 It's now my pleasure to introduce a very special guest, Dr. Peter Brown. He's written a book entitled, Right Relationship, Building a Whole Earth Economy, and we'll be speaking on that same subject. It's an excellent book, which I've greatly enjoyed reading, and it's in the bookstore, shameless plug for you. So I recommend going to take a look at that. I first heard of his book from some NGO colleagues who told me I just had to read it, and then once they heard he was speaking here said my job was to convince him to come back to New York and speak there as well. So we're really looking forward to this talk this morning. Dr. Brown's book, Right Relationship, uses the core Quaker principle of right relationship, respecting the integrity, resilience, and beauty of human and natural communities as the foundation for a new economic model. So I think it'll be a really interesting presentation. Dr. Brown is a professor in the School of Environment, the Department of Geography, and the Department of Natural Resource Sciences at McGill University. Before coming to McGill, he was professor of public policy at the University of Maryland's Graduate School of Public Affairs. He is the author of Restoring the Public Trust and the Commonwealth of Life, as well as this new book. And he's actively involved in conservation efforts in the James Bay and Southern regions of Quebec and in Maryland. So please help me in welcoming Dr. Peter Brown. Thank you, first to Peter, Adrienne, for inviting me to this wonderful conference, to Tara for a wonderful introduction, and to the organizer of the conference for interest in this topic. The idea of this book, which I'm going to talk in part about, came from a despair actually over the relationship between the macroeconomic processes of the industrialized societies and even non-industrialized societies and the well-being of the Earth's living systems. And so we decided to write a book that would try to examine carefully and critically that relationship, and it was written by myself, Jeff Garver, who also lives in Montreal, and with very substantial contributions from three other people, Keith Helmuth, from Frederickton, New Brunswick, Arias, Steve Sege, who teaches economics at Wilmington College in Ohio, and Robert Howell from New Zealand. So what I want to do, I'm going to change the emphasis of the speech a little bit in light of what Peter has talked about and what Arthur talked about last evening. I'm not going to spend any significant time on the dismal future. You know, I think that's been well documented, but I'm going to talk about how we can move away from that path and draw on the religious resources that we have, but I also want to spend a bit of time on some of the developments in science of the last 50 years or so and how they really reinforce and ratify basically of a high vision of the world because I think there is a remarkable but not complete convergence here. So what I'm going to hope for and provide hopefully an image for a moment of grace, a transformation of the human-Earth relationship based upon a combination of science and religion, and this is a phrase taken, a moment of grace is a phrase taken from Thomas Berry's really a terrific book called The Great Work where he envisions a possible re-envisioning of the human place in nature and the human place in the earth and in the universe. This is, I'm not going to talk about the dismal future, so I'm not going to talk much about this slide. This is the Alberta Tarsans project, one of the most egregious abuses going on on the face of the earth right now. If you want to help Canada, the best thing to do would be to boycott fuels coming from this source, have a Quaker friend who is a chemical engineer and trying to figure out whether we can find a molecular signature to oil from this source so that you could identify if it was in your, in particular petroleum sources. So we're not living up to our responsibilities in Canada even remotely on this subject, please help us. One of the themes of the book is right relationship and one of the ways to understand a tricky concept like that is to start with its opposite. And here's an example of the opposite of right relationship. This is the yellow line here, is the line for the size of the Arctic ice cap in the fall of 1979, where the ice is there is where it was in 2005. It shrank considerably in 2006, 2007, rebounded a bit in 2008, but the overall thickness of the ice continued to decline. This is an example of human beings being in a wrong relationship with the earth with basically being abusive and neglectful toward the earth. And we defined, as Tahira pointed out, right relationship as a relationship that respects the integrity, resilience, and beauty of human and natural communities. And what we need to do is to redesign the economic system so that rests on principles like that. Now, if you melt all of this floating ice from some points of view, it doesn't really matter very much. It's already floating. It's not going to make sea level rise significantly. But what it will do is change the heat balance of the northern hemisphere of the planet and will accelerate the melting of the Greenland ice cap. And I have a friend at McGill, Lawrence Mizak, who studies long-term climate trends. I asked him, what would it take to melt all of the natural ice on earth? And he said, well, get to 700 or 800 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, stay there for 100 or two years, and you'll melt it all. If you do that, you get 80 meters of sea level rise or about 260 feet of vertical sea level rise. This would obviously dwarf, I'm tempted to say swamp, the one to two meter rise that Arthur was speaking about last night. And it would destroy basically this civilization in every way as we now conceive of it. But that's where we're headed. We have no policies whatsoever to prevent that outcome. And so this is really the principle, a principle example of wrong relationship. This, most of you will remember who this is, Reverend Jones, who urged his followers to go to