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5
Governance:
New Ways to Stay in Bounds and Play Fair

IN JUNE 2008, the Standing Committee on International Trade of Canada’s House of Commons held a little-noticed, hastily convened hearing on a pending free trade agreement between that nation and Colombia. The witnesses included two labor experts from the Canadian Labour Council, an environmental expert formerly with the North American Commission for Environmental Cooperation, and two representatives of Canada Pork International, an agency devoted to promoting exports from the Canadian pork industry. The committee members from the party in government, which had negotiated the agreement, pressed the point that Canada had better quickly get the trade treaty in place, lest the United States or other countries beat them to it and take market share away from Canadian exporters and investors aiming to get a toehold in Colombia. When witnesses offered by the opposition parties testified about the more than 2,000 union activists killed in Colombia in the past twenty years with alleged involvement of the police and military, the government party members said things were getting better and the trade agreement would help even more. Committee members grilled the pork industry representatives on how many more pigs they would sell, for how much more money, and with how many Canadian jobs created, if the agreement were approved. But no committee member asked about the amount of additional pig wastes to be added to Canadian air, soil, and water, or how much more greenhouse gases would be produced by shipping more pork to Colombia, let alone what overcrowding, antibiotics, and other routine matters of large-scale pork production were doing to the pigs’ own well-being.

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Concerns about the agreement’s labor and environmental impacts came out through questioning the expert witnesses. For example, the agreement allows private investors to seek multimillion-dollar awards if they think the Canadian or Colombian government has violated the agreement by expropriating their investment or treating them unfairly. In pathetic contrast, it only allows a civil society group concerned that the few environmental provisions are not being obeyed to send a question to a bureaucrat and hope for an answer. Although the committee entertained more robust provisions, the hearing left little hope that anything would be done to improve the agreement’s weak environmental and labor provisions. In fact, the hearing began with an announcement that the government had gone ahead and signed the agreement—without even waiting for the hearing to take place.

Take out Canada and Colombia from this example and insert any number of other countries—the United States or the European Union for Canada, and pretty much any Latin American or Asian country for Colombia—and you will have a picture of how free-trade deals are moving forward in much of the world these days. In trade and many other matters, governments virtually always assume that their national interest is identical with the economic goals of the industries or business interests that stand to profit from the trade agreement, because, it is thought, these interests will serve the supreme goal of adding to economic growth, hence a happy government and a contented populace. The only input for the effects of industry on labor and the integrity of natural systems are a few toothless provisions¹ that are only included because it would be politically touchy not to be able to at least refer to them, like a lucky touchstone.

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These trade deals illustrate perfectly how the nations of the world are governing the global economy. Governance is the use of authority and resources to manage society’s problems and affairs. New thinking is needed that breaks away from the prevailing limited conception of what is in the local, national, or global interest, and needed quickly, so as to create the kind of institutions and governance required first to restore and then to enable life’s flourishing. To pave the way for alternative governance models, it is useful to analyze why the present models are not working. Governance is not just for government bureaucrats, politicians, and policy wonks. Right relationship for governance embodies the notion that, properly construed, government is not an “other,” to be opposed and vilified, but rather a representation of collective wisdom, spirit, and discipline. It is something in which each of us as a citizen of the world has not merely a stake but a duty to participate.

The example of the United States helps explain why we need new approaches to governance. The United States is a country that issues inspiring statements of policy about the environment and has a full panoply of environmental laws. The national environmental policy of the United States, adopted in 1970 and still in effect, recognizes the need “to maintain conditions under which man and nature can exist in productive harmony, and fulfill the social, economic and other requirements of present and future generations of Americans.”² Following this visionary, albeit anthropocentric, commitment the United States adopted the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, which established regulatory, enforceable limits on the amount of pollutants that can be emitted to air and water. Then came the powerful Endangered Species Act, which has on numerous occasions stopped development in its tracks through effective enforcement. Other laws followed, such as laws regulating the handling, shipment, disposal, and cleanup of hazardous wastes, toxic substances, and pesticides.

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At various times, state or federal administrations have sought to weaken these laws or their implementation, as with resistance by the federal government to use its authority to control greenhouse gas emissions. And, despite these laws, many signs point to the fact that several recent administrations have been far from stalwart defenders of the environment on issues such as protection of wildlife, coal mining, and climate change, among myriad others. But by and large these laws have led to some significant environmental improvement over the past forty years.

A strong and independent court system has played a crucial role in the credible enforcement of these laws, giving them real deterrent impact, though the courts’ zeal has been progressively imperiled by a move to the right. For all the recent talk of voluntary compliance and market mechanisms, the backbone of environmental protection in the United States continues to be command-and-control regulation, in which the government sets and enforces strict environmental limits. Few people are seriously promoting the idea that this command-and-control system be dismantled. More recent regulatory schemes that incorporate market mechanisms, such as cap and trade systems, have had some success, particularly with acid rain, but they have at their root enforceable limits—the “cap” part of cap and trade. What has worked so far to protect the environment in the United States is command-and-control regulation with teeth, not laissez-faire capitalism.

Even with the finances and an intermittent will to protect, as well as the regulatory power, why then is the average per capita ecological footprint in the United States 23.7 acres, or 9.6 hectares (2003 data), when the world average is less than one quarter of that, at 5.4 acres, or 2.2 hectares? The global per capita footprint that would allow for strong resilience is something less than 4.4 acres, or 1.8 hectares (an area per person that would, in fact, leave nothing to other species).³ Why is the United States a global laggard in addressing climate change? Why does it still countenance serious environmental problems, such as smoggy cities and innumerable waterways that fail to meet limits on mercury and other substances, making them unfishable and unsafe to swim in?

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Why Governance Is Not Working

Constructing a society that favors instead of destroys life will require a rethinking of governance in line with right relationship with life’s commonwealth on this dynamic but finite planet. Here is why.

The Inadequacy of National Governments

The first set of governance problems pertains to governance within the countries of the world. They are not addressing the earth’s ecological crisis, for several reasons.

Velocity and Scale Most countries designed their governance institutions in an era when the size of their human population and their economy were markedly smaller than they are today and when the environmental devastation they caused was considered local—if it was considered at all. At the time, changes in the earth’s systems at the global level were slow. Today, vast and rapidly growing trends are changing the fundamentals of the earth’s life-support systems. Even though several nations have developed complex environmental laws and policies, national governments by and large have failed to adopt systems of governance adequate to keep pace.

Failed or Failing States A number of countries are so embroiled in civil wars, or their governments are so dysfunctional, that they cannot effectively establish systems to ensure adequate care of usual governance requirements such as security, taxation, or infrastructure, let alone new environmental responsibilities.

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Capture In other countries, elites or special interests exert profound influence over the government, and they succeed in preventing adoption of effective environmental or financial controls that would threaten their economic interests. For example, the Clean Water Act in the United States, effective in 1972, contains weak provisions regarding certain kinds of water pollution, such as agricultural and urban runoff and certain kinds of pollution that falls as precipitate in rain from air emissions, like mercury and other heavy metals. Powerful agriculture, coal-mining, and electric utility lobbies help explain why.

