Rev. Dec 13/20

The Blue Planet Club

To promote a system of governance to meet the needs
of a small Blue Planet under stress

The page is a short story that envisions a Regional and Global governance system that could thrive on negative growth in human-activity, toward a day in the future when the human Ecological Footprint could be sustained within the renewing resources of the Gaian systems of.  Members of the Blue Planet Club have indicated that they would prefer the future system of government presented on this page to the competitive nationalistic governance systems of today that fail to recognize Limits To Growth.

       We invite you to join the club.  

Who knows what can happen in our changing world of rapid communications, and today’s young generations now recognize that Business As Usual (BAU) is a grave threat to their future well-being.

Today there is no governing body capable of avoiding the collapse of civilization.  The collapse was forecast several decades ago.  At that time national leaders who understood the human predicament acknowledged that they could not stop it.  Even the United Nations (UN) could not stop it.  Our GROWTH oriented capitalist-driven governments simply cannot respond to apparent ‘limits to growth’ because our elected leaders feel that they would be thrown out of office by voters if they were to begin implementation of the social and economic changes needed to respond to today’s biophysical and energy realities. There is a section in the appendix providing reference material about the information in this paragraph under, Limits to Growth

There are other compounding issues:

§ Human population is likely far beyond Earth’s carrying capacity.  There are still some cultures and religions that forester large families.
§ Complex interactions in trade and commerce prevent any individual national government from acting alone.  The UN cannot act as a global government because a few large nations have veto powers.
§ It is most unlikely that elected politicians would have the technical expertise to make wise decisions in all of the diverse areas that comprise both ‘civilization’ and the dynamic systems of Gaia - the cradle of all life. 
§ The driver of GROWTH: The US$ is the world primary reserve currency

In the US primary money creation is referred to as ‘debt based’ money wherein commercial banks create new money from the interest paid on loans.  As a result, the money supply is always expanding, as explained by Prof. John McMurtry in his book, The Cancer State of Capitalism  This is also explained in a web booklet,  to http://gaiapc.ca/PJ/3a-MCP.pdf.

We cannot forecast whether today’s economic system will collapse first or if ecological deterioration will simply end the possibility of human life on our small Blue Planet.  As we personally witness the evidence of global warming, many of us feel a growing sense of grief and anxiety.

The Blue Planet Club is based on the hope that prior to collapse of either the economic system or the ecological system, there will be a window of opportunity for a convergence of proactive global NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations) to begin the assembly of a constitution, a cornerstone document for a viable system of global governance. But what would this elephant look like? 

As in the parable of The Blind Men and the Elephant, most of today’s leading NGO rivers of change tend to focus on only one part of the elephant, their specific area of expertise, and have yet to form an alliance, a holistic group to define the whole elephant and its needs.  To encourage these NGO rivers of change to converge into a sea-change in the way human affairs are managed on our small Blue Planet, in this document we present an overview of a possible form of Blue Planet Governance that can act as prototype model.

This sketch is rooted in decades of exploring the works of dozens of NGOs and wise philosophers.  It is within these groups that the Blue Planet Club would find the expertise needed to develop the interactive building blocks of the new form while today’s Titanic model continues to serve as a usable platform for development of a regional/global life-boat infrastructure.  NGOs need to provide appropriate expertise in the study of: sociology; alternate currencies; alternate economics; ecological footprint and other real-wealth measurements; biodiversity; energy - both fossil and renewable sources; human population dynamics; atmospheric science; social science; localization; eco-psychology and aboriginal 7thgenerational thinking.  Leaders in these disparate but interrelated fields of thought would be needed to proceed within the spirit of post-normal speculation.  Expertise in development of international standards will also be needed.  As we proceed, it is worthwhile to recall another quote by Albert Einstein:


 We cannot solve problems with the same thinking that created them.

Transformation

 

The United Regions General Assembly consists of representatives from all Assembly of Bioregions

Below is a more detailed view of the United Regions

 

 

Key References:

Gaia

Regions

Assembly of BioRegions

United Regions UR

Real Wealth

Wealth Factors

Bank of Gaia

Ecological Footprint

Human-Activity

Optimum Human Population

Blue Planet Club

Many more links to reference data in the Appendix:

Fig. 1:  Governance in the year 20XX +50  (XX = Paradigm Change)

           A backcast - written as if from 50 years After Paradigm Change - year 050APC.  

