Do you ever wonder when you see programs which point out the lack of certain resources and how this affects the loss of human life. Frequently, there is a statement regarding how many children or other persons are dying each minute. There is never a statement about how many persons are being born each minute. One statement without the other is meaningless. The significance of how many people die each minute has meaning only when considered in the context of how many people are being born each minute and how much resources are required to sustain this number and hold it stable.

It is truly meaningless, because life itself is a cycle and blocking the cycle will prevent life from sustaining itself. This is an important lesson, which seems to be lost on modern society. We program ourselves in a linear fashion. Human life is a biologic manifestation and is so constrained. There is no purpose in children and offspring if the parents do not die. Birth is only sustainable in the presence of death. Living organisms can be only sustained in a cycle, a cycle including birth and death. Otherwise the resources that sustain life cannot be re-cycled. The 2011 movie “In Time” addresses this idea peripherally.

It is useful to remind ourselves that our very survival depends upon our sharing. We may superficially think that this means sharing resources with other countries and other humans. But our sharing is dependent upon our resources being sustainable.
Sustainability does not become possible without recognizing the interdependence of everything in the cycle of interlocking living organisms. Inherent, in this cycle, is the death of interdependent organisms which create the sustainability of the cycle, as it allows another organism to sustain life from the use of the dead organism for sustenance.

You might well think that the algae, which are one of the basic organisms that fix the carbon dioxide to create the building blocks of carbon based life, do not need animal life. You would be wrong as without animals, which shift oxygen to carbon dioxide, the other half of the equation would be missing. Plants cannot survive without animals and animals cannot survive without plants. They are in an interdependent dance of balance. Humans it turns out require a multiplicity of plants. First, they require enough of an abundance of plants which can convert carbon dioxide to oxygen, then they require a variety of plants, from which they can glean the nutrition to make their life possible so that birth, growth and death can be supported. They require the bacteria which process plants and animals in the environment, as well as those which are symbiotes in the intestinal tract and other places. They also require the multiplicity of animals which live in balance in the environment to maintain it exactly as it is.

The idea that animal life or human life is somehow more valuable than plant life fails to acknowledge their interdependence. They cannot possibly survive without each other. Thus an agreement about water has to see that water is a resource that is needed by humans, plants and animals with each variety of one or the other having a unique place in the survival of all in entirety, as it allows for the respiration of the planet (the exchange of oxygen for carbon dioxide and vice versa).