Jonestown, Guiana, and then to kill themselves, which they did. Here's a picture of several, many of them dead on the ground following his instructions. And my basic argument in this talk is that that's what we're being directed to do by our governments, by the Federal Reserve, by Secretary Geithner, by Professor Summers, that we're being urged to go forward with a way of relating to this planet that will basically undercut future human well-being dramatically and inalterably and negatively change the prospects of other life forms on the earth. So it's a sort of harsh indictment, but I think it's true. And we need to be aware of this and get off the bandwagon of this sort of false prosperity that we have. So basically we need to change the question, which we've been asking now for several centuries, how can we dominate and use nature? How can we live with an ethic of respect and reciprocity toward earth and the life on it? And if we can do this, I think we can change our hearts and minds in the way Peter has suggested, Gospeth has suggested. And to do this, we need to rethink citizenship, the economy, and our personal role in securing a just and flourishing earth. So four steps to write relationship, how we got on the wrong path, how to re-envision who we are, how to get economics and governance on the right path, and then what we can do as individuals. So part of that, I'm going to go a little light on this section because I think Arthur covered a lot of these issues very well last night. But I think the Western tradition has put us on a tragic course. It's taken several thousand years to get to this crisis, but I think the seeds of this crisis are in the foundational ideas of our culture. And I've been very influenced by Albert Schweitzer's philosophy of civilization, of which he completed two books in approximately 1923. There are actually two additional volumes that haven't been translated into English. In philosophy of civilization, Schweitzer makes the really bold claim that the Western tradition got off on the wrong foot by asking the question, what's good for humanity, not the question, what's good for life. And he says that this is a characteristic both of the Judeo-Christian tradition and of Greek thought. I take my student, when I'm teaching at McGill, I sometimes take my students to a very beautiful Catholic church, a St. Leon Catholic church in downtown Westmount. And we spend about an hour there looking at the images that are in that church. And on one part of the church, there's the scene of the creation and fall of man. Then there's the history of the church, kind of goes around the back. And then on the left-hand side, crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. And then on the ceiling is the depiction of the day of judgment. So it's the beginning of human history, all important events in human history, and the conclusion of human history are all represented in this church. One of the things I ask the students is, have you got anything like this, right? Anything worldview, right? You got any sort of comprehensive interpretation of human origins, experience, and destiny, and usually that's followed by a rather profound silence. What's interesting about, and many things interesting about this church, and it's a very beautiful place, but one of the things is the images are almost all about humans or God or buildings of humans and almost nothing about nature, right? Almost no pictures of landscapes or trees or anything like that. So I'm afraid that Schweitzer was right, and I think the same charge can be leveled against Plato and Aristotle. Okay, second problem is we have too narrow conception of morality. Recall that in the Good Samaritan story, Jesus has asked what one has to do to secure eternal life, and he tells then the Good Samaritan story where it turns out that the neighbor in question is another person, right? So in the Judeo-Christian tradition, moral obligation is almost, not completely, some of the things that Peter put on the screen this morning are exceptions to this, but it's almost all conceived of as obligations to other persons. Martia Sen just wrote a book, which I haven't read, but I've spoke with somebody about it called The Idea of Justice, in which it's just assumed that justice is only something that arises between persons. It's assumed that way. It's not argued and demonstrated that. That's just an operative assumption. So I want to come back to the, in fact, I have a picture at the end of this talk of eternal life, right? So it's not all talks have pictures like this, right? So you might want to hang on for that, right? So other things that went wrong, sort of it's like a sailboat that gets a little bit off course and then keeps getting more off course. I've done that myself. And another deflection point was the rise of Baconian science, where the object of science became getting power over the earth and of nature, as opposed on an Aristotelian conception of science to have understanding of nature and the earth, right? The idea that we can control and manipulate nature was another big, a big mistake in my opinion. As was the Enlightenment conception that mind is something that's uniquely human. Whereas in fact, and I'll try to show in a minute, mind is in fact bountiful, even ubiquitous on the earth and perhaps in the universe. Another, yet another difficulty is the pre-scientific character of our moral systems, both from the Judeo-Christian tradition and the Enlightenment. And I think it's very instructive to look at an analogy. There's a really great movie by Peter Sellers called The Magic Christian, where he's the richest man in the world in the movie. He's holding a board meeting of his company on a train and they're going through somewhere, I guess it's somewhere in New Yorkshire, not really sure. And he's pointing out that everything is going wrong. The profits are down, public confidence is down, and we should, you know, the company's in a mess. And so he says, gentlemen, they're all men, he says, you're fired. Train stops, the door