§  Figure 1 is a simplified sketch of a dynamically interactive global/regional human governance system capable of guiding human civilization toward sustainable levels of human-activity within the limits of the once bountiful Gaian systems of life on our small Blue Planet

§  Along with many small nations, large nation states have dissolved into significantly autonomous cooperative regional governments - regions.  Progressive paradigm change has enabled regional governments to establish the chaordic organization sketched above.  The United Regions (UR) is designed to coordinate regional affairs and to deal with global issues that are beyond the scope of any one region.  

§  The UR scientists now monitor the state of the world, the state of civilization, and regional and global real-wealth:  This information is used by the Bank of Gaia in order to regulate gross human-activity via control of the money supply to each region.  The total wealth of each region is limited to its measured real-wealth assessment. 

§  When a region’s Real Wealth is expressed on a per capita basis, it becomes apparent that each individual’s wealth is inversely proportional to the region’s human population level.  This makes individual procreation considerations a concern to all people of the region. 

The long-term goal of the UR is to regulate each region’s gross human activity until the global human ecological footprint is less than 1:1 and there is a state of optimum human population to sustain a thriving civilization

Another view:

 

The first purpose of the BPClub is to communicate with leaders of key NGOs to encourage them to reach out to other NGOs to work together to weave their individual threads in to the fabric of a shadow United Regions and to begin development of the documentation needed to define the role of each of the administrative segments of the United Regions (UR).

The second purpose of the BPClub is to serve as an attractor, a place where the general public can express their growing anxiety and ecological grief by showing support for the concept of a better world, such as Blue Planet Governance

BPClub membership is based on a simple endorsement of the statement that…:
I prefer the basic concept of Blue Planet Governance to what exists today.

You can go to the endorsement page now or continue reading first:    

The BPClub makes no claim that a non-chaotic paradigm change toward the Blue Planet Governance scenario can be made.  We simply present for readers' consideration a prototype model, an envisioned system of global and regional governance that would be dynamically responsive to real-world data.  This proposal suggests a prototype for those of the BPGA who will develop the model's details. 

When they have refined the model, they can then present this concept to the many regions of the world that are fertile for change today.  Perhaps some of them will initiate implementation of the processes in parallel with the Titanic system for a while. 

As envisioned, the Blue Planet Governance model remains as close as systemically possible to government structures that exist today, as recommended by the late cyberneticist Stafford Beer.  The envisioned model is rooted in the study of human-nature, dynamic systems, energy, and the state of the natural world. It recognizes the need for a form of biophysical economics that can accommodate a realistic definition of wealth - Real Wealth, as penned by Riane Eisler: Real Wealth is a measurement of a robust ecology and of the general health and happiness of the people!

Details of the envisioned Blue Planet Governance presented here are drawn from Section 4, Envisioning in the booklet Paradigm Junction.  The opening sections provide the social, political and technical reasons for the suggested model.  Another chapter describes how to develop and implement the needed form of biophysical economics and how to create a digital form of money that operates like today’s debit card.

Key concepts:

1a:  Energy is expended to make all things happen;

1b:  Any complex trading society requires a form of money to facilitate the exchange of goods and services.

1c:  Therefore, monetary flow control can be seen as a regulator of human-activity.

       (Today this key regulator is in the hands of growth-driven commercial banks).

2: You cannot manage what you do not measure. 

3: Individual human behaviour is influenced mostly by family and local community.

4: The concept of human rights is a dangerous myth unless it is cradled in human responsibilities -
including responsible procreation.

One primary requirement of the UR is to quantify the biophysical and social elements that represent real wealth as measured within the global commons and in each region.  The measurement of Real Wealth of each region becomes the commodity basis for that region’s money supply.  This brings population into the equation of wealth per capita, making each region’s gross human population a regional concern.

While the future is unknown it is largely shaped by events of the past.  Today's and tomorrow's events will represent the past as seen from 50 years in the future. It can be worthwhile to speculate on possible futures. Here are a few:

1.     Possible Future 1: The Whimper ending: With no serious effort to supplant the (Business As Usual) BAU ‘growth’ insanity, then the Limits to Growth scenario remains as the most likely outcome.

2.     Possible Future 2: The Bang ending: As energy and biophysical resource shortages become critical, well-armed nations continue to invent reasons for conflict leading to world nuclear war, accelerating our trajectory toward the extinction of humans and most large animals. 

3.     Possible Future 3: The global Blue Planet Club develops a functional model of the United Regions and its various sections. They reach out to a few small nations and to states with separatist aspirations who collectively agree to the intent of Blue Planet Governance team.  They develop and begin using Gaia$, the commodity-based digital currency, where each region’s amount of Gaia$ is dependent on that region’s measured Real Wealth.   Now, with a realistic view of civilization’s footprint overshoot known to all citizens, lifestyles soon shift toward low energy usage, localized food sources and products designed to last for many years. 


