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What’s Fair?
Sharing Life’s Bounty

IMAGINE A BUSY CITY emergency room, around rush hour, suddenly overwhelmed by the victims of a mass transit accident. People with partially severed limbs, severe head wounds, out-of-control bleeding, and so forth are being rushed into the hospital admitting area on gurneys, their wounds barely being staunched by paramedics and their cries of pain filling the air. Doctors and nurses stand at the ready and begin the procedure of triage, that is, separating patients according to the urgency of their conditions. But instead of rushing the head wounds or internal injury cases into the emergency room, they first allow an older woman with a slight nosebleed into the case room; once she’s dealt with, they lavish attention on a family whose daughter has a bad flu, followed by a man who may have broken his arm earlier in the day. It goes on like this until the outcry from the severely wounded is so disruptive that a few nurses, reluctantly, go over and began to treat some of the sufferers. Many are already dying.

In any emergency room, triage is applied because many people have arrived in need of medical attention, but medical supplies and personnel are in limited supply. Normally, the people in the most dire need of help take priority; the others wait in line. Heart attacks take precedence over bad cuts, and so forth. Triage is designed to save the greatest number of people possible. The way the benefits and burdens of today’s global economy are distributed flips triage on its head—those who need the least get the most. They step to the head of the line, and the people and other species in the most dire need are left to suffer and to die.

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Our current economy is geared to promoting as much short-term wealth and consumption as possible and to making sure that investments (the process of money making more money) increase as rapidly as possible, while minimizing regulation. As a result, the wealth divide between the superrich and the very poor, as well as between the average worker and their own CEO, keeps getting wider. That’s just on the human level. For the commonwealth of life, one species among millions keeps stealing from present and future generations of its own and all other species. Those needing the most urgent help—forest systems, soil biota, gorillas, sharks, or frogs, among innumerable more—become expendable, because they are not even admitted to the emergency room in the first place. In some parts of the world, such as the United States, the idea of distributing the benefits and burdens more equitably is often vilified as unfair to all the people working so hard to become very rich themselves someday. People’s vision of their getting to the head of the triage line outstrips their worrying about the fact, or even acknowledging the fact, that millions of people are living without the most basic levels of security, or about the deteriorating condition of soil, air, or water that affects us all.

Right relationship requires a fair basis for distributing the economy’s benefits and burdens. In the context developed by Albert Schweitzer and Aldo Leopold, detailed in Chapter 2, fairness requires that living beings and living systems receive the means by which they can flourish. The challenge is to ensure fair distribution among all members of life’s commonwealth, while at the same time preserving opportunities for healthy competition and diversity. An economy in right relationship with humanity and the earth’s life systems encloses the spark of competition within the engines of social and ecological cooperation. Different levels of material wealth are possible, indeed inevitable, as citizens of the world pursue various opportunities for living within the earth’s ecological limits. But fresh criteria are needed for distinguishing when these differences are a result of right or wrong relationship.

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Rethinking Human Rights

Happily, the news is not all bad. Following the end of World War II, the idea of human rights gained global ascendancy, and culminated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.¹ The traditional distinctions between persons fade in the face of the evolution of this universal commitment to human rights. Although they were once paramount and still exist, especially on an emotional level, national identity, ethnic identity (“race”), and ancestral heritage are receding as requirements for basic moral entitlements. Today, nearly all nations of the world have begun to accept a universal duty to protect and enhance the basic rights of all other humans. In some regions of the earth—most of the twenty-seven nations in the European Union, for example, with its 500 million citizens— basic human rights are for the most part adequately protected, and the bulk of the population in those places, even the poor, are guaranteed adequate subsistence and health protections.

That other places still suffer a lack of human rights does not diminish people’s increasing desire to act ethically. Global outrage erupts when the United Nations or various powerful countries do not step in to control gross human rights abuses in places like Zimbabwe, Sudan, China, or Burma. The international condemnation of the United States’ overreaction and abuses following the September 11 attacks and in connection with the Iraq War are a typical current reflection of the international recognition of human rights. This ethical progress shows the moral potential of humanity to include all of at least our own species within the umbrella of political and social concern. Yet just as a moral consensus may be emerging, it is essential to acknowledge that the very idea of human rights, and along with it the concept of distributive justice, must be rethought.

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The rights and responsibilities set out in many national constitutions would take on radically different meanings if they were juxtaposed with a photo of the shrinking Arctic ice cap. There, the quick-moving effects of global warming graphically illustrate how political and moral choices as well as behavior interact with the earth’s geophysical limits. At present, the American ideal of individual liberty is being spread around the world. Along with it, tragically, comes the desire for American levels of individual consumption. Combined with the increasing human population, this trend will substantially further destabilize the biosphere, resulting in vast numbers of plant and animal species going extinct, extreme disruption of the nitrogen and other natural cycles, and eventually catastrophic climate change.