opens, and they get off. And he hands each of them a map. But it's not a map of Yorkshire, right? It's a map of anywhere, basically New Zealand, northern Norway, Paris. And so they're not maps of where they are. And our moral maps are not maps of where we are, right? So we're lost, basically, right? We haven't been able for very complicated reasons to connect our scientific knowledge with our ethical systems, right? And I can give some examples of this a little later on. Thomas Berry points out that we need a moral system which includes, excuse me, moral frameworks which include duties to systems, not just duties to individuals. And our moral systems are almost entirely individualistic in their orientation. And the last problem of our tradition is that we're somehow, rather no matter how much we mess up, we'll be rescued from somewhere else, right? And so somebody will come or something will come from outside and help us reach justice, as in the Book of Revelations, I guess, would be an example of that. And it's very much in the theme of what's been said at this conference so far and in the Baha'i readings, teachings that I've been reading, that if there's to be a rescue, it has to come from within us. We'll find spiritual resources that will help us to accomplish that, but we are key players in getting this going. So how could we possibly reconstruct a worldview, that would lead to better outcomes than this? And here are, it's a big question, obviously, and I'm only giving some examples of suggestions. And I'm going to spend a little bit of time in this section on some contemporary developments in science, which I think are crucial in understanding our role in the universe and how we fit into it. I love the picture in an impeter's presentation of a galaxy or something. I'm not sure which one it was. This is a very famous photograph at this point from the Hubble-based telescope. It's called The Pillars of Creation. And what it shows is a vast process underway of creating of the creation of stars. Basically, these are huge columns of gas. The distance on the left-hand column, the distance from the bottom to the top is six light years. So it's enormous. It's being bombarded by ultraviolet rays. And these are sort of uncovering and liberating, if you like, energy, balls of energy that can become things like our sun. Some of them don't. They blow up or collapse or don't fail to make that. But this basically is a star factory or a place where new suns are being made. And this is going on all the time in the universe. So from the point of view of contemporary science, the universe is a creative process, not a created process. It's something still unfolding. It's not something created at an instant and then left alone. So what are some of the properties of a universe with these characteristics? And this is somebody before I gave this talk, this lady sitting here in second row wished me good luck on this talk. And if I needed it, I needed it for this slide and the next slide. After that, pretty much easy. Easy going. But anyway, thank you for that. So what do we know from a scientific point of view about the evolution of the universe? That's a big subject, obviously. But I'm going to talk about some general features of that process. It's generally conceded that there was an event around 14 billion years ago called the Big Bang, an enormous explosion that began in the present universe. What happened before that? We don't know. We don't even know if there was a before that. And what people who work in this field now say is that the characteristics of this process that began 14 billion years ago is that it was basically an evolutionary process. Biological evolution, as discussed by Darwin and others, is a special case of a general characteristic of the universe. So the universe began as a rather, in some ways, quite simple thing and has become, through evolution, more and more complex. A very, very good book on this by Shea Song called The Epic of Evolution, just a terrific, terrific book. There's also a nine-page summary of that which you might want to look at rather than a 500-page book. But as an author, I hate not to say a Bible. Okay, so what makes this thing work is about 300,000 years after the Big Bang, there was a division between matter and energy and set up basically a temperature gradient in the universe. The universe, in a way, is trying to get rid of anything where there's a gradient. So if I hold up my watch, there's a gradient between my watch and the floor. If I let go of my watch, it'll fall and hit the floor. What the second law of thermodynamics does is to describe that process as it works in the entire universe. The universe is trying to get to cool itself off. And so the second law of thermodynamics is a description of that attempt to get rid of that temperature gradient. This is referred to in some of the literature on this as the law of laws. This is why everything in the universe isn't the same as everything else. Why is there difference? Why am I different than you? Why is this microphone different from my watch? All of these things, all these differences are made possible by this effort, if you like, on the part of the second law of thermodynamics or the universe to cool itself off. This law describes the processes that reduce temperature and other gradients, and this process is referred to as entropy. Now, this is a concept that terrifies lots of people. It is a kind of worrying idea, and it's also a little bit difficult to grasp. Here's a good example. If you loan your car to your son, does it ever come back better? No, right, basically, right? It's always something a little bit different and not improved, right? Now, you could think that's just because he's rude and inconsiderate, but that's not true. He's actually trying to teach you that if you don't continually put new energy and investment into something, it falls apart, basically, right? That's what entropy is. Entropy is the tendency of everything to disintegrate, if you like, or to reach an equilibrium with the things around