A few years later the world’s global banking system fails. This period of chaos and die-off becomes known as Paradigm Junction.  In the ensuing chaos when conventional fiat debt-base dollars$ become worthless, the small bloc of relative stability within the Blue Planet Governance group suddenly becomes attractive to more regions.  When these regions adopt the requirements of the United Regions (UR) they are allowed to enter the Blue Planet Governance trading bloc.  Eventually most regions of the world begin to assess their Real-Wealth and to exchange goods and services using the Bank of Gaia allotment of Gaia$.
By 50 years after paradigm change the original overgrowth and die-off graphic produced in Limits To Growth has taken a turn for the better as illustrated in a graphic of a modified Seneca cliff!

  Here are a few features of the social/economic/political scene in the year 050APC:

§  There is no private ownership, but land can be leased from the Regional Government.
§  The lands, forests and lakes of each region are under the stewardship of the regional government, but can be leased to individuals, community cooperatives or corporations.


§  The era of male domination in governance is over as the female voice now plays an equal role.


§  The United Regions (UR) recommends that regions should have a minimum wage for each adult and also a limited annual income.
§  A region’s total money supply is generally expressed on a per capita basis.
§  Each region has a branch of the Bank of Gaia.  Since each region is provided with a fixed number of Gaia$ , proportional to their Real Wealth assessment, the bank monitors all transactions and accounts.  This data is needed to regulate inter-regional trade levels and requests for immigration and emigration.
§  Regional governments are the only shareholders of all large interregional corporations.
§  There are many local worker cooperatives and individual entrepreneurs.
§  Adult citizens of each region are issued a debit card by the regional Bank of Gaia.
§  Regional governments implement measures to reduce human-activity as needed when their Regional Wealth Factor assessment shows a low Wealth Factor per capita rating.
§  In year 050APC optimum population has not yet been reached and civilization’s ecological footprint is still somewhat in overshoot.  But conditions are improving!

In Sept. 2019 the Ecological Economic organization, in their emerging list of definitions, adopted this definition:

An Ecological Economics system is one where the currency that enables human transactions is based on, and limited by, ecological and other resource-wealth-and-health considerations within each country or region, of Earth.  This data is based global standards, established to categorize and quantify each element that represents ‘real-wealth’.  Each region will have an overall wealth rating, and therefore will have a wealth per capita rating.  With this ecological economic system, regional wealth per capita is inversely proportional to its human population.  This brings human procreation considerations into each regional government’s planning and regulation considerations.

We do not know with any certainty what the future will hold, we do know that BAU deficit spending of the small Blue Plant’s fragile web of life will soon end. If you prefer a better outcome for our common future then you can join others in the Blue Planet Club by endorsing the simple statement:
I prefer the basic concept of Blue Planet Governance to today’s GROWTH-driven governments.

 

Are we ready to endorse?

…. Go to the endorsement page

On November 12, 1936, Winston Churchill grew so exasperated with the continuing failure of Britain to prepare for Hitler’s onslaught that he charged in a speech to the House of Commons:  “The government simply cannot make up their minds, or they cannot get the Prime Minister to make up his mind.  So they go on in strange paradox, decide only to be undecided, resolve to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent... the era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients of delays, is coming to its close.  In its place we are entering a period of consequences.”

<<<<?future?>>>>

Appendix - Footnote links

These footnotes are in alphabetical order providing data linked from the text above.  This section will be updated from time to time.   Feedback about dead links or other errors appreciated.

050APC : This refers to an envisioned desirable society 50 years After Paradigm Change.

Donella Meadows, one of the MIT researchers in the Limits To Growth study, gave a keynote speech in 1994 to the International Society for Ecological Economics. The abstract for her speech, quoted in the Paradigm Junction, states that:

Vision is the most vital step in the policy process. If we don’t know where we want to go, it makes little difference that we make great progress. Yet vision is not only missing almost entirely from policy discussions; it is missing from our whole culture. We talk about our fears, frustrations, and doubts endlessly, but we talk only rarely and with embarrassment about our dreams. Environmentalists have been especially ineffective in creating any shared vision of the world they are working toward -- a sustainable world in which people live within nature in a way that meets human needs while not degrading natural systems. Hardly anyone can imagine that world, especially not as a world they’d actively like to live in. The process of building a responsible vision of a sustainable world is not a rational one. It comes from values, not logic. Envisioning is a skill that can be developed, like any other human skill. This paper indicates how.”