Many Nations, One World Even if more national governments were proactive about the environment, their governance systems are inadequate to address global problems because many ecological threats do not recognize national boundaries. The most obvious and pressing example is climate change. Yet global warming is just one symptom of massive failure. A much larger, related crisis looms behind it: the oversized and growing global human appropriation of the products of photosynthesis (what we call our “ecological footprint”). Vast regional air pollution covers large swaths of Asia. Montreal has smog alerts aggravated by coal-fired power plants hundreds of miles away in the Ohio Valley of the United States.

Even the most developed governance systems have not been able to control their citizens’ ecological impact. The top tier countries in terms of ecological footprint, with per capita footprints far in excess of their fair share, are the United States, the United Arab Emirates, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the Scandinavian countries.⁴ Thus, the exorbitant ecological damage attributable to consumption in rich nations is often exacted in poorer ones. The fact, for example, that the United States has a huge, seemingly perpetual trade deficit means that it is a net exporter of its ecological footprint. The term “emerging markets,” so loved by Wall Street and other investment communities, is often code for places with nonexistent, lax, or easily corrupted regulations on pollution and the exploitation of forests, fisheries, and labor. These are places where the regrettably named “human capital” and “natural capital” are to be had for the taking. Within nations these are de jure or de facto open-access systems where the rule is private appropriation of the benefits and externalization of the costs.

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A major shortcoming of existing governance arrangements is that awareness of the urgency of growing global ecological threats has not triggered the voluntary agreement of nations necessary to make progress toward an economy in right relationship with life’s commonwealth. The United States and China, for example, are major contributors to global climate change, with significant consequences for all nations, and yet neither is being held accountable to any international body for its behavior.

Nickel and Diming In most countries, the environment takes a back seat to the economy. Government institutions in the United States have allowed its laudatory commitment to long-term environmental quality to be compromised in bits and pieces. The fine print of laws and regulations gives more weight to short-term economic impacts than to long-term environmental impacts. And the core principle of ecological resilience is not as easily applied to global ecological challenges, such as global warming and mass extinctions, that are less visible and appear less immediate than conventional pollution problems, even if they are more ominous.⁵

The Devil Is in the (Boring) Details Because these broad, looming ecological challenges are most clearly apparent at an aggregate scale, addressing them requires the time- and resource-consuming collection of huge amounts of data and information. Government programs in the United States that are devised to analyze such large pictures are often poorly designed or implemented. For example, the U.S. Clean Water Act requires the government to develop total maximum daily loads (TMDLs) of pollution for degraded water bodies. TMDLs are designed to restore water to healthy conditions and serve as a planning tool to apportion the allowable pollutant load among all known sources, both natural and human-derived. The concept is sound, but just as with the global system for apportioning the right to emit greenhouse gases, developing and implementing TMDLs has been extremely slow.

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The Failure of International Governance Regimes

The present system of sovereign national governments dates from the Peace of Westphalia, two treaties signed in Germany in 1648 that curtailed a long cycle of territorial wars in Europe and created mutually recognized sovereign nation states. Today, sovereign countries the world over that mutually recognize each others’ sovereignty interact through diplomatic channels as well as through organizations like the United Nations. Mutual recognition of sovereignty, backed up now with international law regimes that most countries accept, provides an important though very imperfect bulwark against war and conflict. But the system of sovereign states is not up to the challenges of our era. Here is why.

No Means to Ensure Fairness Not a single international institution exists to guarantee even a minimum standard of sharing in the earth’s bounty. For both humans and nonhumans alike, the situation is simply grotesque. In a world awash in money, there are hundreds of millions of people, or by many measures billions of people, who lack the means to acquire even minimal goods such as clean water, shelter, food, preventive medical care, and the like. For nonhumans the situation is even more dire—the question of their fair share hardly arises at all, and more and more are dying off. And even when it does arise there is no effective mechanism to stop the precipitous decline in life’s variety.

Growth Über Alles Institutions like the United Nations (UN), the World Trade Organization (WTO), the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the International Labor Organization (ILO) have opened the door to better ecological governance. They all have, to one degree or another, programs and rules that promote consideration of environmental and social impacts of the work they do, and most have adopted various accountability mechanisms that allow the public to raise environmental and social concerns.

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But when was the last time you heard a government official or a person in the media applaud higher energy prices, because they will lead to more conservation and less greenhouse gas emissions and other ecological impacts? Almost always, the immediate promise of politicians is to make every effort to drive the prices down again. Even though the growth-oriented laissez-faire approach is directly correlated with ecological degradation and its social consequences, most nations fear short-term damage to their economies and a backlash from the financial interests that support them, so they fail to work on supplying sufficient protections for life’s commonwealth. Hence, environmental and social safety net provisions are nearly always secondary, with development and growth the driving priority.

The international community has had little serious discussion that could lead to an understanding that global economic institutions are embedded in the biosphere on which they depend. As a consequence, when there is a clash between efforts to ensure living within the earth’s ecological means and short-term economic growth, even the most dire ecological scenarios, like those in the increasingly foreboding reports of the International Panel on Climate Change, are insufficient to place effective checks on growth.

Power Imbalances The governance arrangements reflected in today’s international institutions are still biased toward the great powers reigning over the world when they were set up. The UN was founded at the end of World War II and is largely controlled by five countries with a veto power in the Security Council: the United States, Britain, France, China, and Russia—the main powerbrokers at the end of that war. Despite its shortcomings, the UN has been a decisive positive influence in the world on many issues, yet its more powerful members have not allowed it to be effective in addressing looming ecological crises.

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The international business community has steadily used the World Bank, the WTO, and the IMF, all of which the United States has also dominated, to advance the goals of the economic model of unlimited growth and resource use. As in the example of the Canada–Colombia free trade agreement, economic interests that have the resources to exercise overt and covert control make sure to get involved in how these international institutions are run. The result: a world economy dominated by transnational companies and financial elites that operate with active support or passive acquiescence of national governments. Thus, though no effective global or international government exists, a de facto system of governance does exist, run by the economic interests that dominate the most powerful nations. The current system implicitly rejects, and for the most part would not seriously consider, governance options centered on respect for the earth’s ecological limits and a fair distribution of its ecological capacity.

Little Power, Less Money The international institution at the global level that is most explicitly responsible for the environment is the UN Environment Programme. UNEP, though, lacks the authority and status of other global institutions, such as the WTO and the ILO. It is significantly underresourced and has no means of compelling right behavior. Proposals for global institutions for the environment were first made in the late nineteenth century, with more recent discussions dating from the 1970s onward.⁶ Recent discussion focused on creating a World Environment Organization with enforcement powers similar to those of the ILO or WTO, and has also included various reform proposals of the intellectually rich but ineffectual UNEP.⁷ However, despite many useful environmental programs at UNEP and other UN agencies, an effective global environmental institution does not yet exist.

