all of us. It builds on a foundation of the bad science in nutrition research of the past fifty years, and it shows little concern for the absence of clinical trials that might actually test it. It’s also the lean person’s perspective. If those of us who are predisposed to be insulin resistant, obese, and/or diabetic in the modern food environment get fat or stay fat eating beans, legumes, and grains, we have a conflict that must be resolved.
“Censorship has always been on the side of authoritarianism, conformity, ignorance, and the status quo,” write Erwin Chemerinsky and Howard Gillman in their book Free Speech on Campus, “and advocates for free speech have always been on the side of making societies more democratic, more diverse, more tolerant, more educated, and more open to progress.”
The past exists only in our memories, the future only in our plans. The present is our only reality.
“It is because we know happiness that we want to be happy, and since nothing is more certain than our wanting to be happy (beatum esse velle), our notion of happiness guides us in determining the respective goods that then became objects of our desires.”