it. Now, so that's a sort of overall direction of the universe is toward simplicity, or everything going back to being the same as everything else. But in the universe, so that's the characteristics of the universe as a whole, but within the universe, there are places where new energy is flowing in, right? So these are called open thermodynamic systems. So the earth is an open thermodynamic system because we're getting new sunlight all the time. And because of this, we are able to support complexity, complex things like you and me, complex things like this association, like this city, like this nation, and so forth. So the universe is at once running downhill through entropy, but in certain places it's running uphill, and the earth is one of those places. And this is the toughest part of this lecture here, this next idea, or two ideas. So how the earth does this was clarified, or excuse me, how the universe does this, was clarified substantially in the 1970s through the concept of dissipative structures. And the idea here is that that thermodynamics works by finding ways to get rid of heat more efficiently. So if you're cooking an egg on a stove, you turn on a burner, nothing happens for a little while, then lots of little bubbles, and then if you leave it on, lots of big bubbles, right? And after a while you'll get a rolling boil. Those big bubbles are dissipative structures, right? They're trying to throw off the heat that you're pumping into it from the burner as fast as possible. And these become self-organizing, right? These bubbles can kind of pull themselves together and hold together just for an instant or two. And if you look at things through these two concepts of dissipative structures and self-organizing entities, you can think of them in very common sense ways. So for example, look at the wind patterns on the earth. The wind is basically an attempt on the part of the air on the earth, if you like, to become the same temperature everywhere. Okay? So the earth, it's always hotter at the poles, excuse me, always hotter at the equator than at the poles. And what the currents, the air currents, the winds are doing is they're trying to bring about a thermal equilibrium on the earth. They're trying to get rid of the temperature gradient, right? So they're doing what the universe is telling them to do. They're never going to succeed because of the angle at which the sunlight strikes at the equator is different than the angle at which it strikes at the poles. So the winds have got a kind of perpetual job never going to win. The ocean currents are the same way, right? Ocean currents are an attempt to get the temperature of the ocean to be the same, and they're not going to succeed either for the same basic reason. Okay. Now what's what happened and what's really exciting to me, at least in the, particularly in the mid-1990s through work by a Canadian who unfortunately died very young, James Kay, was to look at life as a process like that, to say that the evolution of life on earth is basically a dissipative structure, right? It's an attempt, or it's a design feature, if you like, that allows us to dissipate heat more efficiently, right? So the heat dissipators are already at work, or the wind and the ocean currents and other things like that. But living beings are also heat dissipators. And also what Kay was able to show is that ecosystems are heat dissipators. So if you look at it this way, the universe is always, is both creating complexity and destroying complexity at the same time. And what's happening on earth is we're a sort of window or island, if you like, where complexity is being created in a whole universe in which the net effect is to destroy it. Okay. So I just want to talk a little bit about how mind and spirit fit into this picture. So looked at this way, the universe has direction, but no destination, right? So it's a train headed somewhere, but it doesn't know exactly where. It's an optimizing process, right? It's an attempt to find the most efficient way to cool itself off that it can find. It isn't necessarily going to succeed in cooling itself off. In fact, we know it isn't. But it's trying to be as cool as it can be. So a tropical forest, for example, is a very efficient heat dissipator. In the atmosphere above a tropical forest, it's typically very cool, right? Because it's been in a very efficient way to get rid of the heat. So the human mind and the human spirit are emergent properties that are implicit in the universe from the beginning, as Telyard Deschardin says. So mind is not something on this view that starts the universe. It's something that emerges from the universe. And what we regard as spirit, which we experience as spirit, is an emergent property of this very long evolutionary process. Okay, now if you accept that so far, then we want to look at where there are other minds are, where the humans are the only minds. And I think this is one of the places where we got off on a very bad direction, because mind is widespread. And there's a beautiful quote here from Henry Best in the Outermost House. I worked hard on trying to shorten this, but I really decided not to, because it's so beautifully written that I couldn't help but degrade it. So here's what he says of them. And I guess I'll read it, but I'll read it a little bit slowly, because it's very beautiful. Imagine he's just a book written about Cape Cod. So he's looking at seagulls and whales and sea otters and things like that as he's writing this. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we air and greatly air. The animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete. Gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings, they are other nations. Caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth. I will come back to this idea when I talk about the idea of communion toward the end of the talk. Now you might think, well, okay, and I can tell you some stories, some how we figured out whether beavers can think or not. Let me tell you they do, right? And they're a lot smarter and some things than we are. But do plants think, well, in a way they do, right? If you live in the country and you have a septic system and you plant a maple tree near it, the maple tree will harvest the nutrients from your septic system rather rapidly because the maple tree has a capability of changing its behavior in response to new information, right? So there's mind all around us. We've got glasses or screening or conceptual screens on it to make it hard to see. Okay, so that's sort of point one. Let's think about how the universe works and how we fit into that. Point two is just the image here. This is from Voyager in 1987, a photograph of the earth from four billion miles. The little bars there are just so you can see where the earth is and see how tiny it is. Here's what Carl Sagan had to say about it several years ago. Basic idea here is it's a very small thing in a very, very big place, right? And we have the opportunity at our junction in history to nurture and support and enrich this place where we are taking the opportunity to degrade it. Here's what Aldo Leopold, we drew on a lot in our book, has to say about this. This is written in the early 1930s. Basic problem is to get into right relationship or basically to get into a respectful relationship with the planet where we live. To do this, I think we have to rethink citizenship or recover citizenship, maybe is a better phrase. If you made a list of mistakes in the 20th century, it would be a really long list, but one of the ones that would be near the top is the substitution of consumer for citizen, right? Government thinks we're consumers basically, right? And we won't put up with anything that doesn't appeal to our consumer dimension of our personality. We should insist on dropping that vocabulary and getting a better one. What is citizenship? Well, a terrific book on this subject is by James Karst, a very short book called Finite and Infinite Games. And in that book he makes a distinction between finite games like football or baseball or hockey, things like that, where the point of the game is to win, the rules are set in advance, the number of players is set in advance, no new players can be substituted, etc. Everybody knows all those rules. But he says there's also an infinite game or set of infinite games, and those are games where the point of the game is not to win but to keep the game going. That's civilization. That's this association, right? People don't want to win in this association. They want to keep this conception of themselves and of the universe going. So we're players, we're all players in finite games, we all want to win certain things, but we're also players in an infinite game. Rufus Jones at Quaker, who taught at Haverford College where I went, Lolo before I went there, refers to human beings as amphibian, right? We're both within time and outside of time in our experience. And when we're playing as finite players, we're in time, but when we're playing as infinite players, we're taking the perspective of 5,000 centuries, of taking an extremely long view. So the ultimate infinite game is evolution. And what we're doing now on the Earth is stamping that out, basically, through biodiversity loss, through cultural loss, through the loss of languages and so forth. Okay, the last point I want to make in this little section is this will probably offend some people, but I don't see a way around it. Not only frontal male nudity, but other things may offend them. So I think the idea that God made man in his image embodies a kind of dualism that's been very, very damaging, that we're somehow separate from and better than the rest of nature. And also that God gave the world to man for his use, right? Something that Locke makes a lot of although the passage that Peter quoted from Psalms this morning goes in a different direction. These ideas legitimate the destruction or the degradation of the Earth. Now, I'm quite aware that there's a large literature on the concept of dominion and how it's been translated in King James and other translations of the Bible. But I still think the predominance claim that Lynn White Jr. makes in his very famous article that there's a dualism built into this religious framework is true and it's one we really have to take to heart in dealing with and setting aside. So the ultimate act of hubris is to improve on Michelangelo and I got one of my students to do that. So we need a different sort of image of ourselves, right? We're not special creation. We're part of a long co-evolutionary process which hopefully will continue indefinitely into the future. So how does this fit into economics? Well, it has a lot to say about economics because basically economics, the current macroeconomics which I want to talk a little bit about now is part of a wrong narrative, right? It's part of a set of metaphysical, theological, and scientific assumptions that are wrong. And because it's embedded in that system of thought, it's bringing mayhem to this planet. So in the breakfast room this morning, the Wall Street Journal was there. I got there a little early. If you're wondering why there weren't enough, that's why in part. Europe recovers as US lags. I can barely read things like this because this is a legitimation of destruction of the Earth's natural systems without any regard for the fact that that's what's being done. I think the environmental damage of the rebuilding of American and British and mainland Europe consumption is not even mentioned in a newspaper like this. So these guys are lost basically, right? Let me name who they are. Secretary Geithner. Well, I already named them, right? You know this. It's a rogues gallery, right? Of rascals. Okay. So what's the economy for? Well, they say it's for full employment or high levels of employment, low inflation, and increased consumption as measured by GNP. There are lots of studies about why the GNP measure isn't very good, useful, but they haven't gotten past those studies. So the chief data displayed on the front of the paper is the resurrection of GDP growth