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Talking but Not Walking So far, the international community has at least paid lip service to the need to address the world’s ecological and social crises. The 1948 Universal Declaration on Human Rights, the 1972 Stockholm and 1992 Rio Declarations that voiced a commitment to sustainable development, and the 2000 Millennium Development Goals, along with numerous programs of various UN agencies, the World Bank and other development banks, and the Global Environment Facility—all are, in theory, committed to improving the well-being of global society and protecting the environment for present and future generations. Several international mechanisms have actually been quite successful, most notably the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer (signed originally in 1987), which has led to dramatic reductions in the release to the atmosphere of chemicals that destroy the ozone layer, despite the refusal of countries like China and India to join in.⁸ But by and large, international institutions have not yet succeeded in translating those words into effective action that sets enforceable rules for preventing economic growth from undermining human and ecological well-being.

A Step in the Right Direction At least one current international effort holds the promise to be a model, in part, for the greater effort that must follow. The International Panel on Climate Change, while certainly not immune to political intermeddling, has displayed admirable impartiality that provides a hopeful example. The IPCC has demonstrated a commitment to seeking honest information about climate change’s causes and effects, with a view to driving international consensus on the action needed to address the climate change crisis. It has a decent degree of credibility and independence. It is incomplete, though, since it has not yet been linked to a reliable mechanism for building enforceable international rules that will respond to the information it is producing. Whether the IPCC is a successful model depends on whether this linkage occurs.

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Principles of Governance in Right Relationship with Life’s Commonwealth

Right relationship can be reflected in governance systems through a core set of principles that are essential to effective governance. These core principles relate to capacity and authority, credibility, accountability and effectiveness, transparency, and subsidiarity.

Capacity and Authority Governance systems and procedures at the global, national, and subnational level must have, first, the capacity to establish ecological limits on economic activity and, second, the authority to set and enforce rules that will allow human and nonhuman life and the systems they rely on to flourish for generations to come. This implies the authority to foster freedom of individual economic choice as much as possible, but within spheres limited as necessary to protect the commonwealth of life.

Credibility Government institutions and systems of governance need to have their constituents’ confidence in order to enact, implement, and enforce regulatory systems and procedures and to govern on behalf of humanity and life’s commonwealth. This requires that they rely on honest sources of information and be independent from corrupting influences.

Accountability and Effectiveness Government institutions need to be held responsible for their policies and behavior, which must be measured in honest, open ways against preestablished goals and criteria. They must be prepared to make adjustments when they fall short, so that institutions or government actors that do not perform can be replaced with ones that do.

Transparency Government-held information must be freely available, to enable fair assessments of a government’s performance and hold its institutions accountable.

Subsidiarity Governance institutions should be as local as possible. They should be built around ecosystems instead of artificial political boundaries. People should be meaningfully consulted about policies that affect them locally, and local governments should possess authority to apply broadly applicable rules setting limits that best fit the local culture and ecology. Acting locally in self-interest has limits, though. Local actions and behavior often affect other neighborhoods, the local environment and quality of life are affected by outside activities, and local government is prone to capture just as national governments are. At all levels of government, rules are needed so that all actors respect collective limits that are necessary to ensure right relationship.

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Introducing Four Proposed Global Institutions for a Whole Earth Economy

How should fair access to the earth’s limited capacity to support and maintain life be governed? The functions missing at the global level are:

• The comprehensive monitoring and analysis of information on the ecological limits of the earth, in a way that can be applied to keep the economy within those limits (though bits and pieces of this kind of work do exist)
• Means to protect the global commons in a fair way
• A means of passing enforceable rules and regulations
• Independent judicial review of the performance of these institutions and compliance with global rules

The proposals below may not be the best solutions humanity can come up with for supplying the governance now missing at the global level, but they have been carefully considered and are offered here to help focus attention on the urgent tasks ahead. In any event, it is their functions, not what they are called, that are most important. A global discussion must begin on how to bring institutions resembling the four that follow into being in a democratic, participatory way that will avoid the political and economic traps that have so far compromised so much of national and international governance. They serve as functional ideals to which we must aspire, no matter what particular form they take. Such a task is, of course, an enormous challenge. But the first step of that challenge is to envision these institutions, and how they could bring effective governance to the commonwealth of life.

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The first proposed institution is a Global Reserve, endowed with a well-supported research component, that would guide the economy based on the biophysical laws that govern the planet. This would also require an integrated understanding of the earth’s economic/ecological household budget, that is, its real ability to use and renew the planet’s finite resources. The Global Reserve would develop and update information on the dynamics of human ecological impact, the ways in which the benefits and burdens are being allocated and distributed, and the ecological limits that must bind the economy. Information from the Global Reserve would serve the other institutions.

The second institution would be Trusteeships of Earth’s Commons to protect the ozone layer, the atmosphere, the oceans, and the other systems necessary for life’s flourishing, by monitoring and administering the limits, allocations, and distributions deemed necessary through the work of the Global Reserve.

The third proposed institution is a Global Federation, modeled in part on the European Union, with jurisdiction over the operation of a whole earth economy and with the authority to adopt and administer binding international laws establishing limits and allocations on the human use of the earth’s resources, and to ensure fairness among persons and between humans and other species. Critical to its success are government institutions at national and subnational levels that also respect these foundational principles. Properly designed, the Global Federation could sustain and enable, not stifle, the local traditions and natural wonders that give life meaning in particular places and ways, because these are the things that define various cultures and ecosystems and hence, in significant part, human identity and individuality. Last, a Global Court would be needed to resolve disputes arising out of the operation of these institutions and to hold them to their charters.

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The Earth Charter, an international initiative launched in The Hague, Netherlands, in 2000, lays out a hopeful vision of what these institutions could accomplish.⁹ The result of a civil society project led by Mikhail Gorbachev and Maurice Strong and with broad and diverse participation from around the world, the Earth Charter recognizes the need to maintain the economy within the earth’s limits. It sets out principles in four categories: respect and care for the community of life; ecological integrity; social and economic justice; and democracy, nonviolence, and peace. Keeping the Earth Charter in mind will help in developing the right kind of global governance for a whole earth economy.¹⁰

The Global Reserve

The first major global institution proposed is the Global Reserve. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund must give way, either by rapid evolution or by replacement, to an institution charged with understanding how the economy works within the ecosphere. Thus, one of the central tasks of the Global Reserve will be to understand and develop a framework for managing life’s commonwealth in accordance with the concept of right relationship. The Global Reserve will need vast scientific expertise in the fields of ecosystem function and restoration, along with the ability to frame appropriate issues for public consideration and official decision making. In short, it will need to have the power to deal with the tough moral questions that lie unaddressed now—but that, without action, will become ever more difficult over time.

