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Conclusion
Four Steps to a Whole Earth Economy

IN 1968, ANTHROPOLOGIST GREGORY BATESON organized a week-long conference in Austria on the Effects of Conscious Purpose on Human Adaptation, under the auspices of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. He assembled world leaders in the science and humanities, such as biologist Barry Commoner, to spend this time in reflection and dialogue. He asked them to consider the question “whether human consciousness perhaps especially as it is shaped in modern western culture, ‘might contain systematic distortions of view which, when implemented by modern technology, become destructive of the balances between individual man, human society, and the ecosystem of the planet.’”¹

In other words, can conscious purpose affect the course of human adaptation—or, more darkly, is consciousness, especially that of Western culture, tragically, perhaps fatally, distorted? The significance of the conference lay in the fact that this question would even be asked at the time, and that some of the world’s top thinkers would spend a week struggling with it. Forty years ago, the crisis of a mismatch between natural processes and human mental capacities was already looming large on the horizon of the earth’s future.

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Today the question is far more urgent. The irrational pursuit of economic growth despite growing ecological strain is a clear sign of a distorted consciousness, yet right relationship offers the hope for a more optimistic prognosis than a “fatal” one. The human prospect is fully immersed in an ecological crisis, and our options are narrowing into a range of high-risk scenarios. In simplified terms, this collective crisis presents the people of the world and their decision makers with two choices. The first choice is to allow the ecological crisis to develop until it becomes so obvious that the world’s citizens and their leaders will be compelled to react. The second is to act now on the mounting evidence of coming catastrophes, by planning and implementing our way to a whole earth economy. How can we work to increase the chance that the second option is the one we choose?

The people of the world can bring about a right relationship between the human economy and the earth’s commonwealth of life if we come together and take four steps:

• Grounding and clarification: All societies around the world need to develop a sense of awe for the cosmos and the earth, as well as an ethic based on deep respect for the integrity, resilience, and beauty of life’s commonwealth. The principle of right relationship is a basis for this grounding and clarification.
• Design: Societies also must make it an urgent priority to develop institutional changes and processes necessary to enhance and preserve the integrity, resilience, and beauty of the commonwealth of life, with the benefit of history but thoroughly and thoughtfully adapted to the present. Models, pilot schemes, and broad-based plans must be rapidly developed so they will be ready to implement as the demand for change intensifies.
• Witness: Everyone who wants a future for an earth that supports life’s commonwealth needs to commit to individual and collective changes that will lead to right relationship.
• Nonviolent reform: Quaker history contains many examples of nonviolent reform leading to right relationship, but the template for abolishing slavery is the most well known. This model and others can serve as the basis for building a whole earth economy in right relationship with life’s commonwealth.

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To imagine how all the people on the earth might possibly come together to take these steps, consider the usual way a new computer system is introduced into an organization. The new system is developed alongside the old one until the new system is advanced and bug-free enough to be brought in to replace the old. In the same way, work should start now to conceptualize, design, and set up new or reformed global institutions that can enhance the global common good so the world community can bring them into operation when opportunity arises.

This cannot be a plan only for experts and policy makers. People from all levels of society must be involved. Grounding and clarification about the need to cherish and protect the commonwealth will take hold through experiencing nature and after earnest conversations among people who care for each other, and not merely discussions in environmental or governance think tanks. Designing a rational new approach to economics will only work if people with diverse life experiences participate in dialogue about what they aspire to in their daily lives in a whole earth economy. People must bear witness, when working, playing, transacting, and relating to each other every day, so that these discussions will turn from talk into the walk of right relationship. To work, nonviolent reform must be a vast project of the world citizenry.

Social change of the magnitude that is now required has sometimes been evolutionary and sometimes triggered by great upheavals such as wars or economic depressions. Unfortunately, history also offers horrendous examples where change did not happen in time. Scenarios that predict massive social disorder and ecological ruin because of the way the world economy is run have gained enough credence already to begin to galvanize a movement for global environmental governance for the common good. But there is not much time left to do so.

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Grounding and Clarification: A Spiritual Basis for Action

Deep apprehension about the convergence of ecological, economic, and social crises is widespread. Global recognition of these crises is reflected in the commitment to sustainable development made in the 1972 Stockholm and the 1992 Rio declarations, as well as in the 2000 Earth Charter (more on that later), as yet words awaiting meaningful action. Many cultural analysts, social thinkers, and religious leaders see a profound spiritual crisis at the heart of this situation. This crisis is about human identity within the unfurling creativity of the cosmos and how it plays out on the earth.

The solution to this crisis is grounded in right relationship and a deep respect for the integrity, resilience, and beauty of human and natural communities. Essential to this is a shift from an egocentric—“I,” “me,” “mine”—values perspective, to one of collaborative engagement in pursuit of the common good. The combined moral power of the human community must provide the baseline orientation for the changes in global governance that were proposed in Chapter 5. Grounding and clarification on what all people should see as a common purpose has already begun, with what Paul Hawken calls “the greatest movement in the world.”² Even those who think that humans are all that matters from a moral point of view and see no reason to be passionate about the well-being of the rest of the commonwealth of life should care about their own children’s and grandchildren’s ecological and economic survival. Human societies are embedded in the environment and depend on it. Surely, we can all pull together—if only for the benefit of our own future generations.

