Spirit in Action
Building A Whole Earth Economy and The Moral Economy Project
A visit with Geoff Garver, one of the 5 co-authors of "Right Relationship, Building A Whole Earth Economy." Combining a concern for the environment, awareness of economic mechanics, alternative governing structures and how to harness moral energy, this book seeks to find a way forward to preserving our world and well-being.
- Broadcast on:
- 15 Mar 2009
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- other
[music] ♪ Let us sing this song for the healing of the world ♪ ♪ That we may hear as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ My lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpsmead. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred food in your own life. ♪ Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world ♪ ♪ That we may dream as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ We're joined today for Spirit in Action by Jeffrey Garver, one of the co-authors of a book called "Right Relationship Building a Whole Earth Economy." This book explores possibilities for a way forward out of the looming environmental crisis, especially as it flows out of our economic structure and goals. This is solid, deep, and spiritual thinking, reaching to harness moral energy to preserve the life on this planet. Jeffrey Garver is many things, starting out as a chemical engineer who migrated to the other side as an environmental consultant and legal expert. This book is part of the Moral Economy Project, a project of the Quaker Institute for the Future. Jeffrey Garver joins us today by phone from Montreal. Jeffrey, thanks for joining me for Spirit in Action. It's great to be with you today, Mark. You're in Montreal, but are you Montreal born? No, I'm actually an American. I was born in Minnesota, raised in Buffalo. I'm a member of the Buffalo Friends Meeting, the Quaker Meeting in Buffalo, New York. Still, actually, I'm a pending meeting in Montreal. One of the reasons I ask that is because in considering the ideas that are present in "Right Relationship Building a Whole Earth Economy," you have a kind of interesting vantage point. You, and at least one of the other major co-authors of the book, are located teaching, working up in Canada. Did that, in some way, enhance the worldview that you were able to use in writing this book? Especially in the last eight years where the politics in the United States were, in my view, so awful, it was nice to be in Canada, and so I guess there's some effect of that. But living in Canada perhaps brought us to, in trying to tell people what our idea of "Right Relationship" is, to find an example of wrong relationship that we found really helped illustrate the problems we're dealing with, and that is the Tar Fans Project in Alberta. So I suppose that our perspective from being in Canada gave us a closer perspective on that particular problem. I want to start right away, trying to get a handle on what the general idea of the book is. One of the things that I'll note is that economics plays a significant part in what you're talking about in the book. So do ideas of governance, law, how we structure things in society. There's a thread which is about morality, is about ethics, is about some spiritual element that goes beyond just what the law says. And somehow you craft these things together. First of all, there's about five co-authors for the book, and you're amongst them. How did this book come together? How did the idea of this come together? The book grew out of a meeting in Pendle Hill, a Quaker institution in Philadelphia, in 2003. This was a meeting of Quakers mostly working in a field related to the economy or the economics or the environment, but all of whom shared a concern about the human prospect and the prospect for life on earth given our current economy. The first thing that grew out of that meeting was the Quaker Institute for the Future, which is the organization that sponsored the book. And the moral economy project became a project of the Quaker Institute for the Future, whose main purpose was to convene Quakers interested in writing a book together about this problem. The one thing I think that's wonderful about the book, or certainly was wonderful about the experience of creating the book, that it came out of a sense of community. It's a group project and that has some challenges, but hopefully it also gives the book some strength that it might not otherwise have had. So it's really coming from what seems to be a growing concern among friends and, of course, among many people other than Quakers. And is there some special difference that you said that the group that wrote it is Quakers? Is there some special difference that comes through in the text because of the world view or the process that you use to Quakers? If you had included a non Quaker in there, would that in some way have changed the viewpoint, the lens through which you were looking? Well, I should note, actually, that one of our authors, and let me just list them because they certainly deserve to be listed by name. Peter Brown is the lead author in the leader of the project, and he's a professor at McGill University in Montreal. Keith Helmut is a Quaker who lives in New Brunswick now, but for the last ten years was running a bookshop in Philadelphia, an independent bookshop. Robert Howell is from New Zealand. He came to the project through advertisements in, I believe, Friends Journal, a Quaker periodical. And he's been involved in town in the city government in Auckland, and also does work on socially responsible investing. And Steve Seige, who's the non Quaker, is a professor at a Quaker College in Ohio, Wilmington College. And Steve does a lot of work with indigenous cultures and the economies of indigenous cultures, so he may have helped us round out the perspective. But there are aspects of the book that drew from Quaker traditions, but we wanted to be sure that this wasn't and isn't considered a Quaker book. It's much broader than that, and our hope is that the notions that we put forth in the book, in particular this the idea of right relationship and its connection to a broad range of ethical, cultural and religious traditions is clear and resonates with people. There is a tradition of this concept of right relationship and Quakerism, but we think it has much broader appeal, and we tried to describe in the book exactly why it should have a broader appeal. The other thing that was interesting from the Quaker perspective were some of the people in Quaker history and the prophecies in Quaker history from which we drew inspiration, in particular, Quaker movement to end the slave trade in Great Britain and the United States back in the 18th and 19th centuries. And then the last thing I could say about the Quaker influence on the book is just the idea of Quaker methods for coming to agreement through spiritual reflection and discernment, and hopefully unity. There was a sense of unity among the authors on the ideas developed in the book, and that again I think is something that gives strength to the effort. I'm very pleased that we were able to produce a book using that process. The whole idea of trying to co-author a book with five co-authors seems very daunting to me. Writing by committee seems a very daunting prospect. How did that actually go and what was your process in somehow putting this together? Well, it was a lengthy process. It's the first thing, I guess, to say. We had our first weekend, long weekend retreat about the book three years ago in January 2006, and we had a total of four weekends like that, where we convene in the same place and had an intensive set of meetings and discussions. And that started with developing an outline, what kinds of things we wanted to include in the book. Eventually we moved into writing assignments. There was a broad invitation for people to contribute writing, and as it turned out, the five of us ultimately, who were authors of the book, are the ones who ended up following through with that. What we ended up with at some point was a fairly disjointed manuscript, and we knew this was going to be a step along the way, but at least we had something that had a beginning and an end. When we had a manuscript like that, we organized three review sessions where we invited Quakers and non-Quakers. A lot of the people that were invited to those meetings were academics, for example, in ecological economics or other fields that were particularly relevant to the book. We had meetings and got feedback, some of that quite hard hitting, but all of it very helpful. And then we knew we had this kind of like when you're sculpting, you have a clump of clay and you need to start refining it. So around that time, we were in contact with barracolar publishers, and they helped us shape that clay into what became the book, and they were, I can't say enough good things about that publishing house. They were just terrific people. They were very generous with the authors in terms of working with us on developing the ideas of the book. And what appealed to them, first of all, was the idea that this book came from Quakers, that it had a Quaker perspective and Quaker root. And then they also liked the idea of right relationship as a common strain throughout the book, and they liked the idea of using this concept of right relationship to answer five, fairly basic questions about the economy, but ones that we argue in the book are being answered in a wrong way right now. And those questions are what is an economy for, how does it work, how big should it be, what is fair in an economy, and how should the economy be governed. So once we had that formula, that basis for writing the book, we were able to do a very intensive effort starting in late 2007 to come up with a new manuscript, and then also worked with copy editors to even out the book. Who was the target for the book? Who is the destined reader? Is this academics? Is it Joe Sixpac? Is it President Carter? His name appears as a commentary. Did he read it too, in fact? We sent him an early version of the book who were trying to reach here. We certainly didn't want this to be an academic book. At the same time, we've heard already from a number of professors that they would like to use the book in their courses. We were thinking a college freshman, that would be maybe the most targeted description of our audience would be around that level. So people that have some awareness of the issues we're talking about should be able to absorb the book pretty easily. We worked quite hard with the publisher and with the editors to make the book as accessible as possible. That said, there are some things in there that some people might find quite challenging. We felt it was important to describe the key scientific developments that underlie the current ecological crisis that we're in right now. The reason for that is mainstream economics has developed, especially in the last 50 years, with no entry point at all for those scientific developments. All of the science that's telling us are describing to us the ecological limits that we face on this planet and how, for the first time in human history, we're now coming up against those limits. So to understand that, with some depth, we felt it necessary in our chapter on how the economy works to lay that out. But I think by and large, the book should be quite accessible to a broad audience, and that was our intention. There's a number of key concepts, and I want to toss out a few of them and allow you to go where you want with them. One of them is, the name of the book, again, is Right Relationship, Building a Whole Earth Economy, and this is part of what you've called the Moral Economy Project. So those seem key terms, and then you also talk about Right Relationship regularly, and that has Quaker roots, and then you talk about the Commonwealth of Life. So, this is a quite rich mixture of terms that you're using that I think are probably not part of what goes around in society here. It's not what Joe Sixpack usually uses. What is the special meaning of these terms, and why are they key to what you write in this book? Well, the idea of a moral economy is the idea that we should have an economy that's true to the moral traditions that transcend different religious sects, different societies. And we think that we don't have such an economy right now. An economy, for example, that is awash in money in many respects, and still leaves millions if not billions of people lacking in their basic needs. That kind of unfairness reflects a kind of immorality in the way we're running the economy. And it's not just an economy that's treating other people fairly or treating different classes of