The consequences of these changes are already bringing increased coastal flooding to low-lying areas of Asia, killing and driving from their homes people who are already living truly at the margins of survival. This is just the beginning, for the displacement of tens of millions of persons is already certain, given projections of continued global warming and the attendant sea-level rise that is already ensured by current atmospheric concentrations. John Rawls, perhaps the English-speaking world’s leading figure in social and political philosophy in the last century, defines human rights as follows: “Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive total system of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar system of liberty for all.”² Rawls’s precept of respect for others is one of the basic tenets of the whole idea of human rights. The morning traffic jams in Paris, Beijing, New York, and Mexico City are not merely inconveniences to motorists and people living near the highways, they are massive, systematic assaults on rights of other persons, both in those regions and throughout the globe. These unassailable facts have not sufficiently penetrated our society’s collective conscience. Yet once we connect the idea of human rights with the laws of thermodynamics, as discussed in Chapter 2, and recognize that the earth is a spaceship, our understanding of those rights is altered profoundly and irrevocably.

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Fairness to Whom?

Most Western ethical systems, such as those derived from the Judeo-Christian tradition and from ancient Greece, assume that issues of fair distribution concern shares of contested goods and services among persons pursuing a good and virtuous life. Accordingly, these ethical systems are concerned with how much income, wealth, medical care, offices carrying power and prestige, and so on each person is entitled to. The idea that other species could make claims for their fair share finds little, if any, footing in these traditions. Humans now use nearly half of all the ability of land-based plant life on the earth to convert sunlight into food and make it available to the web of life. When we also consider the ability to break down waste, human beings not only are overwhelming the ability of the biosphere to absorb carbon, but are also disrupting the phosphorous and nitrogen budgets and are threatening or destroying life in many aquatic systems.

As mentioned earlier in this book, according to studies that have attempted to assess the overall human ecological impact, such as ecological footprint measures,³ the accelerating human impact is estimated already to be exceeding the capacity of life systems to regenerate. Distribution in a whole earth economy based on right relationship does not consider shares solely among persons. Instead, right relationship requires developing the means for noticing when growth has gone too far—as, for example, when more and more life forms start being extinguished from planet Earth. In a whole earth economy, we humans will no longer ignore the inchoate claims of other species for, literally, their place in the sun, but will recognize that equity among humans, equity between humans and other species, and intergenerational equity are all essential to preserving the resilience, integrity, and beauty of life’s commonwealth.

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What Is Being Distributed?

The basic good for distribution that makes all other goods possible is the ability to harness energy, mostly from sunlight, to create and sustain life. Each share of this good (called net primary productivity, or NPP) is ultimately built on plants’ ability to convert sunlight into molecules that can be broken down by other organisms to support their own ability to create and sustain life. Much of human history can be regarded as a quest for these life-giving molecules—the quest for dominion over forest, field, fisheries, and fossil fuels.⁴ Each share also includes a proportion of the limited capacity of these life-building processes to assimilate all the products of material transformation and then complete (and hence restart) the cycle of consumption and reuse. With human domination of the globe now nearly complete, this process of harvesting the products of sunlight is reaching an endgame. The quest for cheap fuel and other resources that keep the economy’s engines churning is spurring serious conflicts among human societies; and the human economy is demanding more and more shares of plants’ ability to create these molecules.

Money allows humans access to the limited capacity of the earth’s life systems to produce what humans and other members of life’s commonwealth consume, and to assimilate what is left over. Yet monetary systems are tied directly to the predominant world economic order, and therefore fail to recognize ecological limits. We might take a minute to think about money as a license to use up some of the shares of the earth’s limited capacity to create and sustain life. Why should some people have more shares than others? How many shares does it make sense to give someone who has mastered the stock market, or gotten lucky at poker? And why should we humans, as a species, have all the shares, or even as many as we already have? Just as an economy in right relationship with the earth must be seen as embedded in the ecosphere, a new way of accounting is needed that reflects the limited amount of net primary productivity that can be used by humans and other species before exceeding—as we already do—the rate at which regeneration is possible.

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Providing for Present and Future Generations of Life’s Commonwealth

The clear trajectory of mainstream economics is to legitimate and expand the American ethic of distribution—the system of reverse triage that up until now really has not been overwhelmingly accepted on this planet. One reason that Africa is subject to mass famines, for example, is that in cultures on that continent many people will share until there actually is no food left, and then many starve together. In numerous traditional rural societies, there has been much less of the rich strolling past the starving on their way to a fancy restaurant, common in the West. The competitive economic ethic that underlies the world’s major economies and their institutions will further undercut the already precarious existence of hundreds of millions of the world’s most vulnerable people, whose ethics of sharing provides some protection (or used to do so).