Design: An Informed Plan for the Future

As Gregory Bateson suggests, with some significant exceptions, Western civilization has not managed to clearly present the factors that have led to the ecological overshoot of modern civilization in a way that sheds light on how humanity can survive the current environmental crisis. Hence, the design phase that will lead the planet toward a whole earth economy requires a broad review of human historical experience, along with sober reflection on the best scientific information on life’s prospect under various scenarios. These steps will help us find ways to develop institutional arrangements that will drive the economy toward right relationship.

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Lessons from History and Modeling the Future

Over the past several decades, researchers from a number of fields have started piecing together a new kind of history—the history of the global ecosystem and of human adaptation to the earth’s environments.³ Environmental history makes it possible to develop models of trends and map out scenarios of future changes. As ecosystem historians and modelers have gathered information, their models and scenarios have become increasingly credible. Nonetheless, working from the earth’s history to envision the future has limitations, and in fact a disturbing trend is becoming apparent: Future forecasts have often turned out to be far too rosy.

Several significant environmental changes foreseen through modeling and scenario building are happening much faster than expected. For example, in 2001, the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicted significant melting of the Arctic ice cap by 2100, but by 2007 scientists were predicting that greenhouses gases now present in the atmosphere will decrease the polar ice cap by some 40 percent by the year 2050, and already that estimate seems too optimistic.⁴

The evolutionary biologist and bio-geographer Jared Diamond has helped to pioneer a method of analyzing how past civilizations did or did not avert ecological catastrophe.⁵ His work is useful for trying to avoid future failures and drawing hope from the successes. He identifies four categories of failure: (1) failure to anticipate, (2) failure to recognize, (3) failure to attempt to solve, and (4) attempts that failed.

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Failure to anticipate deals with cases where societies deliberately changed the environment, with unforeseen harmful effects. For example, Australian settlers who introduced foxes and rabbits into Australia in the 1800s did not appreciate the damage they eventually would do to the native ecology.⁶

Failure to recognize occurs when societies do not realize that they have caused adverse effects. Examples are soil degradation in Australia, in southeast Polynesia, and in most of the western United States. Failure of this kind includes changes that were not readily visible and that happened gradually.

An example of the failure to attempt to solve known or anticipated problems is acid mine drainage from mining operations in Montana, especially before 1971 when there was no law requiring companies to clean up mining sites. This category contains instances of powerful elites that charged ahead despite the harm they were causing to the common good. Canada’s rampant and globally irresponsible development of its oil-rich tar sands is a tragic contemporary example.

Failed attempts to address problems are what happens when, for example, perverse subsidies in fisheries and agriculture both hasten and intensify ecological collapse, which ends up hurting the fishers and farmers the subsidies were supposed to benefit.

Diamond also describes leaders and societies that have avoided ecological catastrophes. The Tokugawa shoguns in the 1600s recognized that Japan’s timber consumption was increasing through the building of houses and ships and the use of wood fuel for cooking and industry. In that case, the shoguns met the challenge of deforestation by controlling supply and demand. When Joaquín Balaguer came to office for the second time as president of the Dominican Republic in 1966, he recognized the need for maintaining forested watersheds for energy and water requirements. He took drastic action against rich and powerful families, and even used the army to close down illegal logging and expel squatters. In 1994, for example, the army drove bulldozers through luxury houses built within Juan B. Pérez National Park.

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More recently, the Chinese instituted mandatory population control measures that decreased the rate of growth to 1.3 percent per year by 2001, though the ultimate success of this controversial measure is still not known.⁷ These examples may provide some hope as we turn to solutions to the momentous ecological crises we now face.

The Dahlem Konferenzen, or Dahlem Workshops, have included admirable attempts to promote the science that will be needed for such solutions. Initiated in Berlin in 1974 in response to increasing specialization in science, the Dahlem Workshops are designed to promote the interdisciplinary exchange of ideas among scientists. Each workshop is a multidisciplinary conference that brings together about 40 leading researchers in life, earth, social, and cultural sciences to promote joint scientific inquiry in areas of international interest bedeviled by significant knowledge gaps.⁸ Two recent Dahlem Workshop reports, Earth System Analysis for Sustainability (2003) and Sustainability or Collapse? An Integrated History and Future of People on Earth (2005),⁹ show how history can be used to develop global templates for reaching desirable outcomes and avoiding undesirable ones. These workshops integrate earth-science research, social and economic analysis, studies of mental and cultural development, and geographic and ecosystem studies to give a better understanding of how the human economy can improve the human prospect—or worsen it.

These two Dahlem Workshop reports provide high-quality, science-based scenarios that describe likely futures for the human– earth relationship, depending on the economic choices that human society makes. They provide a vast amount of accurate information on future trends, even if a measure of uncertainty remains. However, should the dangers emerge in ways different than anticipated (and often they are worse and also more complex than anticipated), it will still have been better to act on the information available than to continue with a business-as-usual scenario that has an even higher likelihood of leading to catastrophe.

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Jared Diamond and others have provided plenty of evidence of what can happen if such information is ignored or cynically downplayed. The Dahlem Workshops, multiplied many times over, are precisely the kind of effort we need to design our way out of our ecological predicament.

Institutional Change: Reacting to Crisis or Managing Evolution

If there is still time to choose between reacting to and averting the worst of the ecological crisis that has already begun, it is running short. When decision makers are in a crisis, they look for alternative models and systems that work. The preferred path is one of taking seriously the mounting evidence of the impending ecological crisis and, before it is too late, designing and implementing the institutional responses necessary to address them. The more that can be done now to design and test models of governance that respond to the global environmental crisis, the more alternatives will be “on the shelf” to guide decisions on how to build a whole earth economy.

