Peter
Brown's latest book provides a dispassionate, rational and compelling
argument for the need to change our economic, political and social
systems in order to properly steward the planet, and practical ideas on
how to do so.
Conservationist Peter Brown
moved a few years ago from Maryland, where he still manages a forest,
to Quebec, where he also now manages a forest, to take up the role of
Director of the McGill University School of Environment, where he continues to teach. His latest, innocuously named book The Commonwealth of Life was recommended by four environmentalists I respect enormously (and have written about), David Suzuki, Elizabeth May, Peter Singer and Herman Daly. I just finished reading the book and it's astonishing.
Brown starts by laying out the false assumptions by which our economic, political and social systems currently operate:
- that well-being can be measured by economic growth
- that humans enjoy a unique moral place in the universe
- that we can safely predict the consequences of our actions
- that nation-states are morally privileged
- that markets and democracy are mutually reinforcing institutions, and
- that the world is largely unperturbed and unperturbable by human actions
The book systematically and thoroughly deconstructs these false
assumptions and provides an alternative framework for the
reorganization and management of our economic, political and social
systems, that could create a society based on respect for all life on
Earth, and at the same time, not coincidentally, maximize human
well-being.
He starts with an argument, which he eloquently provides historical
context for and then defends, that there are three rights that must be
satisfied for a healthy, functioning society: the right of bodily integrity (freedom from injury and undue confinement), the right of moral, political and religious choice, and the right of subsistence (to make a decent living and hence provide for the basic needs of life).
He goes on to say that in a functioning society these rights are
honoured through three duties: individual duty to respect the rights of
others, government duty to enforce these rights when individuals
abrogate them, and international organizations' duty to enforce these
rights when governments fail to do so. He then, again using historical,
moral and philosophical argument, says that in our interdependent and
finite world we must, to fulfill that duty, extend these rights across
space (to all people of all nations), across time (to future
generations), and (at least insofar as the first and third rights are
concerned) to all other species that reason, communicate and feel pain.
He further argues that such rights can only be granted and enforced if
we have respect for the entire interconnected 'commonwealth of life'
including not only all sentient species but the ecosystems in which
they live as well. These duties and responsibilities of commonwealth
are, he says, analogous to and natural extensions of our duties and
responsibilities of citizenship. They are what he calls duties beyond borders (geographic, temporal and ecological). Not surprisingly, he calls the exercise of such duties stewardship.
Recognizing that this is groundbreaking argument, he rigorously raises
and then dispels the objections that can be made to each of these
theses, and analyzes and contrasts alternative theses for their ability
to provide direction towards sustainable human well-being. He's his own
critic, diligent and rigorous in his analysis.
In Part Two he goes on to explain what changes to our economic,
political and social systems will be needed to act on these duties,
protect these rights and achieve a properly-stewarded commonwealth.
Starting with the 'stewardship economic' system needed to restore,
protect and enhance the commonwealth (and extension of Keynes'
definition of the function of classical economics to 'protect human
life and culture'), he argues that in order for the new economic system
to entrench the three basic rights it is first necessary to constrain
the extravagant and wasteful use of some resources (notably water,
energy, forests, heavy metals and soil nutrients), which has been
allowed to continue because of the pervasive myths that we are not
significant actors in Earth's biophysical systems. He counters the
argument of "technological optimists" that prices, supply and demand
will self-regulate the depletion of resources (implausible in the
presence of market-distorting subsidies and in the absence of full-costing
of resource extraction) and that new substitutes for scarce resources
will always be found in sufficient time (because the cascading impact
of the depleted resources on other parts of the ecosystem, including
parts critical to our economy, can be catastrophic). He concludes his
economic prescription by saying "The space between the lower boundary
of satisfying basic rights, and the upper boundary allowing other life
forms to flourish is the space for legitimate human wealth". He need
not add that, in today's economy, that space is negative.
Turning to political systems, he sees the role of government as a
trustee, acting only when individuals and groups fail to respect the
commonwealth of life, or abrogate the three basic rights or their
responsibility to protect them. Government therefore has seven duties:
- duty to preserve and enhance the well-being of all
- duty to discharge its obligations impartially
- duty to uphold the three basic rights
- duty to prohibit wasteful use of resources
- duty to address crises of scarcity
- duty to respect the virtue of commerce to optimize the production and distribution of necessities of life
- duty to protect the commonwealth undiminished for future generations
He demonstrates that the exercise of such duties need be no more
interventionist than existing government, and that it requires
government to be altruistic, rather than merely responding to the
collective parochial demands of today's citizens, corporations and
special interests. And he skewers the myth of the infallibility of
'free' markets, demonstrating that 'free' markets do not exist today,
and never have.
