The Sino-American Climate Corps will be modeled upon the Peace Corps, yet at a bilateral level, starting with summer-only placements for students and recent graduates and evolving into a full-year or multiyear program.

Specifically, an equal number of participants will be selected from the United States and China to work together on critical climate projects in either nation, whether reforesting the Gobi or assisting on levee projects in coastal Louisiana — or in third countries, such as land reclamation projects within Pacific island nations struggling against the twin impacts of rising sea levels and changing weather patterns.

Our eventual yearlong fellowships will be tailored toward participants’ specific strengths, such as a climate technology corps for engineering graduates or an environmental sciences cooperative for graduates in the biological sciences.

As our volunteers collaborate and solve problems together, they will learn how we can all work together for a better future amid the noise and saber rattling of today’s world.

That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation.