Digging Out

My brother and I know we’re talking about groundbreaking efforts, but we also know we’re not drifting into fantasy land. Global discourse is possible, and once forged, a global decision-making process is equally practical. We’re excited about these possibilities, but we’re also confident because, as socioecologists, we study and understand the way social and ecological forces are already driving change in our world, independent of human will. Though much of the world’s turmoil is obviously bad, worsening and highly problematic—increased terrorism and war, speculative financial collapses, spreading starvation and massive migrations, genocide, climate change and deforestation—these are also outward manifestations of underlying forces that are struggling to open vast, new, liberating horizons. But liberation demands replacing traditional culture and politics with new visions. It demands that we choose to embrace new ideas and relationships.

The problem is that most of us can’t see the potential and the possibilities for real change because we don’t understand the actual forces at work. It’s something like trying to heal wounds back in the days before we knew about germs. If we’re going to solve the problems of our world—the problems of society and the environment—we must be scientific. We must look inside the social processes around us and learn of the forces at work in our lives.

Chief among these is the contradiction between rising population and finite natural resources. Clearly, we already have too many people for the available natural resources, and the situation is going to get almost twice as bad before it gets better. Nine billion humans by mid-century, demographers say. During the industrial age, with mass consumption key to a successful economy, population growth was an imperative, encouraged under the more-is-better syndrome. Long ago, that system overshot the limits of its own sustainability. Now, we vastly over-consume the Earth’s resources, fouling our water and air in the process and brutally cutting down biodiversity. Population growth must be reversed. We need a contracting global economy, one that rebuilds community stability and cuts the global pilfering of resources that later generations will need.

Another critical factor is the world’s sharply increasing economic and social polarization. How many tragedies must we see and lives must we waste before those of us who have it made finally turn compassion toward those suffering incomprehensible losses and sadness? Serving others has taken on new meaning of late with the appearance of NGOs and a vibrant global civil society hell-bent on resolving problems rather than creating or ignoring them. Linked with the economic reform of niche markets and the entrepreneurial innovation that is bursting the seams of industrialism, civil society and the service economy upon which it arises provide hope for tomorrow for people across the globe.

Real stability means finding ways for all the world’s people to have clean water and sanitation, health care, literacy, electricity, access to the global economy and its scientific and technological knowledge, a line of credit to take advantage of opportunity and old age security. If “change” can’t meaningfully promise to provide all these things to everyone, it is not worthy for our time, and it will not stop our slide into social disarray.

Yet, in an already depleted world, how is it possible to restore a sense of confidence among so many desperate people on the edge of survival? Fortunately, as we will see later, throughout history when our numbers exceeded available resources, transformations began in our basic mode of production which, once embraced by human culture, brought changes for the better to the human condition. Agriculture and industrialism were once solutions to chaotic socioecological conditions. But while these have been well-studied, the solutions now offered by the emergent, service-led mode of production are but poorly understood. In particular, we persist in failing to recognize that the new mode of production is creating a new array of classes and interests that need elaboration and support. As these class interests are advanced, progress will accelerate.

Indeed, a host of underlying forces are trying to advance our cause. If a way can be found to express their common interest, they can be united in a powerful movement to express values necessary for a better tomorrow. First among these forces is the new class of people who earn their living by providing service to others, whether through private commercial enterprise or through more public-spirited, non-governmental organizations. They and their institutional structures need an infusion of capital. Second are women who stand to be liberated by the service-led mode of production from millennia of social oppression under agricultural and industrial regimes. Third are the developing nations and minority populations who remain stymied by the entrenched power of the monopoly corporations and militarized states of the industrial era. Fourth are the generations born after World War II during the advent of global mass communications, generations who know the people of the earth share a necessity to find a common path toward global collaboration. Fifth are the citizens of all nations and the members of all ethnic groups and religions who see themselves first as human beings, unique and with unlimited potential, yet who are constrained by customs and decrees that force us along narrow, standardized, often oppressive paths.

These forces of change can be rallied in their common interest by a sound, grounded-in-reality, forward-looking political agenda. But science is the key. It is the means by which we can overcome the narrowness of our individual existences and personal perspectives to find common cause with others for a sustainable, equitable future. Based on socioecological science, we propose to unite these forces in a movement to compel banking industry compliance with the people’s problem-solving agenda.

We start now to build a popular, transnational, global, political movement whose purpose is to pressure the global banking system to collect a small (say, 0.1 percent) automatic fee on EVERY commercial transaction run through the system’s electronic mechanisms. This is kind of like when, during the holiday season, your VISA card volunteers to donate one percent of all your charges to some charity it or you have selected. In this case, however, it’s a fee on every transaction, everything from credit cards to corporate payouts to bank transfers to currency speculation—every electronic commercial transaction. Every participant in the global economy pays directly in proportion to the extent of his, her or its participation.

The revenue of this fee would not be dispersed by the banks that collect it. Rather, the collected revenue (a trillion or more dollars annually) will be channeled to the account of a new Global Problem-Solving Authority, popularly controlled and directed by the world’s people. The authority will invest to catalyze flexible, evolving, NGO-corporate-community partnerships designed to address our world’s great necessities—environmental restoration, population reduction, social equity, economic opportunity and peaceful conflict resolution. These programs will run not through national governments and their client international federations (the UN, the IMF, the World Bank or the WTO) but, instead, through a new social structure working along the global-local nexus of human exchange with the purpose of strengthening human collaboration as we move through the crisis-management epoch before us.