Attractor:  The Wikipedia definition states: noun: 1: a person or thing that attracts. 2: Physics: a state or behavior toward which a dynamic system tends to evolve represented as a point or orbit in the system's phase space.
The BPClub hopes to attract individuals and organizations that share a common bond of deep concern about what the future appears to hold for us and the well-being of fellow species on our small Blue Planet

BackcastWickipediaBackcasting is a planning method that starts with defining a desirable future and then works backwards to identify policies and programs that will connect that specified future to the present. The fundamentals of the method were outlined by John B. Robinson from the University of Waterloo in 1990. The fundamental question of backcasting asks: "If we want to attain a certain goal, what actions must be taken to get there?''

Bank of Gaia: In the envisioned Blue Planet Governance scenario, the Bank of Gaia is closely associated with the United Regions (UR) that provides the data needed for the Bank of Gaia to issue the commodity-based digital currency to each of the regions of the world.   The ‘commodity’ in question represents the quantitative value of the many elements that represent the Real-Wealth of the world, as measured by both global and regional Wealth-Factors.   Gaia$ is the name of the digital currency issued by the Bank of Gaia.

Biophysical Economics : In a 2006 paper C. Hall & K. Klitgaard produced a paper:  The need for a biophysical economy.  In the paper, they state that: More fundamentally, some twenty years ago in the journal Science, Nobel prize winner in economics Wassily Leontief found the basic models of economics unable to advance in any perceptible way a systematic understanding of the operation of a real economic system.  Also note the annual BioPhysical conference:  https://www.isbpe.info/2018-conference

Blue Planet Club: The concept for the Blue Planet Club emerged from discussions in an internet chat group consisting of people from a wide range of specialty fields such as sociology, technology, science, history, energy analysis, education, ecology, population issues, economics and dynamic systems.  The BPClub draws on the material in the Blue Planet Governance proposal that was originally developed in the web-based booklet called Paradigm Junction, written by one of the members.  Over the years, most of the subjects in Paradigm Junction have been discussed in the chat group. 

Blue Planet Governace Alliance: (BPGA) We plan to invite several leading NGOs to work together, as suggested in these pages, in order to form an alliance to develop the infrastructure for a sustainable system of global governance.  It appears that only such a group could begin to establish the requisite network to assemble a comprehensive system of planetary governance. 
The suggested name is Blue Planet Governance Alliance (BPGA).  Will they respond and create this alliance? 
We will see what happens – bearing in mind the wise words of Albert Einstein: 

There is no salvation for civilization, or even the human race,
other than by the creation of a world government.

Chaordic Organization: An organization that has been created by autonomous entities to deal with common issues outside the scope or mandate of any one of the organizations.  Historic examples are: Competing/cooperative airlines of the world created an organization called ARINC to establish common technical standards for global aviation.  They also created ICAO, in conjunction with national governments, to deal with issues associated with global travel.  A few competing banks created the Visa organization to create a common credit card system: Other banks formed Master Card.  
In the 050APC scenario the largely autonomous regions of the world have created the United Regions (UR) to deal with the many matters of common interest that are outside the scope of any one Region. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaordic_organization

Civilization:  For the purposes of the BPClub, ‘civilization’ refers to the interconnected world of trade and commerce with the basic definition as in Websters on-line: a relatively high level of cultural and technological development; specifically: the stage of cultural development at which writing and the keeping of written records is attained…. Or Websters ’89 hard copy:  a making of or becoming civilized|| to endow with law and order and the conditions favorable to the arts and sciences.

Today’s governance fails to meet the requirement of ‘civilization’ because we ignore the science that could guide us away from the disaster forecast 50years ago in Limits To Growth.  We have already entered the period of consequences.

Commercial Banks: Remember the 2007 economic melt-down? This bad mortgage Ponzi-like scheme was caused by bank greed coupled with short-term thinking.  The errant banks had to be bailed out and the problem was not/could/not be fixed because the banks controlled the money system and are therefore an essential part of the operation of civilization. Because the issues have never been corrected, the systemic weakness remains.  The expression banks are too big to fail has become common. 

Commodity-Based Currency:  Barter means one commodity in exchange for another commodity.  Later there were tokens (money) that represented the value of a commodity, such as gold.  But gold has now been taken out of the process in a move that created debt-based currency, as explained below.  