in Europe. So we ask five questions of them and we think they can't answer any of these satisfactory. What's it for? How does it work? How big is too big? What's fair? How should it be governed? So I just want to quickly answer those from our point of view. In the background of this slide, by the way, it's on my farm in Southern Quebec, a place I call the Cathedral. Okay. What's the economy for? Well, ironically, we think that the person who had the right answer to that question, John Maynard Keynes, who invented macroeconomics. Keynes was a delegate to the Versailles conference near Paris at the end of World War I. He left the conference in a huff, went back to England and wrote a book, a very important book called Economic Consequences of the Peace, which said that if you impose this peace treaty on the Germans, the one that's being proposed at Versailles, you will get large-scale unemployment in Germany, get inflation, financial collapse, the rise of a dictator, and another war. Wrote that in 1919. 1939, that all more or less came to bear, a tragic turn of events if there ever was one. So what Keynes did in the mid-30s was to try to come up with a conception of economics that would prevent, basically, economic instability. And that's the book, the very famous book, the most important book in economics in the 20th century, General Theory of Employment Interest in Money. The purpose of economics, as I read that book, is that economic policy is to bring about social stability. What we don't want in particular, sorry about this ladies, is large numbers of unemployed males. That's just bad public policy. And so what we need to do is to find ways to create enough employment so that we don't get that consequence. Okay, that's so far so good, but what Keynes left out for very complicated reasons historically is the world, basically, right? Forgot about the earth, right? So what we just say, right, what we aim for is stability or resilience or the ability, if you like, to keep the game going, but we've got to broaden the framework to include the well-being of the earth's life support and biological systems. So here's a picture of what the economy is for, in my opinion, right? It's for a resplendent, feaken, beautiful, life-bursting earth. That's not the one we've got, though. Okay, how does it work? Well, this is the most banal remark ever you're ever going to hear, probably, that I'm about to make, is the economy is part of the universe. I could think, well, okay, that guy stood up there as a professor and everything, you know, what a jerk. You might think that's not really news. Well, here's a book, hold this way, I probably can't see it, by Benjamin Bernacke, Andrew Abel, and Dean Krushor, called Macroeconomics. This book was published in 2008. My son used it when he was a student at the Columbia Business School last year. I didn't want to buy the book for obvious reasons. Now, what this book, this book is up to date scientifically for January 1, 1800. There is no systematic connection in this book or in this framework of thought between the way macroeconomic policy is thought about and the science of the last 200 some odd years. No connection to thermodynamics, no connection to evolution, no connection to complex systems theory, no connection to ecology. None. If you look up climate change, ocean acidification, the whole thing on all the things on Arthur's list, last night you either have no entry or you refer to page 30. On page 30, there's a green box. And in the green box, sorry about that being so loud, it says, ideally for the purposes of economic and environmental planning, the use and misuse of natural resources in the environment should be measured into national income accounts. Unfortunately, they are not. Okay, we'll see how I can show you this book for an estimate. It's a little bit like a book, right? And big pages, okay? The last, so there's a 585 more pages of that book, right? Are used even though he's just acknowledged that he hasn't got any systematic way of thinking about the relationship between what he's doing and the earth, life support systems. So this is really, really a dangerous bunch of guys. Okay, so how does the economy work? Well, basically, you have to think about it in terms of two budgets. The first budget is what I call somehow the complexity budget. It's the ability of the earth to support complex systems through photosynthesis, right? The driver of everything we do is, the basis of everything we do is the ability of green plants to convert sunlight into usable energy. Have you thanked a green plant today? That used to be an old bumper sticker. Not around so much anymore. If you haven't, you should because it wasn't for them, you wouldn't be here. Okay, so the earth has only a certain limited ability to support life. And it also has a limited ability to support or to rather to assimilate in a benign way the waste stream from industrial society and other sources. Thank you. So one of the many things that the current macroeconomic framework doesn't take into account, these two features of our spaceship, this pointed out by Kenneth Boulding in a very famous speech written in around 1965 called Spaceship Earth. So the basic unit of wealth is not dollars. It's the photosynthetic capacity of the earth to support life. And this leads to rethinking of some of the basic ideas in economics. So money looked at this way, paper money or credit card debt or things like that, our rights we give each other to use some of the earth's limited life support capacity. This conception is not at all evident in macroeconomic policy. And I'll skip just to the last item here. A budget then is a way of thinking in a systematic way about how much of that life support capacity is being used and why. I can come back to some of these other things if you want later. How big is too big? Well, the answer here is self-evident. I think it's too big if it overwhelms the earth's life support systems, both in its ability to support complexity or create complexity and its ability to absorb the waste