The Blue Planet Club for Blue Planet Governance, by Don Chisholm
Human Goods, Environmental Evils, by David Barr
Life-Value Onto-Axiology ~ A Contemporary Theory of Value, by Giorgio Baruchello
Growing Pain: The Delusion of Boundless Economic Growth, by Ian Christie, Ben Gallant, Simon Mair
What, if Anything, Can God Do? Divine Power and the Ecological Crisis, by John Thatamanil
The Most Socially Just Tax: Aspects of Land Value Taxation Affecting Government, Land Owners, Communities, and Ethics, by Yousuf Shabbir
Solidarity Economy Roads ~ Chapter 5 - The Road of Social Participation and Self-Management, by Luis Razeto Migliaro
Bad Psychology: Why Climate Change Won't Be Solved by Better Decisions at the Supermarket, by Mads Nordmo Arnestad
False Hopes for a Green New Deal, by Rufus Jordana
Understanding Why the Green New Deal Won't Really Work, by Gail Tverberg
The Forgotten Link in the Climate Debate, by Margarita Mediavilla & Khaled Diab
Resilience and Fire Management in the Anthropocene, by Lindsey Gillson, Cathy Whitlock, Glynis Humphrey
Is a Techno-linguistic Transition Inevitable?, by Erik Assadourian
The Real Economy, by Damaris Zehner
Material Requirements and Energy Investments (EROI) Associated to Global, Large Scale Transition to Electric Renewables Under the Green Growth Paradigm, by Iñigo Capellán-Pérez, Carlos de Castro, Luis Javier Miguel
Challenging and Pledging ~ Drawing Battle Lines in Defending the Planet, by Alex Morss
In Search of a Sane Economy ~ Could Degrowth, Community, and Basic Income Create a Sane Economy?, by Philippe Van Parijs
Agroforestry in the Amazon, by Natasha Foote
Apartheid in the Global Governance System, by Jason Hickel
Decreasing Carbon Emissions through Increased Public Transit Usage and Sustainability, by Carolyn Stewart & Adam Golob
Rethinking the Modern University, by Marcus Ford
These Extraordinary Times: Indigenous Peoples and Coalition Building for Agroecology and Food Sovereignty, by Carol Kalafatic
Radical Feminism: A Gift to Men, by Robert Jensen
The Nuptial Insanity of Male Headship in Human Ecology, by Luis Gutiérrez
The Blue Planet Club for Blue Planet Governance
Don Chisholm
This article was originally published in
Blue Planet Club, 24 October 2019
REPUBLISHED WITH PERMISSION
The name Blue Planet Club is chosen to bring our focus toward the pale blue dot, as planet Earth appears when seen from deep space. The pale blue dot term was suggested by cosmologist Carl Sagan in hopes that the fragile appearance of humanity’s only home may arouse within us the emotional and spiritual response needed to help us deal with the deteriorating state of our natural world.
Revolution of the Young
This revision of Blue Planet Governance has been written shortly after the phenomenon of ‘Greta’ the teenage Swedish girl who has suddenly awakened much of the world to the crisis we are in. Yesterday, September 27, the world’s youth triggered large demonstrations around the world. They’re recognize that the trajectory of our collective nation’s default, Business As Usual (BAU) way of promoting GROWTH in human-activity deprives them of a viable future, and is rapidly leading us into a world with collapsing diversity and other dire results the global warming, a well-known consequence of using fossil fuels.
The time is ripe for change. But change to what?
Currently we are in a state of TINA - There Is No Alternative!
Blue Planet Club suggests a way forward, toward negative growth in human-activity with relatively little disruption of the daily lives of most people. After you have read these two pages, I hope you will go to page 3 to endorse the idea of Blue Planet Governance as a way forward: a movement toward Blue Planet Governance to create the possibility of a viable future for today’s youth and following generations.
Within the surface, the atmosphere and the oceans of our small blue planet the web of life is sometimes referred to as Gaia, in the spirit of Mother Nature. During the human evolutionary journey we became the top predator. In the relatively brief 250 year non-renewable fossil fuel era the top predator has been able to populate virtually every land mass on Earth while our populations have grown from about 1 billion to 7.6 billion.
Source: Threats to Biological Diversity: Global,Continental, Local,
J. Michael Scott, U.S. Geological Service, 2008
In this period the extinction rate of our fellow species has increased by about the same factor. Every day the ‘endangered’ list grows as the expanding human footprint continues to fragment the Blue Planet’s web of life.
Clearly, our collective human-activity is far beyond the limits to growth on our small blue planet. ‘Growth’ has become endemic in our industrial societies. Our corporations measure success by their rate of ‘growth’ in economic gain for their shareholders. Our governments measure success as ‘growth’ in human-activity – more jobs, more people and more resource and energy throughput. And ‘Growth’ in human population is encouraged by some religions.
That we need a change in the nature of human governance is not a new idea:
The industrial context in which we presently function cannot be changed significantly in the immediate future. Our immediate survival is bound up in this context, with all its benefits as well as its destructive aspects. What is needed, however, is a comprehensive change in the control and direction of the energies available to us. Most of all we need to alter our commitment from an industrial wonderland achieved by plundering processes to an integral Earth community based on a mutual enhancing human-earth relationship. This move from an anthropocentric sense of reality and values to a biocentric norm is essential. Rev. Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth, 1988
Today’s independent national governments fail to respond to our global crisis. Why?
There is no salvation for civilization, or even the human race, other than by the creation of a world government. Albert Einstein
Einstein’s comment suggests that creation of a Blue Planet Government is what we must do!
Today there is a growing sense of ecological grief that has initiated the thousands of rivers of Non-Governmental change Organizations (NGOs) each attempting to bring corrective change to one or another of the vast array of global issues that confront us. Could these rivers of change converge into a comprehensive sea-change?
Presuming there could be such a convergence, the next page provides a sketch of a model system of governance that might emerge after a chaotic period of paradigm change. The sketch is based on many diverse building blocks that have been put forward by several of today’s concerned NGOs.
Link to keep reading about
Blue Planet Club and Governance
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Don Chisholm is the Director of the Gaia Preservation Coalition. He is a retired engineering technologist whose career path dealt with dynamic systems, maintenance, design, management and quality assurance auditing, generally related to the aviation industry. The past thirty years have been spent studying human behaviours, energy, and other areas related to the human predicament. For his complete biography and contact information, click here.
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