Societies have usually undergone whole-scale institutional change gradually, over considerable time, or in periods of major social and political disorder. The European Union, for example, begun in 1952 with the European Coal and Steel Community, has, over the past fifty years, evolved into a powerful, yet adaptive, constitutional structure that integrates the European economy while establishing some mandatory EU-wide environmental and social safety-net norms. International institutions such as the United Nations, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, and the International Labor Organization continue to suffer from political domination by growth-oriented corporations and governments and have strong internal cultures that are resistant to change.

True, these international organizations do have agendas and some well-developed programs and expertise for safeguarding the global common good and, in theory, they talk about addressing the long-term consequences of economic growth. In practice, however, their ecological and social goals take a back seat to business interests’ free trade and investment pressures. The hope that current international institutions can evolve in appropriate, timely ways with regard to global environmental governance is therefore highly tenuous. The current ecological crisis requires urgent action.

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Yet climate change, overpopulation, deforestation, resource depletion, and other growing ecological threats present an opportunity, as well as a challenge. Many of these issues have languished on the international agenda for decades, but the climate crisis is bringing new and sustained attention to them. Decision makers and opinion leaders may well be tempted to focus on issues like climate change with a leisurely, business-as-usual approach, but the growing urgency of the ecological threats to human society will make that response less and less acceptable to the world’s citizens. More and more people are realizing that if the crisis runs unchecked, it will likely end what we think of as “modern civilization.”¹⁰ When the world is in crisis and conflict, opportunities arise to fundamentally alter political and economic systems.

The Earth Charter is an example of civil society’s growing impatience with the global political impasse that blocks progress on the as-yet-toothless commitments that the international community has made to maintaining global ecological integrity over a long period. Originally a project of the World Commission on Environment and Development (the Brundtland Commission), in 1994 the Earth Charter became a civil society initiative after a draft UN Earth Charter failed to be adopted at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. The initiative used a consultative process, engaging civil society and academia, and the drafting process drew in more than five thousand comments worldwide. After its formal launch in The Hague, Netherlands, in 2000, the Earth Charter Initiative began an endorsement campaign, through which the Charter has gained the endorsement of some twenty-five hundred organizations and over four hundred towns and cities. As of 2007, the governments of Brazil and Mexico, along with subnational jurisdictions in Australia, Canada, Germany, and elsewhere, made public commitments to promote Earth Charter principles in their domestic and international affairs.¹¹

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Another global effort that holds strong potential to assist in the transition to a whole earth economy is the International Union of Conservation and Nature (IUCN).¹² Established in 1948, the IUCN is a global environmental network with over one thousand government and nongovernment member organizations and more than ten times that number of scientists and environmental professional members, with a presence in some 160 countries. The IUCN mission is “to influence, encourage and assist societies throughout the world to conserve the integrity and diversity of nature and to ensure that any use of natural resources is equitable and ecologically sustainable.”¹³ Engaging existing platforms like the IUCN for merging scientific research with policy dialogue will be essential in building a whole earth economy.

Designing New or Reformed Global Institutions

If current international institutions are not likely to respond to the current ecological crisis without significant reform, is there a way to trigger a shift to effective global environmental governance within the ten-year span that many scientists say we have to take action to prevent global warming’s worst catastrophes?¹⁴ Is it possible to use available or emerging models and suggestions, such as those in the preceding chapter, to develop a critical path? While the movement in the eighteenth century to end the political economy of slavery in Great Britain was successful within a fairly short time, it had the advantage of being a single-issue campaign. In addition, the British Parliament had the power to enforce its decisions on slavery, and because Britain was the sea power of the day, it had the capacity to enforce the decision at the international level.

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The critical changes needed today are far more multidimensional and complex. They involve the establishment of appropriate global decision-making functions before some of the necessary changes can be introduced. Chapter 5 described the kind of global governance that will be needed to provide equitable stewardship governance for the global commons. These proposals are visionary, far reaching, and complex. As with all complex arrangements, the process will require organizing the tasks involved into manageable parts and logical sequences. The following are some of the questions relevant to the establishment of a critical path for establishing new forms of global governance that will be needed in a whole earth economy.

• Has the concept or institution been developed enough that its implementation can be readily comprehended, and has it been provided with sufficient support to become operational?
• Are there pilot schemes or working examples in parts of the world that can be used to show how the application or institution can work and be used?
• Can the concept or institution be developed in one or more countries or regions, so that it can run alongside existing systems until the new system is working well enough to phase out the old one?
• Since some of these proposals will take longer to become operational than others, can they be started earlier?
• Is it possible to identify a critical path for reaching the goals envisioned?

The Global Court A Global Court is relatively easy to envision. As already discussed, the basic template of the existing International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court could be adapted to this expanded use. To some extent, a Global Court will depend on the other proposals, but the first three criteria above pose no serious problems to its setup and functioning.

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The Global Reserve While in theory the federal monetary reserves of many nations provide a starting point, the Global Reserve described in the previous chapter needs more conceptual development. At the moment it lacks pilot schemes or working examples, and it does not have systems running in parallel to existing systems. The UN Environment Programme and other United Nations agencies, the Global Environmental Fund, the IPCC, the World Bank, and other international financial institutions already have much of the expertise and capability to perform functions that would be housed in a Global Reserve or other similar institution. But, as noted in the previous chapter, proposals to reform global institutions intended to protect the environment have failed to tackle the economics of unlimited growth.