people unfairly, but also when it's treating the many millions of other species with which humans share the planet unfairly. So, it's an appeal to rethink the morality with which we humans decide to provide for ourselves all of the things we consume and the ways in which we throw waste back into the environment. I guess in part this book also tries to bridge the moral traditions that we've all grown up with in some respects. So, it's just basic principles like the Golden Rule, or moral principles that underlie appeals for fair sharing and so on. We're trying to bridge those ideas with scientific development, and then using those combined forces to describe what we think would be a right way to run the economy. So, I guess the next term was right relationship. Our idea for right relationship, first of all, was to describe something that would resonate with Quaker traditions. And right relating in Quakerism is the idea of responding to your fellow human beings, and we would argue more broadly to other life on the planet in a way that is true to your most inner spiritual beliefs and knowledge. The way we describe it in this book is by updating the basic, or one of the basic environmental ethics of the Aldo Leopold, who was a leader in the creation of the environmental movement in the United States. He laid a lot of the philosophical underpinnings of an ecological perspective that ultimately became very important in the environmental movement. So, he lived in the 1940s. He wrote that a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of biotic communities. So, this was a systems-based approach that we had to consider the impact that we were having on entire systems, entire communities. In order to reflect the development and ecology since then, which is recognized that ecosystems are constantly changing, there is no, they're not as static as was once believed. And so, the idea of resilience makes a little more sense these days than the idea of stability, resilience is the ability to withstand changes and still maintain the overall integrity of a system. And we also wanted to capture the idea that when we talk about the biotic community, we need to be talking about community, human communities, not just other life communities. And so, we wanted to capture this idea that humans are part of the community of life on the planet. So, our updating of Aldo Leopold's ethic became a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, resilience, and beauty of the commonwealth of life. And so, that brings me to the left term that you pointed out, Mark. The commonwealth of life, again, it's the idea that humans are part of a broader life community, that the capacity of the earth to support life, what we sometimes call in the book, the ecological capacity of the planet, is a form of wealth that's shared among all forms of life, humans and others. So, it's a form of wealth that we have in common, essentially, where the term commonwealth comes from. I do want to point out to our listeners, there are a lot of rich concepts in this book. It takes a good, solid reading, and I think college freshman is a good target. I don't think you're going to find any fifth graders reading it. The ideas are both extensive and deep, so wide ranging. One of the things that I was wondering, Jeffrey, you are an environmental consultant, evidently, in legal fields. So, somehow, environment and law are both part of your background. What is your actual degree? Well, actually, my undergraduate degree is in chemical engineering, and at the same time, I was pursuing that major. I was at Cornell University and took a lot of courses from a program of study called Science, Technology and Society. Over the course of those four years, I became more interested in the impact, the effects of what engineering was doing than in the actual design of, say, extraction columns or distillation columns, the kind of things we learned to design in chemical engineering. So, I shifted toward an application of that to the environmental field. It was something that I always was interested in, and worked in an environmental consulting firm. This was in the early days of the hazardous waste laws, the superfund and so on, where there was a big program just to find out where those sites were and to characterize them, the kind of threats they posed, the waterways and other things. And I had also then taken the exam to go to law school, the LSATs, and decided that was really where my interests and talents would be best applied. So, I ended up going to Michigan Law School in the mid-80s, so I have a law degree, a Juris Doctor degree, in addition to my chemical engineering degree. And a very useful combination during my career, right up to the work that I did in contributing to this book. And plus, somewhere in there, you're a Quaker, or just Quakers, and go way back. It seems to me that you've got all these professional qualifications, but a very essential qualification for being part of writing this book was some kind of a spiritual viewpoint that, I guess, harness the energy of your training. How far back does that go for you? Well, my father was the original Quaker in the family. He attended fourth more college in the 1940s. He went so far with his newfound religious and spiritual beliefs to burn his draft card and spend a year in prison in the late 1940s. I was raised going to Quaker meeting, and I have to say that being involved in this book has led to a kind of spiritual reawakening for me. One of the things in Quakerism I've always really liked, but misunderstood, was a saying from George Fox, who created Quakerism. I was heard this as an imperative. There was a saying that we should walk cheerfully over the earth and answer to that of God and everyone. And what I learned more recently, as I was writing this book, is that, in fact, there's an if-then character to that statement. So what it really is is that the statement is more like, and this will be a bit of a paraphrase, be an example. In other words, live your life in witness to what you know to be right, what you truly believe. And then you will walk cheerfully across the earth and answer to that of God and everyone. And the word God there doesn't have to throw people who may not have a religious bent off. I think there's a spiritual aspect to that if-then statement that's very powerful and that has given me