I wish you a happy new year, with the hope that we make the world a slightly better place in 2010. Speaking of which, here is an inspiring story that still resonates today... The 1854 American indian chief of Seattle replying to the US government who wanted to buy Indian land.
"How can you buy or sell the sky? The warmth of the land? The idea is strange to us. If we do not own the freshness of the air...... and the sparkle of the water how can you buy them? We don’t own them. Every part of this earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle... every sandy shore...Every midst in the dark woods...Every humming insect.... is holy in the memory and experience of my people. This beautiful earth is the mother of the Red man. We are part of the earth as it is part of us. The rivers are our brothers. We give the rivers the kindness we would give to any brothers. But the white man does not understand our ways. He is a stranger who takes from the land whatever he needs. The earth is not his brother but his enemy. And when he has conquered it, he moves on. He kidnaps the earth from his children. And he does not care. I do not know. Our ways are different from your ways... "
Watching the Copenhagen debacle, it is clear to me that our governments are quite inefficient at addressing world ecosystem issues and that the Indian Chief of Seattle had a point. One of the biggest question of our time is a question of pricing: how to value the Common Goods? How to value clean air? How to value a forest creating oxygen for the planet? How to value clean water? The answer of the Indian Chief: priceless, hence an absolute respect of Nature with a life in harmony with natural cycles. The answer of our governments is far less clear. But maybe we should look at ourselves. What is our answer?
I think that Copenhagen failed mostly because we asked the right question to the wrong people.
Copenhaguen could not succeed because environmental issues are 1 connected, 2 systemic, and 3 a question of governance at the local level.
1 Connected: pollution has no border. It is no surprise we have to pay for our excess sooner or later via CO2 increases, polluted water, and other birth defect since all causes and consequences are connected.
2 Systemic: we intuitively understand that the Earth is a natural organism. The rivers are its arteries. The forests its lungs. The species its laboratory for evolution. However, we act as if it was not, creating dams to block the arteries, killing the forest for its wood and eliminating species or parking them in zoos.
Pollution and other natural catastrophies are just a symptom of an aging, non regenerating Earth. The disapperances of species, non renewables resources and biodiversity a signal of a poorer ecosystem with lesser potential for future generations. To heal this system, we need time and to address the root causes to create positive reinforcing loops.
3 An issue of local laws
Under the Indian Chief, Nature was protected by time tested traditions. Some areas were holy and forbidden to men facilitating the development of diverse ecosystems. Under the rule of capitalism, Nature is a free good to plunder to churn out a profit. The problem is, we cannot realistically live like the Indian Chief or the Evenes nomades in Siberia in a modern society with soon 9 billion individuals. My experience from Switzerland is that when you pile on people on a limited area of land, (80% of Swiss people live on 20% of the land, the rest being occupied by mountains) the only way to maintain social stability is to build strong local governance. The solution of our environmental issues start and end with our behaviors and the local laws that govern them. And, to be most efficient, this can only be a bottom up approach.
Some would like us to believe that there is no problem, and if there was one, governments would solve it, or companies, or entrepreneurs who may invent ways out of our energy crisis, warming planet and water pollution issuess. All of this is partly true but is is not the full story. Our ability, as local citizen of the world to change our mindset on nature from a predatory or ignorant approach to an educated and nurturing approach can and will make the most difference.
Instead of trying to solve the problem at the international level, why not starting in our local communities?A lot of the environmnent related issues are connected and start and end at the local level because they start and end with our behaviors. This is why putting some good governance in the hand of the local communities where it belong is the natural thing to do to solve these kinds of problems.
I have a Dream. What if...
(1) ...we define what the "Common Good" is at the scale of a "local community", a pilot for the rest of the world to value and protect natural resources, things that we take for granted every day, our undergrounds and its riches, our air, our environment, our surrounding level of noise, our access to clean water, how it smells, how we dispose of our trash, ...basically, what the Indian Chief describes.
(2) ... then, what if, we then create laws in this local communities to govern this common good...
(3) ... and then what if we facilitate the world wide roll out of this definition of common goods and local body of laws via a website that would be translated in all languages across the world by volunteers reviewing each others like in Wikipedia ...
Each community could then reuse this common goods definition and body of laws and adapt them to their local situations without having to invest in heavy legal fees, while giving back to the global community the changes they made to the original templates as many variants that would enrich its original and accelerate its exponential growth. This would then make the template even more attractive to other communities to use until every community on the planet has a shared definition of common goods with a localized body of laws to protect them.
At that stage, this living web of local laws governed by local communities would turn some serious accountability on greedy corporations who want to exploit our limited resources, forcing them to become “better corporate citizen” "playing by the rules" if they want to operate and turn a profit in any given community. It would deter the world bank or governments to create a few billion dollar dams projects and displace millions of people to instead create millions of projects for a few thousand bucks to purify local water relying on those organized communities to implement them. Now, these millions of better decisions happening all over the world would start healing the planet more efficiently that handing out a few billions dollars accross border to take care of the Amazon forest.
Now of course, this is a Dream, influenced that I am by the country I live in (Switzerland) which is known for local democracy...(and we know its limits) but please, let me know what you think... Could we make this happen? Do we even care?