So, how could a Global Reserve be developed? Work of the kind that the Global Reserve would have to undertake is already being done, as a few examples show. Previous chapters described the I=f(PATE) framework and how it can provide the basis for the work of a Global Reserve, and many researchers have analyzed how variations of the framework could assist policy development.¹⁵ The ecological footprint developed by William Rees and Mathis Wackernagel in 1996 is widely regarded as one of the best available comprehensive indicators of environmental impact, though it is not without its difficulties.¹⁶ The science of global ecosystem assessment is producing an evolving picture of the human impact in terms of net primary productivity, ecosystem biomass, biodiversity, and other key variables.¹⁷

Also relevant in considering the work of the Global Reserve are case studies of regions and communities that have attained a high level of well-being with a relatively low level of ecological impact. An example is the state of Kerala, India. Although its average income is sixty times less than in the United States, with per capita consumption and ecological footprints typical of the developing world, its quality of life indicators based on education, health care, fertility rates, and the like nevertheless rank quite high on the world scale.¹⁸ Kerala’s success has been attributed to a communal spirit of cooperation, a sense of the earth’s efficiency, reliance on local production, the high status of women, a strong sense of grassroots democracy, and a social agenda aimed at providing for society’s weakest members.¹⁹ Amish communities in the United States, too, are a noteworthy if imperfect example. They have a long tradition of introducing new technologies only after the community’s careful consideration of whether they are truly needed.

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Design of the Global Reserve should begin with comprehensive reviews of these and other analytic techniques, assessments, and case studies, to determine how they can be brought together. Part of this initial process is to examine the many capacities and functions related to this work that already exist in UNEP and other international organizations. It makes sense to see whether and how that work can be integrated and put into a logical framework that fulfills the functions for which the Global Reserve is proposed. The categories of allocation, scale, and distribution must be more fully elaborated to establish a global ecological budget in which allowable impact on the biosphere, not money, is the underlying analytical foundation. Additional conceptual work is also needed with respect to the development of transitional budgets and implementation plans based on the global budgets. This conceptual work needs to be placed at the front of determining the critical path to fulfilling the proposed functions of the Global Reserve.

Global Trusteeships The Trusteeship concept described in the previous chapter fully meets the first criterion of being readily comprehended. The basic purpose of the trusts is to ensure the ecological integrity of global common property resources, while providing a fair allocation and distribution of benefits and burdens among humans and between humans and other species. As with the Global Reserve concept, the capability and expertise to conduct analytical work needed for the trusts’ functions already exists in various organizations, and tapping into what already exists is an important initial step.

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The Trusteeship concept, at present, has no closely relevant working examples at the global level, though the Alaska Permanent Fund that holds a portion of oil revenues in trust for the state’s citizens has many comparable features, as do numerous land trusts around the world. Scores of indigenous reserves and communities around the globe also have set up trust-based management systems that are relevant. One example is the Yakama Nation in eastern Washington State, which manages a 12-million-acre timber and farming resource and distributes the revenues equally. It fully supports all members of its community, while consciously maintaining the beauty, resilience, and integrity of the land for the future.

Will it be possible to achieve coordinated governance of the global commons by persuading all national governments to agree to such trusts? Is it possible, for example, to divide the atmosphere and its use into 192 allocations corresponding to the number of countries in the world?²⁰ Dysfunctional, criminal, and failed states, or states with strong views on proprietary use of a commons resource, may well prevent the trust approach from successfully protecting the commons, just as countries like Norway, Iceland, and especially Japan have found absurd rationales to justify whale hunting, despite decades of international bans.

The experience of Arvid Pardo, a Maltese diplomat, is instructive in this regard. He became the “father” of the Law of the Sea Conference because of the electrifying speech he made in 1967 before the UN General Assembly. He called for international regulations to ensure peace at sea, to prevent further pollution of the oceans, and to protect the entire marine resource. He proposed that the seabed constitutes part of the “common heritage of mankind,” a phrase that appears in Article 136 of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, and asked that some of the sea’s wealth be used to bankroll a fund that would help close the gap between rich and poor nations. He urged the United Nations to create a new kind of international agency, as a trustee for all countries, that would assume jurisdiction over the seabed and supervise how its resources are exploited. He called for the net financial benefits, which he hoped would be considerable, to be used primarily to promote the development of poor countries.

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Despite the long and tireless work of many global-minded people for a Law of the Sea that would work in this way, the final document reserved “Exclusive Economic Zones” for the proprietary interests of national governments. Pardo lamented that the common heritage of mankind had been whittled down to a few fish and a little seaweed. According to Richard Falk, the private sector engineered this result with heavy lobbying, much aided by the neo-liberal politics of the United States and Britain.²¹ A better route for the implementation of Trusteeships at a global level remains to be developed. It is not clear that Trusteeships for global commons can be brought into being independently of a global parliament. If this is the case, the early development of such a parliament is critical.

The Global Federation The concept of global federalism meets the first two criteria of having existing templates and operational support. People already know what a parliament is, as examples abound at a national level. The European Union is relevant in this case, though a bit more complicated. The EU lies somewhere between an international organization and a state.²² It consists largely of a set of intergovernmental and supranational institutions supported by a pact among elites, without deep loyalty, a common identity, or mutual support. In mapping out approaches to this kind of federal structure and process, there is much to be said for keeping the chosen model simple.²³ As the European Union expands, that model is gradually being tested.

Even though global federalism is at least imaginable, it raises many weighty questions. How is the principle of subsidiarity to be understood and practiced within the context of global federalism? What areas of decision making and control are most appropriate, and at what levels of government? How can transparency and accountability be ensured? How can federalism avoid bureaucratic corruption, dominance by larger national countries, and capture by transnational companies and the wealthy elite? How many elected members should there be, and what method should be used to elect them? What will be the rules for decision making? What will happen in nondemocratic countries? How will minorities be protected?