a lot of something I've thought a lot about as I've written this book. Because it points up a real challenge, we say, in trying to work towards an economy that's not headed towards destroying the life support capacity of the earth. And that is to seek and find a sense of well-being, a sense of joy, a sense of spiritual enrichment from providing for yourself and getting rid of your ways in a way that's more in harmony with the earth and more within the capacity of the earth to provide and to assimilate things. And that, for me, hits a very deep spiritual chord that reinvigorated my Quaker roots. There is a leap of faith. There is a sense of magic and mystery involved in orienting yourself towards walking more lightly on the earth and having these wonderful, somewhat unexpected returns come back to you in the form of sense of spiritual enrichment and well-being. If you've just tuned in, this is Spirit in Action and I'm your host, Mark Helpsmeet. This is a Northern Spirit radio production. You can always find these programs out on my website, northernspiritradio.org, and we welcome your comments on that site. Today we're speaking with Jeffrey Garver, who is one of the five co-authors of a book called Right Relationship Building a Whole Earth Economy. And we're speaking right now with Jeffrey, who's up in Montreal. Jeffrey, one of the things, by the way, that I really liked about the book, that got it started off in a good foot for me, was the example you started off right with in chapter one about the woodstock farm market. Would you share that with our listeners? Because I thought it was a good microcosm of what the book had to address. The story about the woodstock farm market comes from Keith Helmuth. And let me just quickly say that what we tried to do to give this book and each of the chapters from context is to start out each of them with a bit of a story. And the idea behind the woodstock farm market in Woodstock New Brunswick is to have a market that's in tune with the local human communities and the local environment communities. So just the way in which the market participants worked out solutions to problems in cooperation. The idea that cooperating and caring for all members of the communities is an important part of it, rather than seeking only to see themselves as competitors with each other was an integral part of the market. What we end up saying is that what an economy should be for is not the kind of things we may think an economy for is right now, should not be oriented towards endless growth. It's unfortunate that despite the hopeful change that having Barack Obama elected as president has for many of us, he's still talking about the growth imperative, the need to grow. And what we're arguing in this book is that should not be what an economy is for. Economy should be for preserving and enhancing the integrity, beauty, and resilience of the commonwealth of life. And the Woodstock farm market, we think, is an example of a kind of economic activity that is much better oriented towards that goal. One of the things that I liked about that example of the Woodstock farm market was it got fairly concrete. You got to see things in a way that most of us can handle, whereas global forces are really hard to understand. The picture gets blurry when you see too many billions of people and species in the mix. And the Woodstock farm market said, "Oh, how do we make these decisions to limit how do we include things in and out?" And those forces, which we know as economics and so on, are really very little understood. The book talks about the history of economics and how we define what's worthy or not worthy. And one of the things that I was intrigued about when I first read about it maybe 20 years ago was alternate indexes. Right now we have GNP or GDP as measures of growth. And then there are alternate indexes which factored in better measures of how we're doing well, like, for instance, life expectancy or so on. Did you discuss that as part of the creation of the book, these kind of alternate indexes? Because people need something kind of simple to look at to say, "How are we doing?" We mentioned some examples. We highlight some problems with GDP. For example, GDP is simply a measure of economic activity. It doesn't tell you whether something is a helpful activity or a not helpful activity. So, for example, this is an example that others have talked about, something like the Exxon Valdez oil spill. All of the money gone up there to clean up the spill adds to GDP. Or another example, Peter Brown tells the story of his neighbor who grew up in Montreal his entire life. He's now in middle age and very recently bought an air conditioner for his house. Montreal was a place that used to be just fine in the summer without air conditioners, and it's now becoming a place where it's increasingly uncomfortable, at least for some portion of the summer. And that's what's called a defensive expenditure. You're adding to GDP by buying an air conditioner, but you're doing it in order to protect yourself against the effects of global warming. So, GDP, which has become a kind of orthodoxy, is hugely problematic. The other thing it doesn't do, it has no recognition or no entry point for a feedback signal from the atmosphere. When we're talking about climate change or from other ecosystems, to say you're overheated. The economy has gotten too big. So, we mentioned the need for other indicators. We talk about how the country of Bhutan has used something called gross national happiness to measure their well-being and their progress since the 1970s. There are other examples that hopefully will get increasing attention. The genuine progress indicator that the group redefining progress has been working to develop along with others is one that gives a much better indication over all of how we're doing. Another thing about GDP, it doesn't account at all for our using up of resources that are non-renewable. The best example there is fossil fuels, but there are others. Some of these other indicators better reflect that they incorporate things like ecological footprint, which is built on the idea of the limited ecological capacity of the earth. It's very, very hard politically to stop talking about growth. But what I think could be done in this administration, and hopefully this will be a message people will start saying to the