Currency Debt-based: Today’s world operates on the debt-based system of money creation which is a major driver of ‘growth’.  Every time interest is paid on a loan, new money, created from nothing, enters the system.  This guarantees that the pool of money in the world always increases, and also, that the accumulated debts can never be paid back, as described in this historical analysis by Jada Thacker, How Debt Conquered America.  The money creation rate is amplified by the Factional Reserve banking system.  The World Debt clock gives vivid detail of the expanding money supply and also of human population growth per country.  
Further data on Debt at 
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/tag/debt-free-money

Currencies 050APC:  Because, you cannot manage what you don’t measure, the future transparent digital-commodity based money system will be created based on each region’s real-wealthThis measured real-wealth becomes the commodity backing for each region’s Gaia$  .  Like today’s debit card system, it will be traceable and transparent thereby eliminating corruption or money laundering that was endemic in the pre-paradigm change era.  Only registered citizens of a region will be allowed to have an account in Gaia$ and will be given a debit card for day-to-day transactions.  Illegal immigrants will have no access to money.  Details are sketched out in Chapter 4e-Dynamic Flows, of the booklet Paradigm Junction.   

Ecological Grief: Article titled, “Ecological Grief as a Mental Health Response to ClimateChange-Related Loss.  The article discusses research into our response when we hear news of ecological disasters related to climate change and to the emotional depression that is triggered every time we see the evidence directly in the news.

Ecological Footprint: Wikipedia summarizes the work of the international organization, The Global Footprint Network.  The work of this organization is the first significant effort to gather data on the global resources on which humans depend.  While their measurements are limited to Earth’s bio-capacity, their efforts set the standard for regional and global measurement of the many parameters vital to a sustaining human civilization.  Because energy is considered as civilization’s master resource, we need current data on both non-renewable fossil fuel reserves and also updated data in the development of nature’s free flow energy (erroneously called renewable energy).  We also need updated information on many other vital parameters that we refer to as Wealth-Factors.

Economic Collapse:  History is rife with examples of economic systems that collapse, sometimes bringing civilizations to an end.  Sometimes a recovery is made, such as the 2007/2008 crisis.  However in that crisis the root ‘Big Bank’ problem was never remedied because of TINA - There Is No Alternate – a comment made in the 1980s by UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.   We offer Blue Planet Governance as an alternative!

A web search provides many examples of economic collapse: http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/ 

or http://listverse.com/2012/12/26/10-fascinating-economic-collapses-through-history/

Some speculate that the financial collapse is likely to follow a typical Seneca cliff pattern.

J.R. Saul on The Collapse of Globalismhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90UAEtt0ta8

A long video about corporate governance:    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHrhqtY2khc

Energy: This is a very large subject.  Energy is the master resource of all lifeforms and civilizations.  Howard Kunstler’s book, End of Suburbia describes our likely future problems when we face the spectre of peak oil.  Suburban living is just one example of our energy wasteful unsustainable lifestyles.  The future outlook for energy is discussed below under Peak Oil and also in dynamic system.

Dynamic RegulationWikipedia describes the concept in engineering terms.  A simple familiar form of dynamic regulation is a home heating system.  The home owner sets the thermostat to 20o C.  The bi-metal device in the thermostat reacts to temperature change.  If the temperature is below 20o the thermostat switch starts the furnace energy flow (gas, oil, thermal, etc.) to bring the heat to the selected temperature, and it then shuts the furnace off.  (Further detail on systems can be found in Chapter 2B of Paradigm Junction.)

Key points of regulation here are that:

1: A decision was made for a target temperature;
2: The prevailing temperature is measured to provide feedback information to …;
3: A suitable energy source that is engaged, increasing home temperature to the desired setting.

The same basics apply when we speak of dynamic regulation of human-activity.  Money gives us access to energy within the various things we purchase, whether it is in the form of oil for the home, gasoline for the car, food for our body or the imbedded energy in the ‘things’ we buy.  With more money we can buy more things, and with less money we buy less.  Therefore monetary flow control can be seen as a historic regulator of human-activity.  In this regard, the Blue Planet Governance proposal offers nothing new: We simply ‘measure’ the level of human-activity could be sustained in each Region, and control the region’s energy flow (human-activity) by regulating the money supply.   J. W. Forester wrote about social dynamics in 1973.

This process may be referred to as systemic negative feedback.  Today’s evolved geopolitical governance has ceded primary control of money creation to the hands of corporate banks where the ever-increasing money supply fosters ‘positive feedback’ on human-activity.

Gender Equality: An article entitled Planetary Duty Is a Feminist Construct, recommends far greater female influence in defining our common future.  A chapter in Paradigm Junction, Our Journey Into Today provides additional historical data indicating that the rise in male dominance is a relatively recent phenomenon

Gaia:  As named by scientist James Lovelock, Gaia represents the mythical Goddess of Earth’s systems of nature.  In the context of Blue Planet Governance, Gaia refers to all of the biological elements of animal and vegetable elements that interact with mineral elements to form the unique web of life on our small blue planet.  It should become every person’s responsibility to bring an end to humanity’s current destabilization of the Gaia systems.  