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The experience of the European Union will provide some guidance, yet there is considerable (though not insurmountable) work to be done in making operational the concepts of global federalism. The case of Norway, in relation to the EU, offers an example of the complexities involved. The people of that nation, in a referendum, declined to join the EU because doing so would have required them to lower their standards on social benefits, economic equity, labor rights, and environmental protection. The new global federalism will have to avoid the trap of sinking down to the lowest common denominator, which is the tendency when institutions are expanded to include many members.

If a Global Federation is to be established, the highly unequal sizes of the existing 192 countries require that the basis of global participation be rethought. The unifying idea is the common need of the entire global community to have clear rules on how our global commons is used and shared, and how the global community can share the earth’s limited capacity to use the power of the sun to cyclically renew life. Because the United Nations is the current forum for bringing the nations of the world together on global issues and has expertise and capabilities in many of the areas for which governance reform is needed, reform of the UN and its agencies so as to ensure that this unifying idea takes hold is a possibility to examine and consider. Doing so would entail integrating the relevant functions of existing UN and other international agencies under common direction and oversight. Most important of all, effective reform would have to come from a new orientation of right relationship that gives respect for life on earth higher priority than short-term profit and continuous growth.

Effective reform must come from a new orientation of right relationship that gives respect for life on earth higher priority than short-term profit and continuous growth.

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In addition to these questions on the nature of global federalism, the matter of independent funding must be considered. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan once observed that “the United Nations is the only fire brigade that must go out and buy a fire engine before it can respond to an emergency.”²⁴ Countries like the United States condition their massive funding of the UN on the adoption of policies or practices they support, which illustrates that the issue of institutional financing is less about money and more about political control.²⁵ For example, local government in Japan has a weak financial base. It is heavily supported and therefore controlled by the central government. If the Global Federation is to be properly equipped to carry out its mission, it will need taxing authority.

Based on this discussion, a summary of a critical path for developing the global institutions needed for a whole earth economy is described in the following table.

Critical Paths for Four Proposed Global Institutions

Proposed Institution	Is the concept ready for implementation?	Do pilot programs or examples exist?	Are regional or national pilots possible?	What time frame is required?
Global Reserve	No	No	Yes	Long
Trusts for Commons	Yes, with adaptations to global level	Yes, at subnational level	Yes	Medium
Global Federation	Yes, with adaptations to global level	Yes, with adaptations to global level	Yes	Long
Global Court	Yes	Yes, but modification to global level needed	Numerous examples exist	Short

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Witness: Toward a Mass Epiphany

As we make the personal choices we must make each day, we face the dilemma of being dependent on a society that causes ecological destruction we abhor. We cannot turn away from the modern world, yet we must curb our demands so that the earth’s resources are sustained. We are called to show, by our daily choices and actions, the way toward a more harmonious, more fulfilling, nondestructive way for humans to live on our planet—the way to harvest the fruit without destroying the tree. We are called to celebrate the beauty, diversity, and complexity of life, and to engage in the difficult but ultimately joyful work of practicing right relationship within the whole commonwealth of life.

But how will the collective action of individuals come together? From where will come guidance on the kind of action needed to build a whole earth economy? The complex interplay between governments, commerce, and civil society, compounded by the limitations of international governance institutions, restricts initiative and hampers rapid decision making. Yet these are the arenas where change ultimately must occur. The initiatives needed are likely to come with the emergence in any or all of these sectors of new champions and leaders willing to break from the binds of conventional thinking and able to inspire a mass epiphany underlying a broad call for a new way.

Within the complicated web of international, national, and local links, and among government, commercial, and civil society sectors, it is impossible to predict just how change will happen. The inspired leadership built on a strong ethic of right relationship, which is necessary to trigger a kind of mass witness to the need for transforming the human–earth relationship, could emerge from government, from business, or even from civil society.

There are change agents as well as status quo supporters in all three sectors. Each category offers examples of success and failure. Wealthy people sometimes do admirable things with their money; some companies are progressive and visionary; some governments have adopted effective programs. In all these sectors, care and concern for the future of human and other life on the planet in the face of climate change and other ecological threats is a growing topic of discussion. Civil society in particular has begun to show unity on global warming and in efforts like the Earth Charter.

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The change will come when a convincing case is made, built on honest information about what is needed for right relationship between human beings and the earth, and what our lives will be like in a whole earth economy. And more and more, the case is being made. For example, in his book Managing Without Growth,²⁶ Peter Victor shows how Canada could retain its high quality of life, reduce poverty, and improve its respect for the earth’s limits in the context of steady-state economics.

Leadership from those in public office is more likely to follow changes in public opinion, rather than begin them. As Henry David Thoreau said: “statesmen and legislators, standing so completely within the institution, never distinctly and nakedly behold it. They speak of moving society, but have no resting place without it.”²⁷ This means that each individual citizen has the biggest role of all in the coming change, whether as a consumer, a voter, or a member. Bearing witness is a matter of moving from conviction to action in a way that strikes a chord of common sense, rings loud and clear, and soon has others joining in the joyful music. Public opinion is the collective wisdom of human society, and history proves that almost any kind of governance, however odd or revolutionary, can control society if it enjoys the support of the majority of its citizenry.