administration that they would like to see much more in the way of these other measures. And then hopefully as soon as possible, we can start looking at those other measures to assess whether things are going well or not than on GDP. Because if we stay on this track of looking for endless growth in GDP, we are going to destroy the ecological base of the planet. We are going to destroy the atmosphere that we use as a think for greenhouse gases. These things are starting to happen, so we need to act rapidly to come up with alternatives. And the natural conclusion is that these things are going to come back right on our heads, that when we destroy the environment in which we live, we've poisoned the pond in which the frog is living and the frog dies, and that would be us gasping, I assume as we go along. One of the concepts you introduced as a kind of a formula in the book refers to the integrity of the system. And you write as a formula that it's a function of P-A-T-E, a population of fluence, technology, and ethics. And talk about that formula, what it means, and what it implies for us, if you would. When we talk, we introduce this formula in detail in the chapter "How Big is Too Big." That's where we talk about the need to have some kind of a thermostat for telling us when the economy is overheating and getting too big and overwhelming the ability of the earth to support life. That formula, some call it the IPAT formula, or I guess would be IPAT-T-E, or IPAT formula the way that we talk about it, was first presented in the 1970s by Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren. And a quick footnote there is that John Holdren is now in one of the White House offices, as I think he's the science advisor to President Obama now, so that might be a sign for hope. I think he would certainly understand the ecological crisis we're facing given his work on this formula. And basically it says that our total impact, and in my mind, the impact is more or less the same thing as ecological footprint, when we think of how much of the earth we're using. Our total impact is a function of population, just how many people are. Obviously the more people there are, the greater the impact if nothing else changes. Affluence, at least to date, how wealthy people are in terms of monetary wealth correlates quite closely with how much they consume the earth. Technology, and technology is something that can either increase impact if you think of something like the atomic bomb, and there's plenty of other examples, or something that can decrease impact if you look at various technologies, and luckily there's more and more of these that increase the efficiency of energy use and natural resource use. And we've extracted from those the fourth factor ethics. You can maybe consider them to be integrated or implicit in the others, but we think it's important to highlight. And ethics is just the idea that we can make deliberate choices, despite wealth, despite our numbers and so on, to lead lives that have lower impact. So even if you're wealthy, you can still decide to take the bus or to walk, not to buy a big gas pump, a cuckling car, or a private jet or so on. I imagine there will be some people out there who will say, "Why do we have to include this ethics in there? Why is that important? We're just talking about a scientific system." Can you say more about why that's important? What essential part it plays in the measure of the integrity or the impact maybe our footprint on the earth? Exactly how this would apply in terms of policy arenas, because when we talk about governance, we come back to this formula and say each of those variables is something that can be subject to policy. On ethics, take something like advertising, which is something we talk about in the book. A lot of advertising is just a fancy way to tell a lie, in my view. It's designed to be deceptive in one way or another. And the most insidious way in which it's deceptive is that the message a lot of advertising tells you is that for you to feel worthwhile, for you to be living the life you should be living, you need this product or this service. It's a lie because a lot of those things are not things we need. And there are things that collectively are creating impact on the earth that the earth can't handle. They're having a footprint that the earth can't handle. So the choices we make on what's allowed in terms of advertising and so on are probably most relevant to the e-factor in that formula. And we, by the way, we don't say we describe it as a framework because the interrelationship between those factors can be quite complicated. So it's not just a matter of multiplying population by affluence by technology in some form. It's really just describing the major variables that influence the overall impact. The people who are coming to this book, Jeffrey, with a kind of traditional economic point of view will have to have their heads twisted a little bit because people have been told, for instance, that any growth in the economy is good for us all because a rising sea lifts all boats, for instance. That's a common bit of supposed wisdom that's out there. I think you attack that notion and you say this is not true. Isn't it okay if we just keep going and have the rich get richer and the poor get a little bit richer, but this big disparity of income? Why is that not a valid economic model for the world? It really goes back to this basic notion that the economic theories on which that approach is built, again, have no way of recognizing the major scientific development over the last 200 years that explain to us how the earth works. What kind of real wealth, what's called natural capital, exists on the earth that's available for us to use. It's built on a notion of infinity, of infinite growth, where this growth depends on taking from the earth resources and sinks, which means where we throw things out, even though that capacity is limited. And there's a little story I can tell you about this. Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve Chairman, wrote a textbook on economics with a couple other authors, and it's on the order of 600 pages long. And if you look in the index of that book for things like climate change or deforestation, pollution, anything related to the environment and ecological crisis, there's either no entry there. You won't find that word in the index, or it refers you to page 20. And on page 20, there's a green box that says economic indicators don't do a very good job of linking the economy to natural systems. And then the other 600 pages of the book talk about how to use those economic indicators. It's a clean myth. It's a complete disconnect. It mattered less perhaps to rely on that kind of a theory when we were living in a world where we hadn't come up against the ecological limits. But all of the information, at least the prevailing information is that we are now at those limits and exceeding them. The consensus among climate scientists now seems to be that the safe level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is 350 parts per million. And if we don't get back down to 350 parts per million, sea level rise and all the other impacts related to climate change that will make life as we know it on this planet impossible are going to be unleashed and can't be stopped. We are already at something like 390 parts per million. There's a similar story to tell with regard to ecological footprint. Since the 1980s, we've been using one and a half Earth approximately, which means that we're using up the Earth and its bio-productive capacity faster than it can be regenerated. We're running an ecological deficit and the idea that if we just keep increasing GDP, if we just keep increasing monetary wealth, at some point we're going to have enough money to pay off that ecological debt. If you believe that, it's a form of insanity. It just doesn't work that way. This is a book that will twist the heads of people who are locked into that mind frame, but I think they have to realize that they don't have good answers to the basic questions that we ask in this book. And we need a completely different system. If all this book and told us about was how terrible the disasters are and what's looming, I don't think it would be breaking much in the way of new ground, but it's considerably more than that because, first of all, you go about analyzing the undergirding. What are the structural problems that are wrong that lead to this? And then a very exciting part of the book is you get into what are the changes we'll have to make structurally to prevent the coming disaster. Two of the concepts that you talked about in the book include global reserves and trustee ships. And you gave some interesting examples of how locally people have treated some of the earth's resources in common and how they use that as a feedback mechanism, as a healthy systems thing. Could you talk about that a little bit? I think it's one of the most delightful parts in the book. We argue in the book of the need for a set of global institutions to respond to what are global problems, so climate changes is one, and there are mechanisms that are being developed hopefully now with a change in the United States government. Those can go forward a little faster. And one of these, as you said, is this idea of a global reserve. The global reserve would be more or less akin to a federal reserve that's adjusting the money supply, but instead of working with the money supply and with interest rates and so on, it would be monitoring and making adjustments to use of the earth's total bioproductive capacity. Your listeners may be familiar with the idea of a cap and trade system for carbon dioxide. If this is going to be done in an honest and effective way, it will take something like this 350 parts per million limit that is acceptable in the atmosphere. Translate that into the amount of greenhouse gases we can collectively produce on the planet and then come up with some air basis for sharing and allocating and distributing the ability to produce those gases. Well, if you expand that concept to something like ecological footprint, basically what you have is a cap on the total ecological footprint, human beings are allowed to exert, and then a system for agreeing up on how that capacity is shared among people of the world. And the global reserve would be designed to do all of the hard research. This is obviously something that takes a tremendous amount of research and monitoring, something we don't do nearly enough of. Its responsibility would be to gather that information to support that kind of a cap and trade system. And then the idea of trust, one thing that's important about trust is that you set them up in a way where the trustees have some political insulation that many of our political leaders today don't have. And obviously that's challenging to do, but at least the notion of providing some insulation is important when you're talking about trust. Their obligation is to protect the trust. So if you set up something like a trust for the atmosphere, one possibility would be for the trust to charge a fee to anybody who wanted to use the atmosphere as a thing for their carbon dioxide. So in this way it could raise funds, the sort of tax from use of the atmosphere, and then use that tax to support projects that will reduce the impacts of the economy, or to address inequities in terms of the distribution of the ability of people to live a life with minimum needs to address some poverty issues. There could be a whole number of possibilities, but the basic thing in a trust is that the main obligation behind the trust is to protect the trust. And it's more powerful than the interest of any particular country or any particular individual. Part of that that I really liked was the change of reference that you give us. I'm afraid that right now people are used to thinking with a very strong set of blinders on. They're only looking at their own welfare. So like I get to do with my air or with the creek that flows through my property. And you propose that we start seeing these things as part of the commonwealth that the air that we have is collectively owned, and so people's use of it is not just their right to do anything they want with. Want that running into a lot of resistance as people give up their narrow focus of this is mine versus this is a community resource? Certainly in countries that are built on a very strong tradition and another form of orthodoxy related to private property, there will be some challenges here. And what can overcome that really has to be the realization that we're in a different context now than we have ever been in human history before. We just haven't in