Gaia$:  See Bank of Gaia

Human-Activity: Throughout this text the expression human-activity will be hyphenated to denote that we refer to both gross human population numbers and to our gross activities that represent our collective resource throughput, our pollution, etc., as may be summarized as the human footprint on our planet.

International Standards: ISO: The International Standards Organization has a secretariat in the United Nation with headquarters in Geneva Switzerland.  Today it develops the documentation needed for international agreements. 
Such expertise will be essential for development of the constitution of the
United Regions (UR) and its various branches. 

Limits To Growth (‘Limits’):  The seminal work Limits To Growth was an effort fostered by scientists of the Club Of Rome and implemented by a team of researches at MIT.  Starting in 1968 they studied historic trends in parameters critical to human civilization such as non-renewing resources, food per capita, services per capita, industrial output per capita, gross human population and global pollution. 

Their computer plotted the interacting trends into the future if we were to … :

1: … adopt negative growth in human-activity;
2: … continue with the rate of growth in human-activity – Business As Usual (BAU);
3: … increase the rate of growth in human-activity.

The book caused significant alarm and discussion because the BAU run indicated dire trends beginning about 2010.  It predicted that the human population growth would begin to fall by 2030 as a result of resource depletion and pollution buildup. 

      Nevertheless, our collective governments continued to strive for ‘growth’ – BAU.

The graphic below is from a 2010 review by the Smithsonian Magazine. Their study found the original Limits To Growth data from 50 years earlier was basically accurate. 

The new study reassessed the data gathered by the original MIT team and made a new computer run of the BAU projection.  Lines in the vertical blue bar illustrate the original projections (dotted lines) compared to reality (solid lines) up to year 2000.  The Smithsonian projection into the future is about the same as the MIT study - about 2030 human population growth will begin to decline as a result of essential resource depletion and growing pollution, such as the CO2 that causes global warming.

How old will you be in 2030?

This link provides a pdf of the full text of text of the 1972 original Limits To Growth booklet, including the speech by UThant that is quoted below.

Evidence of Paradigm Paralysis

Early response to ‘Limits’ – The United Nations:

After a presentation by Club Of Rome the Secretary General spoke to the General Assembly:

I do not wish to seem overdramatic, but I can only conclude from the information that is available to me as Secretary-General, that the Members of the United Nations have perhaps ten years left in which to subordinate their ancient quarrels and launch a global partnership to curb the arms race, to improve the human environment, to defuse the population explosion, and to supply the required momentum to development efforts.

If such a global partnership Is not forged within the next decade, then I very much fear that the problems I have mentioned will have reached such staggering proportions that they will be beyond our capacity to control.  UTHANT, 1969

      But the UN has done nothing. ….

A collective of national Leaders:

Alexander King, co-founder Club Of Rome, spoke of 1975 meeting, to which the club had invited many world leaders to discuss the implications of the message within the controversial book.  King stated that he and others were pleased with the level of understanding among the national leaders.  But would they act? 

At the end of the meeting, one of the leaders spoke for the group stating that they understood what our future appears to hold, “But were he to act on this substantially, he would be out of office, not at the next election, but in a few months”.

Democratic National leaders can do nothing because we voters would not let them. The enemy is us because TINA (There Is No Alternative) (yet!)

We-The-People

Why would the electors vote out a government that took appropriate action?   Here are a few reasons:


§  In order to deal with both peak energy and the excess human ecological footprint, a significant reduction in energy use per capita and resource use per capita will be needed.  This will cause a significantly changed life-style in high end energy use per capata countries.
§  Today’s politicians will never touch the taboo subject of human population reduction, even by planned attrition.
§  The debt-based money system, largely controlled by corporate banks, is one of the root reasons that ‘growth’ is essential: Debt and growth are fundamental to its nature and the system will collapse without growth. Therefore the nature of, and the control of money, must change.  US presidents Lincoln and Kennedy were assassinated while trying to have the goverment issue the nation’s money.
§  There needs to be a Jubilee like event: But this is unlikely to be popular with most, especially the rich and upper middle-class who hold most political influence.
§  We have not grown up with the understanding of the concept of human responsibility as a prerequisite to human rights.

The voting public are quite unlikely to accept change in these areas unless events narrow their choices – such as an economic collapse. 