Nonviolent Reform: Working to Build a Whole Earth Economy

History is replete with stories of violent change that destroyed and devastated the material world and shook the human spirit. Violent change is a wrong relationship between humans and each other and between humans and the rest of the world. The path of right relationship must be built on nonviolent reform. One prominent historical example of how nonviolent action led to dramatic change is the campaign over many generations to end legal slavery.²⁸ As noted in the Preface to this book, a group composed mostly of Quakers founded the Society for Effecting the Abolition of Slavery in England in 1787. They recruited Thomas Clarkson to lead them in an organized campaign to ban slavery within the British Empire. As a Cambridge debater, Clarkson was already well versed on the issue. He turned his speeches into a manuscript, which was published by a Quaker bookshop; the work was widely read, and Clarkson became the leading public figure for the network of Quakers and their allies as they began to build the antislavery movement. William Wilberforce, a non-Quaker, became the person associated with abolition because he brought the successful antislavery bill through the British Parliament in 1807. At the time, nonconformists to the Church of England could not serve in Parliament, so Quakers could not be directly involved in legislative action.

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The process the movement adopted was to gather evidence and present it to a British public largely apathetic about the slavery issue. The Society distributed striking posters depicting the diagram of the ship Brookes, showing how slaves were inhumanely shipped like cargo. They distributed pamphlets and organized many hundreds of public meetings, and they also led a boycott of slave-grown sugar. In 1791, a rebellion of slaves on Saint-Domingue led to the establishment of Haiti, the world’s only country composed of freed slaves. The Society’s action made the cost of enforcing slavery enormously higher, a practical factor in the adoption of Wilberforce’s bill. The British government compensated former slave owners.

Many subsequent reformers, such as those who sought to end the death penalty in Great Britain and the United States, used the antislavery campaign as a model.²⁹ Exposing the facts of the slave trade to public awareness was key to a dramatic turnaround in the public’s moral assessment of the issue. According to The Economist, it was the shame and degradation that the slave trade and the slave economy brought to those involved, perpetrators as well as victims, that proved its undoing,³⁰ even as the shame of wearing the skins of endangered animals today has largely ended that practice in public.

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The poster of the slave ship Brookes, graphically displaying the way Africans were being transported, was a prime catalyst in creating the political climate that led to slavery’s banning. Many decades later, footage of a whale being harpooned by Russians helped turn the fledgling organization Greenpeace into an international force. The 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth has played a similar role in the campaign on climate change. A serious grassroots campaign can undoubtedly uncover other images, even in this time of jaded sensibilities, that can lift awareness of the need for true environmental governance.

This is the kind of public outreach and alternative policy work that needs to be done on the global environmental crisis. All people and all communities who understand the crisis of the human–earth relationship need to act urgently. Although humankind is made up of many different cultures and values, the global environmental crisis unites us all. Everyone concerned about the future of spaceship earth needs to join together in a sustained commitment to change the global economic and governance order. The question is straightforward: Will future generations of humans and the rest of life’s commonwealth have hope for life on this planet?

The antislavery model contains a variety of action-oriented steps useful for any movement focused on global, nonviolent reform. They include: evidence gathering, a publicity campaign, boycotting, legislative reform, and outright nonviolent rebellion. Likewise, building a whole earth economy and the global institutions needed to support it can proceed in the following way.

1. Gather evidence and prepare case studies, pilot projects, and plans. Just as informing the British public helped build a mass movement to end slavery, the world’s citizens today need evidence that helps make the case for a whole earth economy. Many groups and institutions have already spent decades systematically gathering an enormous amount of this kind of evidence. The extensive reports of the IPCC on global warming that came out in 2007 and on previous occasions,³¹ UNEP’s Global Environment Outlook (GEO) series of reports on the world environment,³² the annual State of the World report of the Worldwatch Institute,³³ the Dahlem Workshop reports, the World Wildlife Fund’s Living Planet Report on the global ecological footprint,³⁴ as well as George Monbiot’s searching analysis in his book Heat of current technologies that attempt to address global warming—all provide a mere sampling of what is available. The UN agencies, international financial institutions, and other international organizations have entire programs devoted to generating evidence and analysis that can help build a whole earth economy. Because some of this evidence is of higher quality than others, and some is presented in a context that assumes that indiscriminate economic growth must rise no matter what, honest assessment of the available information is essential.

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   The current challenge is to consolidate the highest quality evidence on the ecological threats that arise from our current economy and to present the consequences of endless growth to the public with complete honesty. With this now virtually irrefutable evidence in hand, along with the tools to continually update it, an appropriate organization or partnership of organizations can prepare case studies, pilot schemes, and broad plans for how a whole earth economy would work and how new global governance functions should be developed and organized. This work will require people capable of understanding and then conceptualizing the relationships between the earth and the human economy. A broadly inclusive organization like the IUCN could certainly play a most helpful role, and it is essential that participants include representatives of the UN agencies and other international organizations already working to understand these relationships. The Dahlem Workshops provide one excellent model for bringing together multidisciplinary researchers and specialists. Other workshops can be organized to map out solutions to global-scale problems, with an allocation of tasks among teams. The Pugwash Conferences³⁵ that lay the groundwork for a moral response by scientists on global peace, and the annual conferences of the Global Ecological Integrity Group³⁶ are other examples.

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   Platforms or models like these are well-suited to assembling working teams to draft methodologies for test cases and pilot projects and to seek out countries and subnational regions that might participate in governance pilot projects and models. From analysis of case studies and pilot projects, plans for global institutions such as the Trusteeships, Global Federation, Global Reserve, and Global Court suggested in this book can be developed, taking into account how they will work together. The principles set out in the Earth Charter, which resulted from a broad, participatory global process over several years, provide an exemplary foundation for harnessing high-quality, honest scientific research to governance structures.