This is simply to say that in the current era, our already limited conception of distributive justice is even further eroded as indiscriminate economic growth has become increasingly established as the public religion. Economic theory for about a hundred years has remained largely indifferent to questions about poverty, fair distribution, and justice, assuming that “rational actors” in a market economy, being equipped with perfect knowledge about all the impacts of their economic actions, will automatically make the best choices.⁵ Some economists with strong market-fundamentalist tendencies, together with their political and corporate elite allies, claim that human goals are most reliably expressed through maximizing the market value of production. Prevailing economic theory fails to focus adequately on who bears the costs and reaps the benefits of such maximization, or how it generates poverty in one place even as it promotes excessive material abundance in another. This has further allowed market fundamentalists to promote the idea that maximizing production’s market value is synonymous with maximizing human welfare, something that standard theory does not claim or prove and that daily experience is certainly far from bearing out.

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Not even the planet’s collective future lies beyond the reach of these impoverished doctrines. The blind faith in the market that underlies much of our political and social behavior conveniently undervalues the future in many of its calculations. In virtually all economic accounting systems used today, future events, whether favorable or unfavorable, have less importance than those that occur in the present. Discounting in this manner is full of mischief— mischief, as discussed below, that is perhaps fatal to civilization.

To ensure adequate consideration of future generations, the general practice in cost benefit analysis, which discounts the value of future needs, should be reexamined. Under the current economic system, only current uses and desires are granted full value. For example, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration uses discount rates to determine its projects’ costs and benefits.⁶ To explain how it uses discounting, NOAA gives the example of a salmon habitat restoration project that will produce salmon valued at $10 million in ten years (NOAA calls this the salmon’s “catch value”). Discounted at 3 percent, the present value of the salmon in year ten is about $7.4 million. Discounted at 10 percent, it is about $3.9 million. If the project costs $5 million, using a discount rate and choosing its value is critical, because it can determine whether the project will be built. In this example, using no discount rate means fully valuing now, at $10 million, the salmon that will exist in ten years, thus creating the strongest justification for funding the habitat restoration project.

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Discounting virtually ensures that current generations will not leave a reserve of nonrenewable resources, or a reserve of the earth’s bioproductive and bioassimilative capacity, for the use of future populations of humans as well as other species. In thinking about issues like averting climate change—where the costs occur in the present, and the benefits in the remote future—the idea of discounting implicitly provides an excuse to do little to protect the well-being of future generations of human and other life.

One justification for discounting the future that mainstream economists make is that a nonrenewable resource in use today will be substituted by “an abundant resource” that will eventually be made accessible after technological advances. If conventional oil runs out, for example, it will be replaced by liquefied coal or “heavy” oil from tar sands. As the price rises, it is assumed that the market will find its way around scarcity. Conveniently ignored are the millions of other species on the earth. Far too often, new technologies designed to provide access to these replacement resources require vast changes to the earth’s surface. Think of coal mining in Appalachia that requires that whole mountaintops be blasted away, or the tar-sands mining that rips up the entire forest and wetland ecosystem and leaves a moonscape. Tearing up the earth is only one extraction method. Other methods are the diversion of already scarce water from use by humans or wildlife—as in vast quantities of the Athabaska River now going into the tar-sands settling ponds; inland water being diverted from the once-vast Aral Sea, in central Asia, to feed short-term industrial agriculture; and the Aswan Dam undercutting the Nile Valley’s soil fertility. Add to this the emission of gases from vehicles and machines worldwide, causing acid rain and global warming, which accompanies any sort of building, extraction, or industrial intervention. Finally, the new, supposedly greener technologies simply might not materialize. Substitution and technical innovation should be encouraged when practical, but only within the context of our duties to life’s commonwealth, and only on the basis of honest information and careful, realistic assessments of potentially available technologies.

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What’s Fair?

Once a new conception is adopted of the goods to be distributed and of the claimants entitled to participate in their fair distribution, criteria are needed to ensure that the distribution of both the benefits and the burdens of the economy is indeed fair and moral. In a whole earth economy based on right relationship, with an expanded view of distributive justice, any use or distribution of resources that impairs the ability of life to flourish in its full diversity would be immoral. Of course, all of life, human life included, depends on consuming other life. This mutual dependence is part of what it means to be a commonwealth. All species have enemies—some the size of tigers, others the size of microbes—that they seek to elude or destroy. This is an essential feature of the struggle of existence and reproduction. Right relationship does not deny these facts but only asks, as Albert Schweitzer and many aboriginal cultures remind us, that we act with respect and compassion toward others.

