A warning from Dr. Leonard Angel, Director of the Institute for Ethics and Global Justice at Douglas College: Catastrophic consequences threaten future generations because we are overusing the earth's regenerable resources by a factor of 23%. On Thursday, March 18 at 7:30 at the Unitarian Church (49th/Oak), Dr. Angel will lecture on this serious problem and the need for remedial action. He argues that it's time to create a democratic international body - a world environmental authority - that can monitor, co-ordinate and if necessary mandate appropriate and equitable action across international boundaries.
Dr. Angel has been deeply affected by the work of Dr. William Rees at the University of British Columbia who pioneered the concept of ‘ecological footprint analysis’ (EFA). EFA is a quantitative tool based on energy and material flows that estimates the area of productive ecosystems required to sustain any specified human population or economic activity. According to Dr. Rees' studies, four additional Earth-like planets would be needed just to raise the present world population to North American levels of consumption.
Dr. Peter Brown of McGill University is another academic who notes that infinite growth in a finite system is impossible. Brown is co-author of Right Relationship: Building a Whole Earth Economy and a member of the Moral Economy Project, a Quaker initiative promoting a new vision of stewardship economics. Dr. Brown believes we must consider ourselves custodians of the Earth rather than as simply consumers of its riches. Brown also advocates national limits on use of natural resources. This would require new institutional mechanisms that are capable of looking beyond state interests to the common needs of the world. In addition to capping the total use of resources and distributing rights to use them equitably, we will also need a global environmental court to prosecute civil and criminal offenses against natural systems that are crucial to humankind's survival. Funding could come from a universal income tax or a tax on carbon.
The idea of a universal jurisdiction above the existing state system has a long tradition in history. Immanuel Kant's Perpetual Peace (1795) envisioned a confederation of democratic and pacific states settling disputes without recourse to war. In What Happened to the Idea of World Government, Thomas Weiss, President of the International Studies Association, notes a 1949 resolution in the US House of Representatives, sponsored by 111 members including future president John F. Kennedy, that advocated the transformation of the United Nations into a world federation. With the advent of the Cold War and the breakdown of trust, that proposal lapsed.
Since the breakup of the USSR, however, there has been a revival in the understanding that global problems require global solutions, and a concomitant search for an appropriate institutional base. A recent effort is the Campaign for a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly. The idea is to begin slowly with an advisory body associated with the UN - a citizens' watchdog with clout - that gradually transitions into a world parliament. This would imitate the development of the European Parliament which began after World War II as a consultative body, but which now is directly elected by over 490 million voters, and has co-decision powers in the European Union. Although just launched in April '07, the UNPA Campaign already has support from participants in over 135 countries including academics, Nobel Prize winners and over 700 current national parliamentarians. A UNPA might be a necessary preliminary to the formation of a global eco-treaty or a world environmental authority that could help ensure the Earth's biological limits are not exceeded.
Dr. Angel's presentation is part of an ongoing series of lectures sponsored by the Vancouver Branch of the World Federalist Movement-Canada, an organization promoting UN reform. The speaker on April 15 will be Dr. William Rees of UBC, a Founding Fellow of the One Earth Initiative, on the question of whether we can avoid the collapse that befalls civilizations that do not respect ecological limits.
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Comments
I had to subscribe to your column Larry, because every time you write it's like I've gone back to school and the prof not only knows what he's talking about, it's interesting as hell for its own sake. What more could a young boy want.
Your exposition of these matters is a revelation, and here I thought I had some sensibility for these issues beforehand. The framework you outline is a like a shadow world philosophy that is there to come into focus for us all, and your own efforts are nonpareil.
Please continue to edify us, along with Dr's. Angel and Rees. The more the obvious is stated, the nearer its status as fact. Bravo!
Your positive feedback much appreciated, Dwight. Let us hope that the public will not be distracted by deniers and quibblers but will recognize the implications of overuse of our planet by a population that has increased from 2+ to 6+ billion people in the duration of one lifetime.
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