Glen T. Martin

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fSbWYl7wU0&feature=youtu.be

As a YouTube video: https://youtu.be/0fSbWYl7wU0

There has been much talk about where the world should go after the global pandemic that we are facing everywhere on Earth. People have proposed modifications of the global economic order. Others have proposed modifications of the UN system. Still others have proposed greater peace and disarmament among nations. However, none of these will solve our most fundamental problems on this planet. None of these will give us a future. All of you young people out there are being betrayed. As Albert Camus declared, you are being cut off from the future. You are being cut off from having any future at all.

The coronavirus pandemic has made us realize that we are fragile and vulnerable as a species worldwide. The pandemic has made us realize that our global institutions are historical anachronisms that are not designed for human welfare. The global economic system is made for the rich and powerful in order to make them ever more rich and powerful and allow them to continue ruling the world. The global bankers, the transnational corporations, and the super rich have the governments of the world in their pocket and they run things for the benefit of the few rather than the common good of the whole. This system is centuries old and is not suitable for planetary human welfare. This system is cutting the young people, you young people, off from the future. It is destroying the possibility of your having any credible future at all. Why do we put up with this absurd system of economic criminality?

The global political system of militarized sovereign nation-states is also centuries old and is not suitable for planetary human welfare. Sovereign nations obsess about their military strength, their security, their resources, their inviolable territories protected by border walls, visas, police, and ever more weapons. They subvert one another, sanction one another, move against one another as if the planet were a grand chessboard of conflicting forces, and they threaten one another with war and weapons of mass destruction. It is possible that the coronavirus pandemic is a spinoff from one of the bioterror labs that these rogue sovereign nation-states maintain all over our planet. Why do we put up with this unworkable system of anarchy and nation-state criminality?

Since the end of the Second World War the world has been facing the possibility of nuclear holocaust. For the first time in history we entered an era in which the human race could wipe itself out entirely. We have never solved this absurd situation. In addition, since the 1960s we have known that the human population on Earth is skyrocketing, that the ecosystem of the Earth is being destroyed, and that we are facing climate change that could wipe out humanity by the end of the 21st century. Yet the global economic system has resisted converting to sustainability, and the global nation-state system has continued its militarism and warring instead of converting our planet to sustainability. Why do we put up with these absurdities that cut us off from the future, monstrous systems that threaten to destroy our future on this planet altogether?

There are five steps that need to be taken together if we are going to have a future on this precious planet Earth. These five steps are all integrated within the Constitution for the Federation of Earth. Let us examine the five steps.

Step 1. Internalize Holism. Not our current economic and political fragmentation, but holism. We need deep awareness of the emergent holistic paradigm that derives not only from contemporary science but resonates with much traditional wisdom. The world’s great religious traditions all spoke about the cosmos and our holistic place within it, and science has discovered the holistic unity in diversity of all things. This paradigm includes understanding of the interdependence and interrelationship of all things in the universe, including the geosphere, biosphere, and noosphere of the Earth. This awareness must inform all our design efforts. The Constitution for the Federation of Earth is based on this awareness, on the holism of unity in diversity, and is designed to promote this awareness.

This means that the nations must join together into a federation of unity in diversity that does not abolish them but places them within a holistic world system in which they no longer can operate to destroy the future of our planet, its living creatures, and ourselves. The Constitution for the Federation of Earth gives us a democratic world system based on holism: the holism of peace, of justice eliminating vast disparities of wealth, of universal human rights protection, and of sustainability. It is designed to holistically protect and restore the ecosystem of our planet.

Step 2. Establish Ecological Economics. We must convert our planetary economy to one that benefits everyone while living within the parameters of the laws of entropy, renewability, and steady-state prosperity. There are good books out there that describe sustainable economics like Herman E. Daly’s Beyond Growth or Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics. They all show that a healthy economy cannot infinitely grow on a finite planet with a finite ecosystem. Economics must be for the common good of everyone in harmony with the planetary biosphere. Such a sustainable economics is built into the Constitution for the Federation of Earth. The Constitution is designed for a planetary sustainable economy.

Step 3. Institutionalize Planetary Climate Science. We must design institutions for studying and monitoring the Earth as a whole and for timely responsiveness to maintain stability. Climate science must be institutionalized and empowered to the point where we really understand and can manage our planetary climate for health and stability. As Buckminster Fuller declared, this means seeing our spaceship as a whole. As James Lovelock declared, this means seeing our planet as Gaia, a living whole. Climate science must be institutionalized at the planetary level with love and respect for our earthly home and all its living creatures, including human beings. The Earth Constitution establishes an Integrative Complex with worldwide agencies staffed by climate scientists and other experts who know how to monitor, adjust, and manage our planet to keep human activities in harmony with the biosphere that sustains all life.

Step 4. Promote Moral and Spiritual growth. We must design for a world system that promotes cognitive, moral, and spiritual growth, that nurtures those aspects of human nature that transcend selfishness, egocentrism, fear, and hate, while promoting those aspects that include love, compassion, dialogue, mutual respect, and concern. Mature people are worldcentric, not egocentric like so many people in power today worldwide. Neither are mature people ethnocentric believing that their religion or country or culture or race is somehow better or superior to the rest of humankind. World Centric people are World Citizens. They think from what Karl Marx called our species-being. They think as what Ervin Laszlo calls “planetary citizens.” They have a planetary consciousness. They are citizens first of Planet Earth, and only secondly of this or that nation state, religion, or race. The Earth Constitution institutionalizes and supports planetary consciousness and global thinking. It is designed to help us think like the citizens of the Earth that we all rally are.

Step 5. Give the Earth a Brain. The world right now is a chaos of conflicting nations, corporations, cultures, races, ideologies. It is an anarchy of the egoistic greed for wealth and power. The world has no coordinating center, no brain. The UN is not a government for the world but merely a treaty of sovereign nation states colonized by the big and powerful nations to be used for their own purposes. We recently saw the sad spectacle of the UN Secretary General begging the nations of the world to temporarily stop their wars in order to let everyone deal with the coronavirus pandemic. How absurd is this? The UN freely admitting that it cannot stop all these wars. It can only beg them to delay their wars for some medical emergency.

The world needs a brain, a central Parliament representative of all humanity, a Parliament capable of protecting stability, justice, and equity within the present, and a Parliament capable of planning and acting for a stable, prosperous, and equitable future. This is absolutely essential to creating a decent and secure future for humanity. The UN is not a government and its Charter must be replaced by the Constitution for the Federation of Earth. That way all its valuable agencies like the World Health Organization can be brought into the Earth Federation and empowered to really do their valuable work. We need a World Parliament, a brain representing all the nations and peoples of Earth, a brain that can coordinate, plan and design a decent future for all of us and our children. Without such a brain, we will remain a chaos of conflicting forces that can never deal with the threat of nuclear holocaust or the collapsing planetary climate. We need democratic planetary leadership. Let us ratify the Constitution for the Federation of Earth.

Think about it. Love it. Act on it. The future belongs to us all. Let us make it happen.