stream. And so the answer is the economy too big. It's much too big. It's not only too big, it's much too big, much too big already. That's what all of the much of the list that was in Arthur's talk last night is about. It's about this thing being too big. So we're now celebrating a recovery of a return to mayhem. Okay, so what's fair? Okay, well, one of the things that we argue, and it's a complicated subject obviously, is that fairness is something that accrues between humans, between humans of different generations, and between different species. So human beings are using up about 50% of the net primary productivity, about 50% of what green plants can produce to support life on earth is being used by us, something around that. We're one of about 20 million species. You ever take five? So we're basically using up half the pie. Seems like it might be a little overreaching. It's also, I just want to make a quick illustration here of the problematical nature of some of our moral concepts. So when, because they're not connected to science in a systematic way, when, and it's true of human rights ideas too, not just the older ideas from Plato and Aristotle and the Bible. So when Obama goes to Russia or Prime Minister Harper of Canada goes to China, they're instructed by NGOs to scold the heads of those governments about human rights. And I don't know whether they do or not, but probably they need scolding, and if they do it, great. What they don't get at all is that the primary human rights violators, par excellence, is us. Every morning during the week, there's a traffic jam in Montreal and in most other North American cities. Those, they're regarded as inconvenient. You're told over the radio how to avoid it, all that kind of stuff, but you can't, of course. Those traffic jams are killing people in other parts of the world. Systematically, day in, day out. But we don't want to hear that, because once you hear that, then it undercuts the consumer culture, which is what these guys are trying to keep alive. Okay, how should it be governed? Well, we need to really rethink governance completely, and I'm going to spend a few minutes on this and then conclude. You can't get to a proper conception of the future using, with all due deference, the framework of the Stern report cannot get to where we need to get to with the theory of market failures for a lot of reasons. We've really entered the period when the nation state is, the inability of the nation state to deal with the problems that we've got is strongly upon us. And it's a, let's see, I've done something here I'm not supposed to do. We need to move beyond the nation state as a metaphysical, anachronism, and a moral and metaphysical impediment to what we need in the future. Now, one thing we could do is, of course, leave governance to the people who are already doing it, who are the high priests of the state sponsored religion. The man on the left is Mark Carney, he's the head of the Bank of Canada, that's Ben Bernanke, obviously on the right. There was an issue of the Claims magazine a few years ago that had a picture of the president of Iran on the cover, and it said, the most dangerous man in the world. And I said, well, that's not right, can't possibly be right, because what about the guy in the White House? And then I thought, well, that's not really right either, because the most dangerous man is the Fed chief, right, because he believes in infinite growth in a finite system. And what makes him even more dangerous is that nobody knows these dangers. So we need to get beyond these guys, head of the Bank of Britain and Bank of England. We need to rethink the governance problem altogether, and I'm going to give a couple of reasons here. When the national governments like the United States, Canada, and so forth were set up, the scale and velocity of environmental change was small, and maybe even negligible, and certainly unnoticed, but now it's fast and large, right, and the governments are not, as you can see just from what happens, not able to deal with it. Going down to the third reason, many governments, including the government of the United States, I'm sorry to say, have been captured by their elites, and they do not act in the public interest. And so the ability, when the governments go to meetings like the Copenhagen meeting coming up, they're not really looking to the well-being of the world system, they're looking to the well-being, I'm sorry to say, of their own, in this case, financial elites, for the most part. Why isn't international governments working? Well, again, there are lots of reasons, just going to take a couple of them. There's no means to ensure fairness. You have in the world today vast inequalities in wealth of people who are desperately poor and people who are rich beyond belief, and we have no way systematically to redress those problems. I'll come back to that in a minute. Last, and the second, third reason here that I'll mention, power imbalances, the world, particularly the Security Council, much too weighted to giving power to the winners of World War II, the United States, Britain, France, China, and Russia, also, by the way, the largest arms exporters in the world, perhaps should be renamed the Insecurity Council. So what to do about this? Well, and here the overlap between what we're suggesting and the suggestions from the Baha'i readings, it's really phenomenal. We urge for some sort of global democratic federalism, possibly modeled on the European Union. We urge trust for the protection and restoration of the global commons, some kind of analytical capacity, the Earth Reserve or Global Reserve, to understand how the Earth works and how the economy could fit in it. And we suggest using a formula by Ehrlich and Holdren of the IPAC formula, where impact is a function of population, affluence, and technology. We added the ethics variable there to highlight conduct or spiritual, moral issues. But basically we need some capacity to figure out how to reduce very substantially the human impact on the Earth. And the four