the way we're running our economy and the way we've developed those systems reckoned with the fact that they allow for an overconsumption of something that if it's over consumed is going to destroy us collectively. We're in this together one way or the other. What our book is appealing to is a notion of community, the motion to the human capacity, which this is where the hopefulness comes from. We know it's there. The ability of humans to get together and find a common solution to a common problem. Yes, particularly hard in a country like the United States, which has such a strong tradition of private property rights, but already there there are emerging new theories about environmental property and new ways that are by necessity needed in order for us to confront this ecological catastrophe. You do go into some extent, Jeffrey, in the book, the analysis of what governance possibilities are out there. And I like the fact that you take a wide and open view, you're recognizing that this is going to have to evolve as we learn what can do. Do we use a United Nations starting point or do we try and pattern something after the European Union or other approaches like that? Again, I'm assuming that this national fiefdom approach, which is so common in the world, will have to be transitioned in the way that the European Union has. Why has it been so successful in Europe? How have they been able to do it when there's certainly a lot of nationalism within those nations? And I'm asking this because I think it's going to be a hopeful sign for us that the European Union has been able to grow as it has. The hopeful lesson from Europe is exactly that, that a process that began as a process of economic integration eventually led to the recognition that to have a strong economic base or a strong economic union, there needed to be some basic rules that everybody agreed to on things like the environment. And so countries in Europe, while maintaining their strong cultural identity, have seeded their sovereignty in ways that we haven't yet in North America and other parts of the world to a centralized system. I think that we haven't done that among countries in this part of the world, but we have done it among states. And I think this is an important thing for Americans to think about, that as the environmental movement took hold in the 1960s and 70s, part of that was the realization that leaving environmental regulation and control to the individual states would lead to a kind of race to the bottom. They would trigger their rules so that they would attract economic activity, economic development, and put environmental concerns in the background. In other words, they could sacrifice them to get for development. The laws that were adopted in the United States in the 70s, in particular, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, a basic set of environmental laws were adopted with broad public support and bipartisan support in government. So there is a possibility to do that. And the other thing to look at is, even in trade agreements, the North American Free Trade Agreement, recent agreements that the United States has entered into in Central America and with South American countries, they all contain a provision that allows investors from a foreign country to sue the national government for compensation when they think their investment has been treated unfairly or is appropriated, contrary to the rules and the agreement, that's a form of waiver of sovereign immunity that can lead to multi-million dollar damage awards and they've been ordered and enforceable in court. So countries in this part of the world know how to feed sovereign immunity if they think the interest at stake is strong enough. Certainly, the ecological situation we're facing should be seen as establishing a set of interests where the countries of the world should be giving up their sovereignty. Now, we think it's important to underscore some important principles on how and when this should be done. First of all, should only be done when necessary. And given the ecological crisis, again, we think the case is very strong that it's necessary to have a new set of global rules. But there also need to be mechanisms that ensure the credibility of the institutions, that ensure their accountability and effectiveness, that ensure their transparency. We saw an awful example in the Bush administration of increasing levels of secrecy of government that's supposed to be representing us. Well, we need to know what's going on for that to work. And then the idea of subsidiarity, again, which is not only that you should only have global rules if they're necessary, but they should be implemented as much as possible at the local context to take into account local conditions. Now, all of this is quite complex, but what we've tried to do in this book is to put forth a set of principles, basic principles from which all of the new institutions and systems that are needed can be developed. So where do we go with the book, Jeffrey? I mean, you've got the book out there. And by the way, you said that you thought it took a long time to write the book two, three years. And my opinion is that co-writing with five authors on such complex interactions of knowledge, that's an amazingly short time to do it. You must have been working with considerable urgency to be able to do that. But now you've got the book. Where are we going from here? Is there going to be a blucatory course where everybody in the White House in the U.S. and all the other capitals of the nations are going to have to sit down and study the book? Are you all five of you out on the speaking circuit? How is this being used to impact the world at this point? Well, we do have an outreach program underway. We're all busy with other things, but are trying to get the word out as much as possible. Of course, bringing the book to attention to people is a challenge, and I'm delighted that you've had me on your show, Mark. We've been doing a number of other radio shows around the country. We've got meetings set up with some people in Washington. We're trying to set something up in Ottawa. Your hope is that when you write a book like this, it will take off in some way that does. In some respects, it's hard to predict. More importantly, is the idea of the book, how they'll take hold. And the last chapter of the book is the