Mainstream media occasionally make reference to the likelihood of the collapse of civilization, as forecast in this 2014 UK Guardian article based on a NASA study, which spells out our future rather clearly in this paragraph:

While some members of society might raise the alarm that the system is moving towards an impending collapse and therefore advocate structural changes to society in order to avoid it, elites and their supporters, who opposed making these changes, could point to the long sustainable trajectory 'so far' in support of doing nothing.

And as psychologist Danial Goleman warns, we are unlikely to act on such information:


There is an almost gravitational pull toward putting out of mind unpleasant facts.  And our collective ability to face painful facts is no greater than our personal one.  We tune out, we turn away, we avoid.  Finally we forget, and forget we have forgotten.  A lacuna hides the harsh truth.

A famous Pogo quote:

I have seen the enemy, and it is us!

And it is therefore only ‘us’ who can bring remedy!

 

Localization: Localization describes a range of behaviors and processes that reflect the natural human tendency to come together and self-organize in the face of difficult conditions such as the interruption or collapse of centralized services. 

Organizations that promote localization are:

   Post Carbon Institute; http://www.postcarbon.org/

   Transition Towns:  https://transitionnetwork.org/

   The Next System:  Gar Alperovitz and Gus Speth speculate on alternate futures in their Next System Project and also in an ongoing effort called Principles of a Pluralist Democracy.   Alperovitz’s book, What Then Must We Do is described on his personal web page.  In this book he lists many reasons why continental USA is much too large in land mass and in population to be ruled by one central government. 

The subject of localization is closely related to the footnote on regions below.

Money - from nothing: This article provides details of how fiat money is created today, by commercial banks. 

Non Governmental Organizations: (NGOs):   This will be updated from time to time.

Optimum Human Population:  This is a very subjective issue, but for the purpose of the 050APC scenario, optimum population would occur when there are enough humans to sustain a thriving civilization, but few enough that their collective footprint on the Gaia systems is significantly below the human carrying capacity of our small blue planet.

Here’s an article on the subject by Rex Weyler in Greenpeace International, Does Human Scale Matter?

Paradigm: From Wikipedia: “… a concept identified by the American physicist and philosopher Thomas Kuhn (1922–1996), is a fundamental change in the basic concepts and experimental practices of a scientific discipline.”  The concept is also used to describe significant social change – paradigm change

Paradigm Junction: This is a web booklet. The first chapters provide the underlying reason for the specific design of the proposed Blue Planet Governance concepts as presented in Section 4, Envisioning.  

Three summarizing papers about the booklet are: 

The Pelican, a web Journal;  www.pelicanweb.org/solisustv13n03page5.html

2016 Washington DC  BioPhysical Economics conferencehttp://gaiapc.ca/PJ/1a-2016DynamicReg.pdf
2017 Toronto branch of the World Federalist Movementhttp://gaiapc.ca/PJ/WorldFederalistMovment.pdf   

Peak Oil: As a non-renewable resource, our growing energy extraction rate will peak and will thereafter decline.  The timing of Peak Oil has been forecast for many years.  While there is a great deal of literature on the subject, a clear synopsis is drawn from the summary of a book by John Howe, The End of Fossil Fuels and Per Capita Oil, or in a 2018 report by Canadian earth scientist David Hughes, summarized in an editorial opinion page.

Population issues:  THEODORE P. LIANOS*Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece suggests a system for limits of an average of 1.5 children per person system. http://www.asecu.gr/Seeje/issue28/issue28-lianos.pdf

Many other papers on population limiting can be found with a web search.  

Post Normal Speculation : PNS represents a novel approach for the use of science on issues where "facts [are] uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high and decisions urgent". PNS was developed in the 1990s by Silvio Funtowicz and Jerome R. Ravetz. It can be considered as a reaction to the styles of analysis based on risk and cost-benefit analysis prevailing at that time and as an embodiment of concepts of a new "critical science" developed in previous works by the same authors.  In a more recent work PNS is described as "the stage where we are today, where all the comfortable assumptions about science, its production and its use, are in question.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-normal_science 

Real Wealth: In her ’98 book, The Real Wealth of Nations, Riane Eisler suggests that:  Real wealth is a measurement of a robust ecology and of the general health and happiness of the people!  As you can imagine, Real Wealth must consist of very many factors.  In the world of 050APC these elements are referred to as Wealth Factors.   Each Wealth Factor is measured and quantified on a common scale of value.   The package of these Wealth Factors represents the commodity bases for the economic monetary system in the world of 050APC.  In 1900s gold was the commodity basis for money until President Nixon ended the practice.

Recovery: 

 

The downslope

This graphic illustrates potential future trajectories beyond the ‘You are here’ peak of the red line. 