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Using the I=f(PATE) Framework

The Global Reserve should make good use of the I=f(PATE) framework discussed in Chapter 3, with the goal of preventing the total human economic impact from overrunning the integrity, resilience, and beauty of life’s commonwealth. A compelling virtue of this framework is that it highlights the available arenas of policy and moral choice: Population, Affluence, Technology, and Ethics. Some tools are already available to assess the impacts of economic activity in line with the I=f(PATE) formula: Examples include assessment of the appropriation of net primary productivity, environmental impact assessment, state-of-the-environment reporting, assessment of carrying capacity, and estimates of how much remains of various resources like oil and how to do real risk assessment that considers the reality of ecosystem fragility. Other tools, such as measurements or indices of quality of life, population studies, ecological footprinting, climate change science, and so on, are also being rapidly elaborated. Ecological footprinting is perhaps the most developed attempt to assess overall human impact, as described in the I=f(PATE) formula, but it both understates and overstates impact and requires further study and refinement.¹¹ The capacity to do much of this work already exists in the United Nations agencies, the World Bank and other development banks, and related international institutions and organizations.

The Global Reserve would make use of these and similar tools to help define the limits that the biosphere puts on human economic activity, and to provide information to authorities, like the proposed Global Federation and the Trusteeships, that set rules or guidance to ensure that the economy stays within those bounds. Nation states or other subsidiary levels of government could also use information from the Global Reserve to decide how to adjust the variables in their particular I=f(PATE) framework, so as to stay within their fair allotment of the total global human impact (I). This idea is simply an extension of ideas growing out of the approach to controlling anthropogenic climate change. Each country has a target and can choose how to stay within it, subject to verification by the Global Reserve. As the Global Reserve becomes more operational, more targets, such as biodiversity conservation, pure-water availability, amount of forest cover, and so forth, could be added to the understanding of biosphere needs that would guide all four institutions.

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Population In making policy choices using the I=f(PATE) framework, the most challenging factor is likely to be population. In many countries, the I=f(PATE) framework will probably reveal that technological advances and reduction in consumption and waste are insufficient to ensure the integrity, resilience, and beauty of life’s commonwealth. The prospect of population reduction and human settlement redistribution within the earth’s ecological limits poses enormous ethical and practical difficulties. Will it be chaotic, tragic, and inequitable, or can it be accomplished in some orderly, cooperative, equitable way that honors life’s commonwealth? To ask this question is to move into the zone of the almost unthinkable. Yet the Global Reserve must be prepared to develop the information that will frame the policy options for addressing population concerns.

Deciding on policies to reach a fair size for the human population and its consumption is an imperative early task for those in charge of managing the earth’s ecological budget. By many accounts of interspecies equity, substantial population reductions, optimally voluntary and humane and resulting from decreased fertility rates, may become necessary. Much of the ecological harm done today is a result of flaws in the growth and development model now followed by nearly every national government. The countries that have achieved the most, as defined by that model—the industrialized economies of Europe, North America, Australia, and New Zealand in particular—do the most harm per capita. So it is here that reducing human numbers will pay the greatest ecological dividends. Of course, as other countries catch up (many of them are already recognized as being overpopulated), their problems will become even more urgent than they already are.

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Consumption In regard to affluence (consumption) and ethics in the I=f(PATE) framework, the honest and rigorous information that the Global Reserve collects on an ongoing basis to establish and refine ecological limits will need to counter the effect of advertising. The constant stream of advertising that bombards human society around the globe often uses deception, overstatement, and subconscious messaging to promote mindless overconsumption. Advertising too frequently transforms the amorphous and endless desires for luxuries, opportunity, and power that are a natural facet of the human imagination into needs that must be fulfilled right now.¹² Pandering to the childish and endlessly greedy side of human imagination creates a warped notion of what it means to be “happy.” This is a manufactured manifestation of the “E” factor that has no basis in spiritual, ecological, or even practical material fulfillment. It also blocks out the moral doubt and consternation that people would otherwise feel when they consider that they may personally be demanding an unfair and excessive consumption of the earth’s bounty. In a whole earth economy, the ability to choose between a broad array of earth-damaging products would no longer be considered real freedom. The Global Federation may need to enact legislation, or provide guidance to the nations and other subsidiary levels of governments to do so, that will confront the effects of deleterious advertising.

Advertisers could be required to follow any advertisement with a statement concerning the environmental impact or ecological footprint of the product being advertised, much like food processing companies are presently required to list nutritional information and drug companies are required to disclose side effects and sometimes “black box warnings.” Germany has an admirable institution already doing this. Stiftung Warentest is a consumer guide service maintaining strict independence from both government and commercial interests.¹³ Owing to its reputation for absolute integrity, it is consulted by some eight out of ten Germans before they purchase any goods, from vacuum cleaners to toothpaste. The consumer guides it publishes monthly assess products not just for durability and cost, but for the very effects on the biosphere that the Global Reserve would begin to make available. Its national moral and economic influence is so great that a poor rating—a vacuum cleaner that contains cadmium, for example, or wine bottles that cannot be recycled—pretty much dooms that brand to failure, despite all the producers’ advertisements to the contrary. The simple fact that small institutions of this nature already exist points to the clear possibility for their expansion, even to the global level.

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The Global Reserve should also develop information on the impacts of generating credit. Just as limits used to be (and again can be) placed on commercial advertising, they should be considered for credit generation, particularly the predatory lending practices that cause not merely overconsumption but also periodic loss and suffering in even the richest countries, to say nothing of the poorest.

Durability and high quality in all sorts of goods can and should be emphasized once again. Public campaigns are already being developed that promote simplicity and try to shield people from the worst affects of consumerism, such as the “What Would Jesus Drive?” campaign of the Evangelical Environmental Network and Creation Care magazine.¹⁴ These campaigns are already enlisting the support of civic and religious organizations, though as yet they have had limited success in trying to work with government and state agencies, except in Europe.

Technology The politically most expedient factor in the I=f(PATE) framework is the technology factor. Beginning (and often ending) this process by putting emphasis on technological solutions lets politicians avoid the complications of asking their constituents to make do with less or to have fewer children. In a world inhabited by almost 7 billion people, technology will have to play a critical role in moving toward a moral economy, but it should never be an excuse not to address population and consumption. The Global Reserve should concentrate primarily on scientific measurements and social change while, at the same time, subjecting all suggested—but as yet undeveloped—technologies to a credible dose of truth-testing, especially when they are offered in order to justify rejection of ecologically preferred alternative technologies available in the short term.

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The Global Reserve also needs to address the reality that much of the current incentive to develop and promote “green” and other technologies comes from their potential to make profits. Without publically created incentives, investment in research and development devoted to public goods not easily privatized, such as clean air, is likely to fall short. Regrettably, the current intellectual-property regime (meaning patents) has increasingly privatized the scientific knowledge base, such as the patenting of living organisms. The Global Reserve will need to manage its surveillance of technological developments so as to ensure that intellectual-property rights do not prevent promising technologies that are not profitable or cannot be easily commoditized from serving the common good. To this end, it will need to develop a broad-based research and development framework.