variables with which we have to work are population size, wealth, our affluence, technology, and conduct. And we think that we need to allocate certain capacities or certain impacts to different nations, and nations have to decide whether they want to be large in population, rich, have a different technology, or have a different ethics. But those are the sort of theaters of public policy. And then lastly we favor the strengthening and making mandatory a world court, some images of these things at global federalism, that's the European Union obviously. A very good book by a friend of mine, Peter Barnes, setting up a trusteeship for climate, for the United States. This is an idea we generalize in our book. In Quebec, where we're in southern Quebec, there's a beautiful apple growing region. When the apples are harvested in the fall, there's about 10 or 12 great varieties, you can also buy apples from New Zealand at about the same price. We need to tax the use of the commons, the oceans and the atmosphere, and we need to use that money to redress, among other things, the grinding poverty in the world. This idea I already mentioned, figuring out how the earth actually works and fitting the economy to it, and using the iPad formula or something like it to figure out what that looks like. Here's an image from Bob Costanza. Basically what I've been talking about for about half an hour now, the earth is a system which receives free energy from the sun. Everything on the earth, or almost everything on the earth, operates from that energy source, and then waste heat is dissipated back out into space, but we have no analytical grasp of how that works that's been adopted in macroeconomic planning. Lastly, we need to strengthen the world. So what to do? We suggest four ways of thinking about this based on looking at people who've been very effective agents of social change. Nelson Mandela, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Chico Mendez, the woman, I don't remember her name, I was head of mothers against drunk driving. We look at those people, they go back to what Thoreau called the fountain head, right? An inner source of energy and conviction, a place of where they find a foundation, if you like, where there's something on which they can stand. They find here a way, an inner strength and resolve, and they connect from here, as Arthur was talking about last night, the inside to the outside. The second thing is, we need to figure out what we want to do, right? And we've suggested in the book, those four things I just talked about, the four institutions, we then need to work toward a public epiphany, or a public change in consciousness, as Peter was talking about this morning. And then we need to move to some sorts of nonviolent reform, and in the Quaker tradition is what we call witness, or bringing to the public consciousness a wrong and insisting that it be changed, even if that requires civil disobedience or direct action. Here's a picture or a drawing made by Quakers around the year 1800 of the slave ship Brooks, a diagram of the conditions under which Africans were brought to North America. These ships were very crowded, as you can see from this, and many people died on this due to that and other adverse conditions. This served in part, there were other factors, to galvanize the British public to say this is not acceptable by British, in the moral traditions of Britain or Christian values, and in 1813 about slavery was abolished in Britain by the parliament, in part due to these activities of the Quakers, not the only people doing anything. They didn't want that to be their legacy. Well, this is our legacy, the way we're headed, right, with, you know, they basically take Arthur's number from last night, one meter sea level rise displaces 150 million people. That's refugee flows that we don't have any idea how to deal with, basically. James Hansen says that sea level rise by 2107 will be 15 feet, so basically roughly five meters or four and a half meters. That's where we're headed, and it's essential to get off that path. So could this be our moment of grace? Could we do what Gus and Mary Evelyn and many other people are urging us to do? Could we reconceive of our place on earth and our place in the universe? In a universe it learns, in a universe, it's not only civilization that's continuously advancing, it's the universe that's continually advancing. The universe is becoming more complex, more varied all the time, and that was happening on earth until the last several centuries. We need to move from consumer to ecological citizen, think of ourselves as embedded in the cosmos and in the workings of the earth. We need a new economics and new governance, and we need them urgently, and the challenge to do all of this is great, but big-scale social change has happened before, and the alternative, which is staying on the present course, is unthinkable. So we need to do, coming back to Thomas Berry, what Thomas Berry suggests here, we need to become in right relationship with the earth and to have a relationship where we're nurtured and the earth is nurtured, and where we change our view of the universe as composed of subjects to be communicated with, not as objects to be exploited. Use as our primary relationship with the planet must be abandoned, and just keep my promise, victory of eternal life. This is a picture taken by a colleague of mine, Catherine Scott in the James Bay region of Quebec. It's one black spruce growing out of another. The baby is on the top, obviously, and the stump is the older. So I can't get immortality out of my metaphysics, but I do get a flourishing earth. Thanks for listening. Thank you very much, Peter. I think we've all really appreciated the overview of the challenges we're facing and the way that you've approached the new system that we need from both a scientific and ethical or spiritual perspective. So I'm sure there's going to be a lot of questions from that, and I really, really appreciate your effort in coming here to present that with us. So thank you so much.