I began to feel that the real topic under consideration was not how hard these concepts are to understand, but how willing people are to understand them. I suggested to my partner that the real issue might be getting people to care, and admitted that I’d not come up with a way to do that. He said he thought that he, himself, might care more if someone could just explain it to him better. I asked whose responsibility that was, and he replied that he didn’t know, but he had to get busy with his day.

The point of this story is not to point a finger at my partner, nor at his parents or our friends, who after all, believe in their hearts that they are caring people. I, too, have trouble getting myself to wake up another day and care, focus on the problems that humanity should be solving, and try to muster up both the wisdom and the time to do something positive for the present and future beings of the planet. In my heart, I care tremendously, but in my daily life, I struggle with the same mundane and habitual battles that face everyone else I know.

Why do we go on like this? Why do we care so little, when we mean to care so much? This is a simple  question, made complex by our vast ability to use rationality to support whatever we want to do. The fact is that there are many things to care about, but there is only so much caring to go around, and we all know, deep within our bones, that our time here, in this life, is short–perhaps *very* short. Of course we want harmony in the world, but when it gets right down to it, we also want a lolipop. We service this more direct desire for the symbolic and tangible “sweet stuff” in life by being incredibly broad and vague when it comes to our definition of “doing good,” or “doing our part,” in the world.

Gestalt psychologists have pointed out that “responsibility” is not an elective, but something each of us owns a chunk of, whether we like it or not, and, more importantly, whether we acknowledge it or not. But what does this mean? It means, most basically, that whatever I think, do, say, or feel, as well as whatever I choose to ignore, has an impact on the collective. So if I say a care about my health, but, for whatever reason I might come up with, I choose to go ahead and grab a burger at MacDonalds for lunch, then, whether I consciously know it or not, I am giving my body something unhealthy to work with, and actually working against my own health that I claim to care about.

By the same logic, the ownership of responsibility means that I can talk all day about how much I love wildlife and forests, but the moment I eat that burger, I have pledged my allegiance to Monsanto and a handful of other large corporations that feed the burger mill at the expense of multiple thousands of football fields worth of rainforests all over the world. My little piece of the shared collective responsibility in the world can and does make a difference–not because my avoiding McDonalds could ever hope to single-handedly stop the destruction of rainforests, but because it simply is what it is: a piece of the total responsibility shared by all living beings.

Contrast this to a tree. According to the Gestalt principle of inherent responsibility, a tree is also responsible. What does the tree do with its responsibility? Well, it starts, as a seed, by reaching into the earth and depleting the soil of some water and certain nutrients that it needs to survive. Okay, so far me and the tree are even–we are both depleting our environment. But then it puts out a couple of leaves and immediately starts accepting the shower of photons the sun casts upon it, and turning their energy into nutrients, which it later sheds to ground in the form of leaves, thus giving back effectively more than it took in the first place by the time it reaches the end of its long life.

Trees use their share of the responsibility to do “good” for life, in the life-centric view of the world. And I believe that they got this way by being around for a really, really long time. In other words, trees evolved to be smart, in their bodies and in their actions, because this supports their future existence.

Perhaps we humans have not yet earned the power to make energy from sunlight using nothing but our own bodies and a little starting energy because we simply have not been evolving long enough–we lack physical smarts. But we have other tools that the tree does not have–a brain, and the capacity to bond emotionally to our surrounds. These tools could work in our favor if we were able to acknowledge our responsibility in the context of the greater collective, and that the only winning solution for our own future is to, like the tree, give back more than we take.

Just as the tree converts the sun’s energy to nutrients in the soil and oxygen in the air, we must learn to convert our abilities to think and to bond emotionally into tangible gifts we give back to the earth. If I am going to make a difference, I have to apply my mind to understanding and my heart to caring every day, just as the tree turns its leaves to the sun every day. And then I have to act continuously, habitually, in ways that reflect my informed understanding of my own piece of the collective responsibility. There is no shortcut to caring. There is no little bit that’s okay to give back. If we want to go on as a species and a biosphere, we have to give back more than we took. We have to act at least as responsible as every tree on Earth.