The Stabilization, Allocation, and Distribution Functions of the Global Reserve

In conjunction with analyzing the ecological boundaries of the economy, the Global Reserve would have functions geared toward determining the means for stabilizing human ecological impacts, allocating the authority to take resources from and put wastes back into the environment, and distributing this authority fairly among present and future generations of the earth’s species. The idea of having stabilization, allocation, and distribution functions derives from the organization of public finance systems and monetary reserves that typically have these functions.¹⁵

Stabilization The chief purpose of the stabilization function is to maintain the ecological impacts of the economy at levels that do not overwhelm ecosystems’ ability to adapt. Change is the order of all things on the earth and in the universe, but the velocity and character of change influence life’s prospects dramatically.¹⁶ A critical task in fulfilling the stabilization function will be to provide a description of how the earth’s life systems respond to change—in essence, their integrity and resilience. Like determining what quantity of nutrients from farming destroys the functioning of an ecosystem such as the Everglades, the stabilization function will involve monitoring and analyzing the interdependence of key variables that control how ecosystems behave and also how interdependent variables interact. One aspect of this will be to track long trends, to identify major threats to life’s commonwealth, and to develop information that can enable a response to threats that will be consistent with a healthy human–earth relationship. Much of the work relevant to this function, such as the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, is already being done and could be consolidated and reinforced.

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In short, there will be a healthy reluctance to introduce manmade changes to an ecosystem of any kind, pending careful study; and existing declines will be carefully analyzed in terms of what may have caused them. This is the very essence of the precautionary principle that already is included in international statements of commitment like the 1992 Rio Declaration and often guides global organizations like the UNEP. The precautionary principle is a beginning step. It attempts to put the onus to prove that a new product, chemical, industry, or development is benign on those attempting to introduce it—instead of waiting until clear damage forces victims to seek redress that, in terms of ecological integrity, almost always comes too late.

Allocation The allocation function of the Global Reserve is to measure and devise policies for using the human share of the earth’s capacity efficiently to produce the forms of plant and animal life that humans consume and also for monitoring the earth’s capacity to assimilate wastes. One promising allocation tool is an International Clearing Union (ICU), as proposed in 1943 by John Maynard Keynes during the Bretton Woods talks that led to the creation of the World Bank and the IMF. Keynes proposed the ICU as a trade-stabilizing mechanism to ensure that creditor nations would not come to dominate debtor nations.¹⁷ The ICU would issue its own currency, to be called the bancor, to serve as the exchange unit for international trade. The ICU would determine the trade exchange rates with the national currencies through the bancor, and monitor any trade imbalances that arose. Should any nation develop a net trade surplus, its bancor exchange rate would be adjusted accordingly to disfavor future trade imbalances. The exchange rate would also be adjusted to prevent countries from falling too far into debt. Instead, the subsequent Bretton Woods Agreement created the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which, as their missions were hijacked by international financial interests, have led many developing nations to sink further into debt under unserviceable loans.¹⁸

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An updated version of the ICU would help ensure fair and equitable international trade that maintains the integrity, resilience, and beauty of the commonwealth of life. By adding an ecological component, bancors could become ecors. Credits or debits of ecors could be tied to a nation’s management (or mismanagement) of its ecological capacity, including but not limited to national net primary productivity (NPP). Policies that result in a net decrease in ecological function for a nation (as measured, for example, by satellite ground-cover mapping and other sources) would result in corresponding charges in ecors, thus creating incentives against further ecological degradation. Likewise, efforts on the part of that nation to increase ecological functions through such activities as reforestation would result in a corresponding increase of that nation’s purchasing power through ecor credits. A service fee in ecor exchange could generate a restoration fund for work in qualifying nations, provided that these nations agree to ecological policy reforms.¹⁹ Implementing such ideas is not really so far away. In early 2008, France and Germany suggested that a tax be put on Canadian goods because Canada was not complying with the industrial adjustments necessary to meet Kyoto Protocol climate change targets, and therefore had an unfair economic advantage over products from countries that were. If such a thing as an ecor already existed, this economic advantage would be even easier to rectify, and the result would be not merely a more level economic playing field, but also the likely acceptance of binding greenhouse gas emissions targets by currently uncooperative countries like Canada.

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Distribution The main purpose of the distribution function is to develop the basis for determining a fair distribution of the economy’s benefits and burdens among present and future generations of humans and other species. The human share can be fairly distributed only after excluding the shares that must be left to the rest of life’s commonwealth. In regard to the human share, few steps have been taken recently to move the world toward greater income and wealth equality. The global community, through the Millennium Development Goals and many other international programs, has focused on poverty reduction, which is certainly essential, but has made no attempt to address excessive wealth and overconsumption. And while these programs have had some local success, within many nations across the globe the continued adherence to the neoliberal growth economy has resulted in systematic dismantling or reduction of social safety nets.

The distribution function will have to start with honest, scientific information on what is legitimately available for current human use, taking into account the biosphere’s regenerative capacities. The objective then will be to establish distribution mechanisms that ensure that basic needs of all humans are met, while also allowing for the variations in material wealth that are inevitable as different people pursue different kinds of lives. Today, greed and wealth have no enforceable limits. No limit exists on how many billionaires the world will allow, or how affluent one person can become. Those charged with the distribution function will face the difficult task of imposing new limits that recognize the immorality of an economy giving—for whatever reason—too much of the earth’s capacity for life to too few inhabitants.

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Global redistribution is essential for reversing the current social tendency of exalting massive wealth and consumption. The global community should ensure that basic human needs are provided for, not as a matter of occasional charity but as a matter of continuous justice and right. Individuals have the right to what they need to sustain life. The ability to engage in the community, and contribute to and benefit from it, is a cornerstone of a just economy. At the same time, people have a duty to contribute to society. All this implies that society must organize its institutions in such a way that every individual is granted a fair share of society’s resources, including the opportunity to contribute to the community in a capacity that enhances human dignity and self-worth.

One promising idea is to replace hit-or-miss foreign assistance by a guaranteed, planet-wide citizen’s income. In addition to being substantially fairer than the present gross inequalities, such a system should provide incentives to reduce the birth rate. Many studies indicate that it will do so, among other reasons because most poor people have large numbers of children to provide security, particularly in old age. Because of the harm already done to global systems, poverty alleviation must be accomplished by redistribution, not by growth—at least when growth increases ecological impact. Of course, because wealthy people have much greater ecological impact than poor people, incentives to keep birth rates low among wealthy populations is critical, as well.

Since those with little income are likely to spend all or most of it on consumption, it is imperative that such a system be connected with a robust global regulatory structure. This structure should orient consumption away from damaging technologies such as private cars that use fossil fuels, or air conditioners that (despite global bans on ozone-depleting chemicals) emit small amounts of such substances and use energy that contributes to global warming, to give only two examples.

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An important task of the distribution function is to make market corrections. Markets are ill-equipped to deal with both tangible and intangible environmental goods and issues, if only because environmental goods are public goods. One person can breathe clean air, and clean air is still there for others to breathe. The same largely holds true for a multitude of other environmental goods, such as clean water, biodiversity, wilderness, and climate stability. Even mainstream economists expect governments to find a way to provide public goods, including environmental goods.