Next up is the changes to social systems, to the functioning of civil
society, which must intervene when necessary to check the excesses of
both the economic and political systems, and give them direction. He
shows why the most common solutions to dealing with the Tragedy of the Commons
(those solutions being: making all property privately owned, or making
all property government-owned) don't work. He describes the essential
aspects of property rights (right to exclude access, right to use,
right to dispose) and proposes a merging of today's property rights
with a new public trust responsibility
commensurate with those rights. This responsibility is identical to the
seven duties of governments bulleted above, insofar as that property is
concerned, and is consistent with the stewardship theme of Brown's
entire philosophy.
In Part Three Brown extends the personal and government
responsibilities to the international arena, arguing that the world is
in essence a community of 'fiduciary states' (nations with stewardship
responsibility). He says that individual nations and supra-national
organizations (like the UN) must ensure that all
nations exercise the seven duties transparently, and that each person
and nation has a community responsibility to all others. In response to
self-proclaimed 'realists' whose view of human nature is cynical and
who see human motives as inherently opportunistic and Machiavellian,
Brown counters with the Aristotelian view of human nature, and provides
historical context to justify its greater plausibility. In response to
the argument that nations 'need' to be able to act in their own
self-interest, he reviews the entire history of nation-states and shows
them to be a largely arbitrary and evolving concept, suggesting that
they are readily adaptable to a more altruistic purpose and may in the
future evolve or devolve into a very different form or disappear
entirely in favour of other forms of government.
This is the part of the book I struggled with the most, for two
reasons. First, I've gone on record as saying I think any solution to
the current ecological crisis will require political and economic power
to first devolve from nations to communities. Secondly, I've argued
passionately in favour of the rights of national sovereignty, even,
with limits, when the exercise of that sovereignty may sometimes offend
our personal and cultural values. I'm re-thinking my positions on these
two issues.
In the final chapter, Brown starts with a lovely quote from Albert Schweitzer:
Sooner or later there must dawn the true and final renaissance which will bring peace to the world.
He then lays out a 14-point action plan to migrate our economic,
political and social systems to their new stewardship of the
commonwealth roles:
- Assess the current state of the three basic rights in each country.
- Inventory the current state of productive resources,
capacity to rebound to natural, sustainable levels, and capacity of
'sinks' to absorb human activity.
- Compile an overall global biological survey of ecosystem health and robustness.
- Design and construct new institutions to protect the commonwealth, modeled after Elinor Ostrom's Governing the Commons analysis of effective common pool resource management structures.
- Introduce new regulations and incentives (emphasis on the latter) to extend and entrench the three basic rights.
- Replace GDP with GPI and other, broader and more credible measures of well-being.
- Redirect central banks' fiscal and monetary policy to incent effective stewardship instead of growth.
- Restructure tax systems to tax 'bads' instead of 'goods'.
- Create national Councils of Stewardship to supplant Councils of Economic Advisers.
- Create incentives for good-stewardship substitutions e.g.
grants, tax changes, short-term subsidies, that could, for example,
lead to the elimination of the need to raise animals for food.
- Grant legal standing to future generations and other sentient species, so that actions can be launched on their behalf.
- Implement cosmopolitan education: teach stewardship,
tolerance, and educate and fund research on good-stewardship
substitutions for existing activities.
- Promulgate an international declaration of stewardship
acknowledging our responsibilities and also the need for all people to
take action to significantly reduce both human population and levels of
consumption.
- Create an annual report of our stewardship and trusteeship of the planet.
Brown acknowledges that some of the countries that fail to provide the
three basic rights will be belligerent in the face of pressure to do
so. He recommends the program of treaties, oversight, sanctions,
cooperative and collaborative institutions and agencies outlined in Richard Falk's book This Endangered Planet as a means of dealing with belligerents, rather than the hasty rush to war, which usually does more harm than good.
All in all, this slim (160 page) volume is a remarkable mix of idealism
and pragmatism. Just one more recipe for saving the world, but one that
has the weight of research, the intelligence to avoid rhetoric and
blame, extraordinary sponsorship and scholarship and the common sense
to take it one step and one country at a time. It deserves our
attention. If people are unwilling to accept the duty of respect and
responsibility that Brown calls for, we are all lost.
(Brown is working on a new book called Reverence for Life: A Philosophy for Civilization. I'll let you know when it's out.)
If there's any reason this four-year-old book has not
become a best-seller, it must be because it's so hard to find: You'll
search Amazon in vain (though you may find it under its even more
innocuous European title Ethics, Economics and International
Relations). In Britain you can get it under the Canadian title from Politico's Books. Americans will, alas, probably have to get their local bookseller to order it in -- publisher and ISBN can be found here, or order it for CAD $20 from McNally Robinson, the great Canadian independent bookseller. |
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