   The work at this stage must be undertaken with the recognition that any plans that develop will require ongoing evolution as public outreach is undertaken; wise leaders will seek to engage the public, not dictate to it, to gather support. Although many scholars and researchers are giving thought to global environmental issues, their ideas need to expand out from academic and professional audiences and move into more popular, multidisciplinary forums. Full consideration must also be given to the intercultural factors involved in making a global governance strategy democratically viable in various spheres worldwide. Cultures that are usually marginalized—traditional and native groups, or isolated minorities like the Bedouin in Israel, or the many culturally splintered groups of the Balkans or of western China—must be sought out to become active participants, particularly when it comes to thinking through plans for a global parliament and Global Trusteeships.

2. Publicize, educate, and involve. The next stage is to promulgate the case for a whole earth economy, including the need for major reform of global governance through developing new or reformed global institutions. Because the global community must eventually come on board, this outreach needs to use as many forms of communication and language as possible. Material needs to be available for highly educated and scientific people, as well as for ordinary citizens of all ages. The effort to publicize, educate, and involve must reach educational institutions as well as media and communications institutions around the globe, perhaps through a network of like-minded organizations that see the need for a whole earth economy. Papers, pamphlets, videos, and Internet-based media will need to be developed for widespread use at conferences, workshops, seminars (conventional and Web-based “webinars”), and study groups.

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   The task and challenge at this stage is enormous and will require a groundswell of energy, enthusiasm, and conviction of the need to turn away from disaster and toward a whole earth economy. Humans have been able to find this energy before, often for war and conquest but also for cultural and spiritual goals, like the cathedrals of medieval Europe or the push to land on the moon. The goal is to trigger mass appeal for the urgent need to act, so that the demand for change will swell to an overwhelming consensus for a new way forward.

3. Withdraw from the present system and highlight its illegitimacy. Nonviolent protest is an exceedingly powerful tool. The boycott of sugar by antislavery campaigners is an example of withdrawal or nonparticipation in the old system. The boycott financially penalized the slaveholders and traders, communicating to the general citizenry the linkage between slavery and their everyday life. Refusing to support the products of slave labor was a way to take morally clear action against slavery. Mohandas Gandhi’s salt march against the salt tax in India is another classic example of a well-timed and effective action. It exposed the British system’s inequity and venality, while gathering public support from the many who felt empowered by the movement. In search of a catalyst for change, Gandhi created a crisis when one was needed. Today, we have already created for ourselves the biggest crisis ever faced by humanity.

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   Today, we have created for ourselves the biggest crisis ever faced by humanity.

   Henry David Thoreau’s one-man act of civil disobedience, refusing to pay war tax, was a small gesture with colossal influence. It inspired Gandhi, who along with Thoreau then inspired Martin Luther King Jr. The Rev. King’s nonviolent resistance campaigns for civil rights became a highly effective tool for profound social change. He was followed by Nelson Mandela in South Africa, Lech Walesa in Poland, and Chico Mendes in Brazil. A chain of people from extremely diverse cultures and societies have passed the moral power of nonviolent resistance onward and through its use have managed to achieve remarkably progressive social, political, and economic goals. The beginnings of the withdrawal of support for the corporate food system, in response to the growing ecological crisis, can be seen in “local food” movements, fair-trade campaigns, and the hundreds of primers and classes now available that teach people how to drastically reduce their ecological footprint.³⁷

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   Those in power who benefit from the current economic order and who rely on manipulation, corruption, and intimidation to retain political control will use all their means to repel the growing message that the present order is illegitimate. But the mounting case for action to build a whole earth economy will gradually weaken the defenses of the power elite, just as it has done in the past in the American South, in colonial India, in the former Soviet Union, and even today in China. Creative protests and withdrawals from reckless, incoherent systems are ways of creating legitimacy and moral authority that can draw more and more participants into action for progressive moral change.

These action items to promote nonviolent reform for building a whole earth economy are overlapping and mutually reinforcing. They are not necessarily sequential, and unforeseen tactical opportunities for action will arise. But tactics have more chance of success in the long run when they fit into an overall strategy. As these plans and actions begin to unfold, champions and political leaders will emerge who will generate more momentum and support. These leaders do not even necessarily have to be outside existing political structures or international organizations. There are progressive leaders and governments that will be eager to support such a program and campaign; think of countries like Norway, states like Kerala in India, and cities like Portland, Oregon, or Curitiba, Brazil.

The analogy of introducing a new computer system in parallel with the old one is once again helpful here. The shift works if professionals develop the new system as much as possible in advance. In the case of new forms of global governance, new or reformed institutions should be conceptually designed and promoted to the maximum, even if the opportunity to implement them is not yet in sight. Unforeseen events—knocks to society’s collective head— may suddenly crumble shaky institutions. New openings for new governance models will appear, sometimes suddenly. A bank of well-developed, participatory models and democratic implementation plans ready to go may make the difference between a lurch into social chaos, followed by political authoritarianism, or a transition to cooperative governance for the common good.