Measures of aggregate income and wealth should include environmental goods and their distribution. With this approach, wealth would include the utility that people derive from sunlight and from clean air, soil, and water, as well as the value that human beings place on wilderness. The economy would also account for ecosystem services: the air, soil, water, and biodiversity that healthy ecosystems preserve to enrich and sustain the planet. A proper understanding of the economy’s essential burdens and benefits that are available for distribution would lead to alternatives to current resource extraction, production, or industrial practices that would preserve and protect life’s commonwealth. Under this approach, renewable energy sources and materials would have higher value, and nonrenewable energy sources and materials would have lower value.

Capacity building is closely linked with the distribution function. Many countries and regions will need help integrating and implementing policies and programs that are centered on maintaining the integrity, resilience, and beauty of life’s commonwealth. Existing mechanisms like the Global Environmental Fund, which promotes, funds, and helps implement environmental projects, can serve as a starting point, but need to be adjusted so that they recognize the ecological limits on growth and development. For example, the full slate of GEF projects that promote development of renewable energy in developing countries may be a step in the right direction.²⁰

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Trusteeships of Earth’s Commons

The role of the Trusteeships of Earth’s Commons will be to translate the information on ecological limits developed in the Global Reserve into measures necessary to manage the global commons in a manner that respects the flourishing of life’s commonwealth. Peter Barnes examined the concept of Commons Trusts in his book Who Owns the Sky? and has extended the usefulness of the idea of trusteeship in his Capitalism 3.0.²¹ He argues in favor of setting up what he calls a “sky trust” in the United States as a way to respond to the burgeoning climate crisis. The function of the trust would be to protect and maintain the common resource of the sky, so that it continues to function to the benefit of all life. The trust would use mechanisms such as cap and trade, which would involve setting a regulatory cap on the total amount of pollution that can be emitted into the sky, conducting an auction among polluters to initially assign and control emission rights, and then allowing polluters to buy and sell emission rights according to market prices. The cap would decline rapidly and predictably, consistent with prevailing independent scientific information on the degree of emissions reduction needed to avoid ecological catastrophe.

Each person is legally defined as a co-owner of this common property resource—the atmosphere. Each person, corporation, or other entity who wishes to use this resource to dispose of waste has to pay rent to the owners. Anyone emitting carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases to the atmosphere would have to buy a permit, with the price based on the number of tons released. Trading of permits would be allowed in a regulated market. The money would be paid into a fund administered by trustees who would be independent of corporations or government, which Barnes regards as too prone to short-term interests to take the necessary long-term view. Indeed, the independence of the trustees is essential.²² The sky trustees would invest the money or distribute it in accordance with a formula. One possibility would be a payment to all citizens, though at first the proceeds would be better used to subsidize technologies and programs geared toward reducing greenhouse gas emissions, adapting to climate change, or mitigating other environmental problems. The main function of the trust would be to preserve the resource, rather than solve poverty or distributional issues.

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Trusts like this make sense for global commons at the international level as well. There could be a single global trust or a set of them, or perhaps a series of national trusts each operating within a national cap, or a mixed system of trusts and other mechanisms. If an emission quota is allocated equally to all persons on the earth, then the “sky trust” could initially serve as one, but by no means the only, major engine of redistribution in favor of the world’s poor. Current per capita use by the rich is far beyond any quota sufficient to avert disaster. So the trust or trusts can serve as their agent and buy their quota annually, directly or indirectly, from the poor. As the global emissions quota is lowered, the prices of permits would rise—thus encouraging the rich to reduce their use, while moving toward climate stability and poverty reduction at the same time.²³ For reasons given below, however, in the long run, proceeds from trustee activities should likely go into general revenues.

Notably, the use of cap and trade mechanisms in connection with trusteeships can be made consistent with the principle of subsidiarity, or keeping governance at the most local level possible. Cap and trade mechanisms establish an overall limit, but allow the market and other factors to determine how emissions shares, or whatever other share is being capped and traded, are distributed. Establishing a defensible cap through honest scientific inquiry ensures that freedom of economic choice does not lead to overconsumption that is unfair to other members of life’s commonwealth.

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The trusts would operate on behalf of the entire commonwealth of all life. The earth’s commons are the property not only of all persons, but also of all living beings present and future. So, much of the proceeds belong to nonhuman species and systems. Trusts could restore land degraded by strip mining, reclaim wetlands, implement recovery plans for species threatened with extinction, replant forests, invest in “green” chemistry to reduce the flow of toxins into the environment, and retard desertification. There is no shortage of opportunities for trustee governance to help societies the world over to live more responsively and respectfully in securing life’s prospects.

The atmosphere’s ability to store limited amounts of carbon is not the only commons. There are radio and other electronic frequencies, the oceans, biodiversity, scientific knowledge, the earth’s fresh water, and many more. A catchall trusteeship might even be established around the concept of the ecological footprint, in which a cap and trade system for asserting an ecological footprint would be administered through a trusteeship. This means that the revenue sources available to trusteeships would be multiple and could be used to support, in significant measure, the other elements of global governance.

The Global Federation

The Global Reserve and the Trusteeships for Life’s Commons described above will need a formal framework that incorporates them into the international community. The Global Federation provides this link. The primary missions of the proposed Global Federation would be to maintain global security and to protect and enhance human and nonhuman rights—which would be understood in the context of all peoples’ responsibilities to their fellow humans and to all of life’s commonwealth. The Federation would establish a global constitution establishing the charters for itself and the other global institutions, built around the core principle of right relationship.

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The Global Federation would have legislative and executive functions. It would attempt to facilitate the ability to sustain cultural values and norms and protect local ecosystems that give life meaning in particular places and ways. Such values have long defined human societies’ varied expressions of themselves. Despite the need for world government, the Federation could not function in a purely top-down manner. A democratically based Parliament would have to establish an executive government accountable to all the people who participate and support it. This government would have to be clearly accountable to the Parliament and responsible for carrying out its democratically determined wishes.

Structure of the Global Federation

Political scientists have made a number of proposals and discussions about how to fix the current global governance system. Richard Falk and Andrew Strauss have proposed a popularly elected Global People’s Assembly.²⁴ George Monbiot developed the idea of a global parliament in The Age of Consent.²⁵ Another model is global federalism as proposed by Myron Frankman in World Democratic Federalism: Peace and Justice Indivisible.²⁶

The Federalism model is already being adopted in Europe— albeit with considerable controversy, some of it over the dominance of business interests over social and environmental ones.²⁷ In the European model, existing nations become similar to European nations in Europe or to states or provinces in the American, Australian, Canadian, Mexican, and other federal systems. Some of the functions of current nation states would be “bumped up” to the level of the world federation. These include obligations of military security among the several states, as well as the creation of institutions to manage the global commons according to a set of common principles. In general, however, the government functions should be as close to the local as possible, so as to recognize and help preserve the diversity of the world’s cultures, while the global character of the federation would further stimulate the global culture already well under way. People could then become citizens of both local communities and the earth at large.