The green line starting in 1970 illustrates how our vastly excessive levels of human-activity could have begun orderly negative growth if there had been proactive governance at that time.  

The beginning of the blue section represents a future point when an organization such as the Alliance for Defence of the Planet is able to convince a large number of regions to join the Blue Planet Governance alliance and begin orderly negative growth in human-activity.

The sooner the BPGovernance begins to develop, the better it will be for the wellbeing of both humans and our fellow Gaian species

Regions

Assembly of Regions: The word ‘region’ denotes a (largely) sovereign autonomous political state, e.g.

 

By the year APC050 (20?? + 50), partly due to trends toward ‘localization’, large nations, such as Russia, China, Canada, the USA, Australia, etc. have broken into much smaller, and significantly more autonomous, regions.  Many small nations of the early 21st century are now regions. 

 They are as small as practical and yet able to have a regional government large enough to administer local government and the management capability of meeting compliance with Blue Planet Governance requirements.  Regions are small enough to have the advantages of a feeling of localization, giving individuals a strong feeling that they belong and that they can be an important part of local government.  The people of some regions have a significant bond from a historic common cultural or religious background.

Blue Planet Governance is an expandable model that can begin from the agreement of a few small nations, or provinces or states, of large countries.  Regions are the home of all the people. Regions are the controlling roots of the United Region.

 Gar Alperovitz’s ’05 book America Beyond Capitalism has one chapter called Is The Continent Too Large?, and it provides many reasons the large land mass of USA cannot be governed in the best interest of the people. A similar view is expressed in a NYTimes article by Neil Grose.  This also applies to Canada or Russia. 

Alperovitz is also a founder of The Next System movement.

    It is at the regional level that human individuals are most likely to develop a meaningful feeling of affinity and inter-responsibility (examples might be Quebec, Scotland, Texas, or Catalonia).  Another example is the the countries of Europe that could become  Regions of the United Regions without much change.  

In some parts of the world it may be in the best interest of a group of small regions to create a larger entity, the BioRegion.  There could also be an Assembly of BioRegions, perhaps at the continental level, to represent their common interest at the United Regions level, and to select the UR administrative members. 

It will be up to the Blue Planet Governance Alliance (BPGA) to develop whatever system works best for each region.

Rivers of change:  This expression was used by Prof. Hartmut Bossil in his ’98 book, Earth At A Crossroads, as he described the growing list of organizations that attempt to deal with change in various branches of governance.  A summary of his book can be found within Chapter 4a of the web booket  Paradigm Junction.

Separatist movements : Globally there are many separatists movements that may be interested in becoming members of the Blue Planet Governance network.  See Regions, above.

Simultaneous Policy Organization:  The motto of the NGO ISPO is: Breaking down the barriers to solving world problems.

Originated by John Bunzl of UK, ISPO has branches in many countries, working toward convincing various national governments to work together to bring about change, change that could not be initiated by one country. 

Stafford Beer: I am proposing simply that society should use its tools to redesign its institutions, and to operate those institutions quite differently. You can imagine all the problems. But the first and gravest problem is in the mind, screwed down by all those cultural constraints. You will not need a lot of learning to understand what I am saying: what you will need is intellectual freedom. It is a free gift for all who have the courage to accept it. Remember: our culture teaches us not intellectual courage, but intellectual conformity. Cyberneticist Stafford Beer ’73 Designing Freedom, wrote this while in hiding from death squads in Chile after the US orchestrated the overthrow of President Allende.  Beer had been designing/developing an interactive system wherein feedback from the measurement of resources would be used to establish government management policies.  It was called Cybersyn.  The design of Blue Planet Governance was influenced somewhat by Beer’s approach.

United Regions (UR): The UR is a chaordic organization created by the regions of the world.  Metaphorically the UR can be considered as the wheelhouse of Spaceship Earth, as coined by Buckminster Fuller in his ‘1968 book, An Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth.  As can be seen in the UR graphic, all essential data for management of human-activity for Planet Earth are collected in the UR and appropriate levels of feedback regulate human-activity in each region of our small Blue Planet.

Wealth Factors: In the world of 050APC, the many elements that represent Real Wealth are measured scientifically, not only in the global commons, but in each region.  An audited measurement of these wealth factors forms the basis of the commodity-based money available in each region.  The Bank of Gaia is responsible for setting the standards for these measurements.  From these audited measurements the bank issues the money for each region based on its Wealth Factor assessment. 

For explanation at http://gaiapc.ca/PJ/BPG/4e-DynamicFlows.htm#WealthFactorImportance    

 

…. Go to the endorsement page

 

<<< The Beginning >>>

Of a new era!

 

Contact Webmaster