Already, human use of resources that threatens other species with extinction or with severely compromised numbers is generally considered immoral, and is even illegal in many countries. Taking this kind of moral principle to its logical extension, human society in a whole earth economy would realize, deep in their hearts and skin, that respecting other species’ right to flourish promotes a healthy biosphere, and that in turn enhances the well-being of humans now and in the future. A fair distribution among present and future generations of the human and nonhuman community will be supportive for humans, but has the added dimension of permitting life’s full commonwealth to flourish.

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Think back to the I=f(PATE) framework presented in Chapter 3. As discussed there, if the I variable, human environmental impact, becomes too big, the earth’s natural systems are drawn down faster than they can regenerate. This limit on impact (I) accounts for the fact that shares must be provided to other species, which have their own I factors, as well as for present and future generations of all species. The first step, then, is to establish the total impact (I) share that is available for humans. This task has been described in previous chapters. It involves ensuring that enough bioproductivity is left for other species to thrive and that materials from human economic activity, such as heavy metals, greenhouse gases, or other pollutants, do not accumulate in the ecosphere. Once measures have been put in place to assess the efficacy of efforts to aid rather than destroy natural systems, to be described in Chapter 5, natural systems will begin to recover. In short, sharing with other life forms is what will enable humans to thrive in reasonable numbers, and once they realize that, the needed legislation and institutions to protect the biosphere will likely be increasingly supported by human societies.

The devil is always in the details, of course. Once the total impact (I) share available to all humans is established, the average per capita human share will depend on the total human population, along with the A, E, and T variables, that is, how lightly technology allows people to use the earth’s bounty. Ecological footprinting is one way—still in need of further study and refinement—to establish these limits and shares through a standardized but, possibly, flexible measure.

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It is unlikely, and indeed probably undesirable, that all humans be limited to an equal per capita share. Moral criteria are needed to determine what kind of variation is acceptable, especially for distribution among humans. If the economy exists for sustaining life, then any distribution that fails to supply the subsistence needs of any subset of the global population is an unfair, immoral distribution. Morality therefore requires redistribution from excess accumulation of material wealth to those who have less than they need. There will have to be global taxation. Global taxes will reach even the distribution-allergic United States. Fair wealth distribution also requires that the economy’s burdens be redistributed. The concept of environmental justice, for example, is that no segment of the human community should suffer disproportionately from the effects of pollution, toxic waste, and climate change. That means that the practices of locating dumps, incinerators, nuclear waste storage depots, heavy industry, and so forth in poor, rural, or otherwise marginal areas would become illegal, with heavy penalties. If those living in affluent areas were forced to deal with society’s wastes, the impetus would be provided to use optimal disposal methods or, better yet, to eliminate dangerous wastes altogether. This is another arena in which the EU shows leadership.

The provision of basic human needs for all the world’s people is the beginning of a fair distribution of the economy’s benefits and burdens among people. Beyond provisioning for basic necessities, greater equality in general enhances the quality of life within the human community by increasing morale, providing a sense of belonging, and creating greater opportunities for interaction and dialogue. Societies with greater equality generally have much lower crime rates than those with less equality. Prisons and other security and anticrime measures use enormous resources that could be applied to far more positive uses. In many respects, greater equality among humans can be viewed as a cornerstone of social cohesion and the integrity of individuals and communities alike, and can be instrumental in supporting, or reaching toward, a world built on right relationship.

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The essential role of diversity in preserving the integrity, resilience, and beauty of life’s commonwealth acts as a counterweight to the moral imperative for equality. For humans, diversity means that different spirits, endowed with different talents and inspired in different ways, will engage in the myriad forms of human endeavor and industriousness on which human society and happiness depends. Diversity is an engine of the human culture. Naturally, different human pursuits will reap divergent rewards and unequal levels of material wealth. But, in view of the dreadfully unjust poverty in the world today, right relationship requires urgent and massive redistribution.

One of the principal arguments against redistribution is the claim that it undercuts economic efficiency—the economy’s ability to produce goods and services that people want at the lowest price. Not true, according to economic theory, which provides that a significant portion of income and wealth disparity has little to do with economic efficiency. Much of current income and wealth distribution is shaped and determined by institutions, structures, and endowments that have nothing to do with contribution to current output. Among these are genetic inheritance; social connections; clan or class structures; cultural attitudes toward gender, race, and class; institutional power structures; historical imperialism; slavery; financial speculation; and, finally, age-old custom. Also playing an important role are changing interpretations and conceptions of intellectual property that pass the benefits of one generation’s creativity to the next. According to standard economic theory, income and wealth disparities that result from forces external to the market can be eliminated through redistribution with no loss of incentive and no shrinkage of the economic pie. On this point at least, economic theory aligns with right relationship in seeking fair distribution.