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Whatever the form of global federation, it will need a parliament or other governing body. The British Parliament is an example of a unitary authority,²⁸ where all government agencies are the responsibility of one central authority. The system in the United States is an example of shared responsibility between a legislative branch, which writes the laws, and a separately elected executive branch, which implements and (together with the judicial branch) enforces them.²⁹ Parliaments can be made up entirely of directly elected members, as in Britain, or a mix of directly elected members plus representatives from another directly elected body, as in Switzerland.³⁰ Governments can be composed and led in different ways, such as by a president or a prime minister.

The current European Union has legislative authority divided between an elected Parliament and a Council composed of ministers from each of the nations. The executive branch is the Commission, headed by one commissioner from each of the 27 nations making up the European Union. The model favored here would take the current European model as a starting point, but would ensure that only directly elected members are responsible for governance so that they could remain accountable to local constituencies.

There is a considerable danger that a Global Federation would be captured by the “empire of the day,” just as the GATT (subsequently the World Trade Organization), the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund were subordinated to the United States following World War II. In the design of a global parliament and government, great care must be taken to avoid having them become subordinate to particular nations or interests. One possible approach is to adopt strong charters or constitutions that establish clear, enforceable core principles that strictly limit the channels through which money can corrupt effective governance.

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To oppose a Global Federation because it sounds like Orwell’s “Big Brother”³¹ is to allow actual control of the planet to remain in the hands of the current de facto Big Brother of unelected, unaccountable commercial leaders and entities that recognize no responsibility for the public good. Governance must be exercised at a global level for global issues, but must have local grounding to ensure relevance and accountability. In this regard, the principles for good governance listed earlier bear repeating in relation to this proposed Global Federation.

Subsidiarity means getting the balance right between global, national, and local levels. The purpose of establishing a global economic governance system is to control those aspects of the global economy that require minimal global standards to ensure fairness and adequate ecological safeguards. Indeed, this approach will help remove what is currently a perverse form of subsidiarity: the growing tendency of national or subnational governments to base local decisions on a perceived need to remain competitive internationally, in subservience to a trade and finance regime in which capital tends to seek the lowest level of labor, environmental, and other types of regulation.

Accountability and transparency can be ensured through a mixture of measures, including fair election of parliamentary members, public accessibility to knowledge of the activities of the organization (such as financial and other reports), freedom-of-information legislation, and regular auditing by different independent auditors. A number of countries use the office of an ombudsman or auditor general to assist with accountability and accessibility. Critical to transparency is the assurance that reviews and inspections are not compromised or deleted if responsibilities are contracted out or assigned to subsidiaries.

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The ability of an organization to be in control of its revenue or income would be critical to its independence. The example of Stiftung Warentest given earlier, though small and local, is useful. It was initially founded with government funding, but quickly became independent of both government and business (which was never allowed any financial role) through the publication of its consumer guides and magazines. In short, the social community it serves also supports it financially, which is the best and safest arrangement for the economic independence of these institutions.

A Regulatory Role for the Global Federation

“The Tragedy of the Commons,” a term coined by Garrett Hardin in a famous essay in 1968,³² contends that without effective controls, people will overuse and destroy any public commons, such as the atmosphere or the oceans. The tragedy of the commons postulates that reliance on individual action to prevent overconsumption or to promote conservation at a sufficient level is almost certainly doomed to fail. Individual assessment of how much of a resource can be used generally does not account for ecological limits, which need to be defined at a collective scale. The proposal to address the tragedy of the commons through privatization has been controversial³³ and has often actually added to the problem of commons degradation. The other main alternative is public regulation, which can be applied with fewer concerns over how to fairly distribute property rights to use common resources.

A regulatory system requires several key elements, including a means for establishing regulatory limits that are deemed fair and effective, a feedback process for monitoring and continual adjustment of regulatory limits, a system for using incentives where regulations may stifle innovations that would yield better results, as well as means for ensuring that regulatory limits are adhered to—in other words, enforcement. To ensure fairness and effectiveness, those entrusted with establishing regulatory limits must be unbiased, uncaptured by regulated interests, and also highly qualified. They must have the tools to develop and access the best, most comprehensive information, yet also have a broad degree of acceptance by the public they serve. Although this is extremely challenging, there are models to work from: judicial systems, “blue ribbon” panels, supreme audit institutions, and existing ecological management institutions, among many others. The Adirondack Park Agency in New York State already exhibits most of these attributes, and has been so effective in its difficult job that the “Adirondack Park Model” for habitat preservation has been adopted, with similar success, in many other parts of the world, including India and the coast of British Columbia.³⁴ The Global Reserve and Trusteeships should be endowed with these attributes and enlisted to support the regulatory role.

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Decisions to regulate must be made rigorously, with humility and seriousness. The starting point must be the accumulated evidence and knowledge on the limits of the earth and its ecosystems to withstand the impacts of economic activity. As well, the approach must acknowledge that in many cases nothing short of regulatory limits shored up with an effective enforcement regime, with adequate compliance inspections and fines that deter violations, will produce the behavior changes needed to avoid ecological decline or collapse.

Regulatory authority should also be exercised in conjunction with the precautionary principle. The precautionary principle, remember, says that if the consequences of an action are unknown, but are judged to have some potential for major or irreversible negative consequences, then it is better to avoid that action, pending additional research. Precaution implies a strong measure of careful deliberation and highlights the need for high-quality, objective, and comprehensive information on the impacts of human action on the environment, broadly defined. Yet the principle has not been widely adopted because governments have not consistently applied it with a desired systemic end state in mind. Without a desired end state, governments applying the precautionary principle have trouble saying what we, their citizens, should be cautious about. The concept of right relationship and the integrity, resilience, and beauty of the commonwealth of life provides grounding for the precautionary principle.

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The most difficult challenge in establishing a regulatory system will be extending it into areas where individual choice is considered sacrosanct in many societies. While many laws that limit individual freedom are readily accepted (for example, laws criminalizing murder or requiring one to stop at red lights), this authority will surely have to expand into new and challenging areas if human society is to work toward living within ecological limits. Laws regulating the number of children people can have, for example, would likely face serious resistance. Yet that kind of regulatory limit cannot responsibly be kept off the table if the only way to stay within the earth’s ecological limits is to reduce population, and nonregulatory efforts or incentives are simply not working.

Consider a set of grandparents who have produced five humans two generations downstream: their grandchildren. Now compare them with another set that has produced over forty grandchildren. These different levels of procreation have significantly different costs for the earth’s shared ecological heritage. Even if the set of forty grandchildren uses energy more efficiently in their lifetimes, the second set of grandparents has produced, two generations later, a greatly multiplied ecological—and carbon—footprint. If those grandchildren live in a developed country like Canada or the United States, the multiplier is even greater. If, on average, women of reproductive age had only one child, the human population would go back down to slightly more than 1 billion within only one hundred years³⁵—a number equal to the population in 1804, and one that would be much more manageable for the biosphere.