conclusion, or the four steps to a whole earth economy, and steps we outline are grounding and clarification, design, witness, and non-violent reform. So the first of those steps is really an awareness building step. It goes back to something I was talking about earlier on an individual basis. It's an understanding and awareness of the crisis that we're facing ecologically and about the disconnect of our economy from that crisis. That currently our way of providing for ourselves and getting rid of our waste, making things worse and not better. And there's an emergency to that. The design stage is where even if the political climate is not ready for certain institutional changes, that there should be an effort not just by experts, but also by people who are affected by these institutions to be involved in the discussion on what exactly they should do and how they should be. So that when a time comes and the climate is ready for them to be put in place, they're ready to be used. Witness is a concept that, again, draws from our quicker roots. In some respects, this is a walking the talk step. And we talk about the need for a mass epiphany at this stage, a growing number of people individually and collectively finding ways and demonstrating ways of living lives that have less impact on the earth. And the nonviolent reform is the implementation of the design stage and when the opportunity is right. And there we again take some inspiration and hope from models that worked in history. And in Quaker history, we talk about the model of the Quakers who used graphic illustrations, drawings of slave ships in the United Kingdom in the 18th century to draw the public's attention to the horrible conditions that slaves were subjected to. They were being transported from Africa. And to use that as a way to kind of hold a mirror, a moral mirror to people so that their consciences could start working in a way that would overcome their belief that you just couldn't have an economy without slaves. So the parallel is quite powerful. So many people today, including we authors, are confounded by the lack of choices we have sometimes given our modern society to live lives with lower impact. But an increasing recognition and awareness that overall the way we run our economy is destroying the earth's life support capacity provides a powerful incentive to search for a different way. Well, Jeffrey, I guess I've got one more question. How hopeful are you? And this you is both you, Jeffrey and the other authors. Did you come out of this feeling fresh hope? I personally do feel hopeful. I think there are the elements out there that can lead to the kind of changes we need. It's not just those examples in history. There are more contemporary examples, some of the ones that I mentioned. The fact that in the United States there was a kind of environmental revolution in the 60s and 70s when there was a centralization of environmental rulemaking that previously may have seemed impossible. We have models like the European Union and the downside of Europe is that Europeans still have very big footprints as well. There may be half of footprints, the ecological footprints in North America, but they're still quite large. So there's a lot more to be done there. But we also have this process going on at the international level to address climate change. It still has to bear fruit in a meaningful way. But it's fairly well developed. There is new leadership addressing those issues now. And if something meaningful can come out of there, we've gone far away towards setting up a model that can be used to address the broader ecological crisis. There are also things like the Earth Charter, a very well-fought-out set of principles for how we can have an international code or set of principles for running our economy. And that's been endorsed by thousands of groups, including some states in Brazil or some communities. So if that movement can spread and more people can commit to it and then find ways to implement it meaningfully, we're also well on the way to addressing these problems. That said, it's still hard to know exactly where this mass epiphany we think needs to happen is going to come from, but we'll use the hope with which we write this book to do whatever we can to contribute to it coming about. This is a wonderful, rich book that you've written, the right relationship, building a whole earth economy. But it's kind of old school to write books. Aren't you just supposed to do websites? Is there a website where people can connect about the material in this book and where they're going to find the book? Absolutely, Mark. Thanks for asking that. The website is moraleconomy.org.org. You can find information about the book. The authors will be adding more and more content about these interviews. We are hosting a symposium in Montreal in May, so that's open for people to register if they're interested. We're setting that up to have remote participation so that people can engage with us without having to travel. People are worried about their carbon footprint and so on, and we'll be looking other ways more through the Quaker Institute for the Future, and that website is QuakerInstitute.org to perhaps do some follow-up research and development of some of the ideas that are sketched out in more of a framework form in this book. So we want to recommend that you check out two different websites, moraleconomy.org, and QuakerInstitute.org, and you'll find connections, information about Jeffrey Garver and the other authors of the book, and their follow-up on right relationship, building a whole earth economy. Thanks so much for taking the time today, Jeffrey, to join me, and thanks for being part of this effort to rescue the earth and all of its inhabitants. Mark, thanks so much for having me on your show. It's been a real pleasure. My guest today has been Jeffrey Garver of the Quaker Institute for the Future's Project called "The Moral Economy Project," their book, "Right Relationship Building a Whole Earth Economy." The theme music for this program is "Turning of the World," performed by Sarah Thompson. This Spirit in Action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. With every voice, with every song, we will know this world alone. With every voice, with every song, we will know this world alone, and our lives will feel the echo of our healing.