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It may seem that countries such as the United States, the European Union, China, Russia, Japan, and India, along with the members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, are the most significant players in the global situation. In one sense this is true; yet other countries and international groups can exercise leverage through moral leadership, economic boycotts, and the capacity to influence public opinion. George Monbiot, for example, asks us to ponder the power that all the nations indebted to the IMF would have if they gathered together and refused—all at once—to pay back their debts.³⁸

Support for change in global governance may come from many sources, which, if well coordinated, can add up to a powerful movement for the common good. Should concerned citizens wait to react to urgent crises, or should they act on the overwhelming evidence that already exists on the need for a whole earth economy? The answer to that question is abundantly clear: Waiting even a day longer simply does not make sense. The only choice we human beings now have, in terms of survival, is to take immediate action to develop a new platform of everything needed for the big shift, so it will be available to our decision makers when either crisis or mass epiphany forces the fundamental reevaluations that will be necessary.

Call to Action

The scientific community’s assessment of global climate change is undeniable: Global warming is happening, and the temperature and sea level are heading rapidly to levels that are harmful to human and other life. Avoiding dangerous increases in temperature is no longer possible. No mitigation effort, regardless how rigorous and relentless, will prevent climate change from happening in the next few decades and centuries. Some form of adaptation is unavoidable. Yet urgent action is needed to prevent a much more catastrophic climate change scenario from overrunning life’s adaptive capacities. Unfortunately, climate change is joined by species loss, the disruption of ecosystems on a global scale, vast regional air pollution, ocean acidification, and equally dire events.

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The five questions that form the core of this book make this situation crystal clear. The predominant economic system used throughout the planet

• Is incapable of providing an adequate answer to the question: what is the economy for?
• Fails to understand how the economy really works
• Is unable to put any boundaries on consumption and waste
• Has no means to even think about fairly distributing both benefits and burdens to present and future generations of people and other species
• Lacks a system of governance that protects life’s commonwealth

This state of affairs is allowed to continue because current international governance systems have not evolved to meet the challenges that face us.

Creating the global governance that this book suggests will require enormous societal resources, widespread individual support and participation, and significant institutional reform. This will necessitate strong public pressure. Countries and institutions do not readily give up sovereignty. The overall challenge is to establish a global economic system that is grounded in science and operates in accord with the way the earth works. Meeting this challenge first of all requires research, monitoring, and analysis of the economy’s impacts on social and ecological systems. Second, effective global responsibility and protection is needed to ensure the health of essential parts of the earth such as its atmosphere, oceans, and forests. Third, an effective system of mandatory rules and policy management needs to be created for the governance of matters that can only be resolved at a global level. And fourth, effective accountability through judicial functions must accompany policy management and governance.

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The problem at present is that existing global institutions and their capabilities are not functioning in a coherent way within a coordinated policy-management system. No strategic framework of action is guiding international, national, and sub-national governance that will ensure the health and well-being of life’s commonwealth. Harmonizing the work of current institutions could lead to a pattern of common services and collective decision making that contributes to the attainment of this overall shared goal. In due course, the result could be the creation of institutions such as those envisioned here. This is the way the EU evolved, and the way that new levels of governance systems often emerge.

While the existing patchwork of global agencies might eventually begin to function in a coordinated and coherent manner, it is far from clear that they can, or will, move in this direction. The international community may need to create dramatic new levels of global dialogue, agreement, and institutional structure in order to reform the functional capacities of current institutions into a cohesive design. While it is not possible to foresee exactly how the institutions of global environmental governance will develop, what is clear are the key functions that must come into play and the mandate that calls the earth’s peoples to a new kind of politics on behalf of the commonwealth of life.

Changes of such magnitude do not happen easily, and sometimes they do not happen at all. A number of human civilizations have ceased because they did not adapt in time, and destroyed their environment. Radical changes have occurred in times of political, economic, and social crises, often during or at the end of wars. Some have occurred slowly over decades or centuries. Humankind currently does not have that luxury of slow adaptation.

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Do we have to wait for the earth’s decline to reach such a crisis point that it can no longer support significant numbers of people and species, before we unite with our fellow human beings to bring about the necessary economic and governance changes? If we do wait, widespread environmental degradation and escalating violent conflict over energy, water, wood, and food are inevitable, with even larger and more tragic population movements than the planet is already enduring. Many people will die, and many will endure lives of great misery.

Urgent action is needed now to avoid reacting to crises of this magnitude. The task for people who are concerned for human survival and the welfare of the commonwealth of life is to help bring awareness of the connections between the looming ecological threats and the political and governance changes needed to avoid them, and to join together to persuade political leaders and parties to act. Protest movements using nonviolent means have yielded enduring results in the past.

Economic and governance changes are necessary for building a whole earth economy, but a more profound new direction is also required. This more fundamental change is a values change. Instead of the anxious, illusory pursuit of more money and possessions, people need to think about pursuing joyful, grateful, and fulfilling lives in right relationship with life’s commonwealth. Values progression of this kind is needed not only at a personal level but also in institutions and enterprises at the community, national, and international level. Many indigenous peoples already have cultural values and belief systems that support right relationships, which rest primarily on respect and gratitude for all that is.

It is sadly ironic that so-called “developed countries” urgently need to learn basic survival skills, including how to enjoy life within the finite reality of this planet’s resource limits, from “undeveloped” peoples to whom Western ideas of advancement have brought so much loss. But taking inspiration from indigenous peoples and others who have learned how to live joyfully in right relationship with the earth is the key to the long-term survival of life as we know it.

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The guidance system of right relationship needs to be reflected in laws, professional rules, organizational charters, policies, codes of conduct, creeds, and religious doctrines. It can arise in cultural customs and through myths, stories, and traditions. For some people, the change will be through a spiritual epiphany, while others will walk different paths. Which path is not important, as long as it leads to the changes needed to build a whole earth economy . . . If we have time.