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The Role of the Global Federation in Setting Quotas for Member States

As the I=f(PATE) or similar framework is used to systematically analyze and define goals for reducing the human ecological impact, the rough shape of policy and practice options for a whole earth economy will come into view. Overall planetary goals, subject to frequent adjustment as new information becomes available and new technologies emerge, will have to be set. Nations within the Global Federation will have choices about the weight assigned to the four variables, so long as the total human impact (I) globally remains within their share of the earth’s ecological limits. A nation that chooses to permit a large population may have to agree to a lower level of wealth, different technologies, or different practices, and conversely. An individual nation can use taxes or other environmental pricing mechanisms to create incentives for behavioral change with respect to the desired outcome. Tax incentives can be offered for certain technical innovations (T), for fewer children (P), for use of public transit and the like (E), and for public service jobs that pay less but provide fulfillment (A). There is nothing new, revolutionary, or threatening in these ideas. The Global Federation can do the same thing. It can tax individuals directly to alter one of the variables or a component thereof. Or, it can tax nations to ensure compliance, or offer grants to provide incentives. A wide portfolio of real possibilities can be imagined.

Taxing Authority of the Global Federation

Within the quotas set by the Global Reserve, human society will continue to use the earth and the life on it. Within those quotas, uses of the commons, such as the oceans, the air and atmosphere, fresh water, the products of photosynthesis, topsoil, thermal vents, and the like, should also be subject to taxes. The Trusteeships of Earth’s Commons will be responsible for preventing confiscation and abuse of the commons by the wealthy and powerful, as has been the norm in much of history. In addition, the Global Federation should retain authority to tax these uses and, everything else being equal, to use the revenues to support those institutions that guide the running of the “earth household.” Using the taxes for general revenues is likely preferable to having them earmarked for specific purposes no matter how worthy, as earmarking can create incentives to exploit rather than to conserve. The Alaska Permanent Fund, which distributes oil revenues to that state’s citizens, for example, creates incentives for exploration and consumption rather than conservation. This in turn creates political pressure to maximize oil development. One way to help ensure the trustees’ independence is not to let these incentives arise to begin with.

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The Global Federation and the subsidiary governments should impose severance taxes on extractions from the earth’s crust (the lithosphere), such as oil, coal, gas, mineral, and metal deposits. Some extractions should be discouraged or eliminated. For example, gold mining is often extremely damaging to the biosphere and often to miners themselves, yet is hardly essential because most of it is used for jewelry or for sale as hedges against currency instability. Limiting the use of gold for jewelry to gold already extracted is a small sacrifice that would benefit life’s commonwealth. The main attraction of gold as a hedge is its scarcity value—a commodity that cannot easily be created. Its use for this purpose can be rendered unnecessary by the creation of an artificial scarcity, such as in ecors, or in limited coins or artifacts. The Global Federation could wield its taxing authority to work toward eliminating or finding substitutes for metal compounds that are persistent and harmful in the biosphere.

Global taxation is also warranted on income of individuals and corporations, with the goal of reducing or eliminating tax havens— jurisdictions that levy little or no tax and serve only for wealth building. An international alternative minimum tax should be established so that no one can escape paying a fair share to support the global commonwealth of life.

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A Global Court

A whole earth economy should be based on the informed, scientifically based rule of law. The “rule of law” means that global regulatory limits required to meet ecological limits and ensure fair sharing of the earth’s bounty must be respected. Resistance to these limits because of ideals of national sovereignty and the desire of certain countries to dominate the economy needs to fall away. In a successful system of governance, regulation can play a determinative role—as has happened, by and large, with environmental laws in the United States, incomplete though they are. And while existing international judicial bodies tasked with enforcing this global justice are weak, they are in a process of evolution that serves as a useful template for the future.

The World Court (also called the International Court of Justice, or ICJ) located in The Hague, Netherlands, was established in 1946 under the auspices of the United Nations to replace the Permanent Court of International Justice, which functioned under the League of Nations. In 2002 the International Criminal Court (ICC) was formed as a permanent body to hear cases involving crimes against humanity, war crimes, and genocide.

Two revisions to these courts are needed. First, the international community should expand the courts’ powers to recognize as prosecutable those civil and criminal offenses that are “harmful to natural systems,” such as illegal actions that threaten species with extinction, or excessive emissions of gases that contribute to global warming. The existing ICC could offer a better venue for these issues at present, as long as its jurisdiction were expanded. In the World Court, jurisdiction over a case occurs only if the nations involved agree to its being heard, and nongovernmental organizations and individuals have no standing, either as plaintiffs or as friends of the court. The World Court also lacks robust enforcement mechanisms. While the UN Charter requires that all states abide by this court’s findings, cases where nations do not comply are merely referred to the Security Council where its members (the United States, China, Britain, France, and Russia) can exercise their veto. Accordingly, it is ineffective in controlling some of the worst of the current economic rogue states.

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The ICC has jurisdiction strictly over nations that are members. Since China, India, and the United States currently do not plan to become members, this is a significant shortcoming in the operation of the court. Yet, as global government is established to preserve and enhance the commonwealth of life, the ICC or something like it could evolve into the court of reference for global governance: a Global Court. All nations that make up the Federation would be subordinate to it for matters set forth in a Global Federal constitution, just as Europe has developed enforceable rules that limit individual nations’ sovereignty in numerous areas. The Global Court would also have jurisdiction over disputes concerning Trusteeships of Earth’s Commons—such as the nature and issuance of extraction and “tipping” permits, the sharing of profits, and so on. It would also review the operations of the Global Reserve and treaties between or among member nations in areas relevant to global jurisdiction. Compliance with the court’s decisions could be enforced by denying nations the rights to use the universal currency or the right to trade. Rogue states could be punished by losing their citizens’ shares from the global trust fund and by other measures similar to today’s economic sanctions used to encourage international cooperation. To have a chance of working in a timely manner, the Global Court would need to have a hierarchy with a presence at various levels, such as regional and national. At the same time, national and subnational jurisdictions would retain the right to embody independent judicial systems to govern matters where global rules would not be applicable, such as education, public safety, culture, and so forth. As in provincial and state courts under current federal systems, this would allow the emergence of jurisprudence specific to less-than-global circumstances.

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Toward Global Governance for All of Life’s Commonwealth

The current de facto system of global governance, with its laissez-faire underpinnings, is following a trajectory that provides much more to fear than new and more rigorous global governance functions or institutions with effective regulatory authority, which at the same time provide the minimum level of jurisdiction and authority needed to ensure an economy in right relationship with life’s commonwealth. Considerable capability already exists in the world for monitoring and projecting trends and for identifying causal relationships with regard to global warming, loss of biodiversity, chronic air and water pollution, and other elements of the current crisis. The need is to integrate these separate capabilities and to give them a new focus: reining in economic development so that it no longer pushes past the ecological limits of the earth.

A Global Reserve, Trusteeships for Global Commons, a Global Federation, and a Global Court provide ways to envision an effective system for fulfilling the functions now missing at the global level. If other governance options would better achieve the same objectives, not only are they welcome—they are urgently needed.