Sustainability
From Sustain
The biggest challenge facing any form of global governance is how to navigate a route towards a sustainable society.
There are still many who question our environmental predicament, be it genuine conviction, self-interested distortion, ignorance or simple denial. Maybe in the interests of media impartiality, the naysayers get disproportionate airtime to sow the seeds of doubt. Such doubt is easy to stimulate given the vast complexity and incomplete information regarding our ecological footprint, and a willingness to believe we need not change.
Mastering the certainty of our consolidated knowledge would bring critical clarity and legitimacy in such areas as the basis for action; for doubt + difficult problem + potential sacrifice = political inertia.
Humans are indisputably heading towards a resource crunch. I get frustrated by the annual Economist article penned to scoff at neo-Malthusians (which is probably replicated across the right wing press). One man's famous miscalculation acts as a default excuse to rely only upon the market and technology. I don’t care much for disputes over exact details – it's stinkingly obvious to me that we are soon heading for trouble in one way or another, be it water, energy, forests, fish, climate change, x, y, z. Whichever combination bite first, it is hard to imagine today’s mode of society delivering smooth and peaceful solutions. Only if we adequately address inequality, depletion and ignorance with a shared sense of purpose can we ever hope to approach sustainability.
The next few chapters explore the economic changes I imagine my impartial global governance would implement as the means to expediently reap the optimal recurrent harvest.
The actual path to sustainability will require many more and different proposals. Regardless of the exact composition, any sufficient suite of proposals will require the scope and legitimacy of united governance, supported by a shared belief system.
I start with a chapter emphasising the need for a global system of taxation or, as a minimum, harmonisation of tax across as wide a coalition of nations as possible. Here it is: Global tax
