Apr 15, 2020
How to Share the World’s Natural Resources between Humans and All other Species for All Time
“The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.” ― Franklin D. Roosevelt
This article is the tenth in a series of eleven short papers that address how we can use ‘market mechanisms’ to better share the world’s resources, without destroying the biosphere upon which all life depends; now and into the future.
It discusses how we may better share the world’s natural resources between humans and all other species for all time.
Overview
Each of the articles is written to be self-contained. If you want an overview of the series, it is provided here.
Recap
As discussed the first article, it does not matter how big the economy gets, ‘the market’ cannot decide ‘fair shares’ where the participants have unequal knowledge and power (including all other creatures), many costs are not accounted, and 50% of the population is ‘outside the market’!
Articles two through seven discussed how to implement a Market-based Universal Basic Income (M-UBI) to eliminate ‘systemic’ poverty using Australian data to illustrate its practicality. They also discussed how such an approach could address all the concerns many people have with ‘traditional’ UBI and the many benefits it could deliver: not just alleviating ’systemic poverty’, but helping to better manage the economy and improve individual and social well-being in general.
The eighth article discussed the need to share work between all people capable of doing it, to give some people more free time to enjoy the fruits of their work, and others more money to better enjoy their free time.
The ninth article discussed how we may better share the fruits of production between ‘workers’ and ‘owners’, using well-tried ‘market mechanisms’.
This tenth article looks at perhaps the most significant of all:
How to Share the World’s Natural Resources between Humans and All other Species, and with Future Generations
As we now, quite literally, have the power to re-shape the planet, it comes with the responsibility to not destroy it. In fact, after much depredation, our moral obligation today is to leave it in a better state than we find it — for all future generations of people… and all other creatures with whom we share it:
If the Earth was only a few hundred meters in diameter,
floating above a field somewhere,
people would come from everywhere to marvel at it.
They would walk around it,
admiring the large and small pools,
and the water falling and flowing in between
In awe, they’d examine under their microscopes
the bumps and hollows,
the fascinating tiny humans and creatures of every kind
living on the surface,
and in the water, as well as the
those flying and buzzing in the almost imperceptible halo of air around it
all sustained by an abundant diversity of microscopic plants…
the patterns of clouds and storms
swirling in the thin blue haze surrounding it,lit by lightning, resonant with thunder
and the sounds and scents of all life.
It would surely astound them.
The ball would be the greatest wonder known.
People would want to protect it…
Because it was the only one.
…By Anonymous (with some modifications)
Or, as others have said: there is no ‘Planet B’
As noted at the start of this series, COVID-19 has shown that when the threat is wide-spread and our actions can make an immediate and measurable impact, human beings will act with urgency to protect both life and well-being in ways previously unthinkable.
It raises the prospect that we can address other moral imperatives in a similar fashion: with urgency and large scale change previously unthinkable.
One of these imperatives, if not the greatest of our age, is how we share this world with all other living things.
Unfortunately, many people still think of ‘the natural world’ as a resource to be exploited, rather than a ‘web of life’ that has its own intrinsic value unique in the universe; as well as being the source of our own food, water and well-being.
Protecting our ‘home’ is also a moral problem that has a system solution.
Over the last half century, our supply chains have expanded globally to meet the ever-expanding ‘needs’ of an ever-expanding population, with ever-expanding waistlines requiring ever-more resources to feed, clothe and house!
But this is about to change once again.
New technologies now allow smaller production runs using highly-flexible highly-automated plant and equipment that has the same global price tag regardless of where it is situated; allowing us to re-localise production at lower cost.
As this current crisis has shown, one of the main benefits of siting our production plants close to where the output is consumed is ‘security of supply’ through widespread redundancy.
Even more importantly, localisation offers a way of reducing our impact on the planet…
If we have a common vision to guide decision-making across both government and the private sector:
Imagining the Future
Ideally, in future, each major city-region should be able to source designs (sold competitively from around the world) to be produced in local facilities, only drawing in some raw materials and key components from elsewhere, and using ‘circular manufacturing’ processes (that recycle products after use) to mitigate our impacts on the biosphere that sustains all life.
Combined with a concerted shift to renewable energy, new materials and ways to produce food, and the cessation of population growth, we could look forward to a future of plenty set within a re-blooming Garden of Eden.
Imagine living in a world where the biosphere and all life in it is treasured and protected. Where everyone shares in our collective wealth via a UBI, and also shares ‘paid work’, where the shares between workers and owners are negotiated from positions of equal bargaining power, enforced by law (and where both sides understand their mutual dependence).
How much better would all our lives be?
Imagine all the things we could DO with the extra time and money made available through automation and virtualization, while also reducing our impact on the planet.
Fortunately, these changes do not require a change in human nature.
They do require a change in human behaviour which, to a large extent, is governed by the norms and systems that govern us.
To paraphrase Sir Winston Churchill:
First we shape our systems, then our systems shape us.
We just have to show that the proposed system changes benefit us all: rich and poor; present and future generations, humans and all life.
This article by Aurecon hints at the possibility of leveraging the current crisis to ‘re-build’ the economy by investing in new infrastructure that will stand us in good stead for the future. This could include even greater investments in ‘renewable energy’.
Of course this would mean big losses for the carbon industry. Yet, just as we’ve set aside traditional economics to see us through the ‘COVID-19 crisis’, perhaps we can also provide the money to help the carbon industry transition to other energy sources?
The next article suggests a system solution aimed at making the ‘Big Coal, Oil and Gas’ industry a partner in the change, rather than an adversary
