 And so you have smart people, you have a resilient planet, that's where growth comes from, not from money itself, it comes from people and land. So I see the international institutions like the IMF and the UN, the environmental program, WTO, they're all kind of specialized and fragmented. It seems to me we take global institutions and we put them together with ecological knowledge, and then the investments and the credit are based on restoring people and the planet. My name is Ann Davis. I have been teaching at Marist College for a number of years. So Mainstream Economics has several assumptions which render climate change invisible. One of them is zero cost of disposal. So you can produce something and put it in landfill with no impact. It also assumes instantaneous equilibrium. So there's no time involved in Mainstream Economics, whereas accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere is time dependent. Mainstream Economics also ignores history and so assumes markets are infinite and perfect and there is no need for any other solution. COSIS Theorem, which is brilliant, allows people to negotiate. If I'm bothering you, I negotiate with you and you give me a payment so that I feel better. So whether it's secondhand smoke and you pay me so I can smoke, but then if you get secondhand cancer is financial compensation sufficient. And COSIS also assumes zero cost of negotiation, good faith. The payments can go either way with no problem so there's no income constraint. It's brilliant because it recognizes externalities which are usually not recognized. It's an individual property owner solution. It doesn't address the systemic issues related to climate change. So Nordhaus, who won the Nobel Prize for his work on climate change, calls it the very most difficult problem that economics is facing. And so he's like the leader but he admits in a way that he doesn't have a solution. Climate change is a systemic problem which the existing framework essentially blocks out. And so I would refocus the framework on a holistic relationship of humans to the earth. Property is one of those relationships. So economics is concerned with me and my property. So I have incentives to make the best use of my property to get the most income but in fact my property is affected by other people's property. So it's beyond nuisance, it's beyond externality, it's a systemic relationship. And I think with the Anthropocene we've reached a point where human population is the dominant force of earth systems. And we can't do that on an individual basis. Mainstream economics assumes the individual. And I think it's a social collaborative systemic problem. So it's really beyond the reach. So Locke says, OK, God created the earth. We enjoy it in common as humans. But I can extract from the commons from my own survival. That ignores the fact that how I use my property affects the survival of everyone else. And if we all cut down all the forests, which we're close to doing, the earth systems don't sustain any of us. And to have a solution, we need a collective set of rules that restore the ecology. To me it's almost like a paradigm shift. So from Ptolemy to Copernicus, we understand that the sun doesn't revolve around the earth. It's the reverse. The earth revolves around the sun. And now we have to, I think, have another significant shift. That the earth is not there for human enjoyment. The earth is fragile. And humans need to protect the earth for survival. So it's no longer my own work as an individual feeds me. It's that we, as a human collective, need to figure out new ways to relate to the earth. And I think we're close. I think our system science is already there. We're just not listening. So instead of individual private property, this is mine. And I reap the rewards of how I use it in terms of food if I'm a farmer, in terms of financial if I'm an investor. Individual property is no longer a foundational principle that's sustainable. It needs to be collective property of various kinds. There are examples of collective property like co-ops and co-housing and condominiums and parks and preserves and conservation areas in cities. We have collective property, but we don't see it. And we don't think that humans know how to use it. So like Garrett Hardin would say, if it's collective, we abuse it, and it doesn't work. I think we, as humans, are capable to communicate, to understand the problems, to address them, and to have new rules of use of land. So I think when property relates to land, we need different practices of land use to understand how each parcel is part of a whole and what are these global systems that affect that parcel and how do I, as a person, understand those global impacts and work with them, not against them. So a few years ago, I participated in a project like, okay, what's your utopia? And so yes, it was fun to think about. And so I'm starting with the idea from Carl Polanyi and others that part of the reason people are desperate is they have to work to live, to get enough money to buy food and housing. Housing and food are conditional on wage labor, and that makes us all a little desperate. You know, we need to work to live. Instead of having my home depend on my wage labor, which is conditional on my employer and his profit, I would start the other way and say, assume you have a home and that you are in this home with other people and you have rights to reside in this home as long as you observe the ecological principles that avoid damage to the extent possible and that restore the landscape of that area. And so one thing is to reduce the contingency of my residence so that I can invest in it, I can invest with my neighbors, and we together can build a livable community. So just to digress a little bit, real estate is now valued based on location. The location is based on transportation, foods, parks, school districts. And so the things that really give value to that individual house, that individual parcel are public goods. But we forget that and we say, oh, it's just the house and it's just the market. OK, so I would internalize that and make a community aware of its ecology and work together to preserve it. I've lived in Hudson Valley, New York for now some decades. I grew up near a river and I live near a river and the watershed strikes me as a coherent concept. People I think understand the watershed, like the river and the tributaries and the water cycle, I think people learn in elementary school. I don't think this is rocket science, but I think it's fundamental to human understanding of how we need to change the way we live. I think watershed is an example of a concept that is ubiquitous. And people need water to live, and many times settlements were near rivers for transportation and in irrigation. And so I think people know where the water comes from. And early settlements, like New York City and Los Angeles, went in search of the water because they knew the city can't grow without it. And so given that we need water, we can design the boundaries. The watershed is the water flows towards the river from a certain height. It's pretty fundamental. You can take a hike in the Adirondacks and you can understand that people wanted to preserve the Adirondacks for water in New York City. There's a connection. And if you don't already understand it, I think it's pretty clear to learn about it and then to take pride in it to protect the water quantity and quality as opposed to emergencies we're facing now with the Colorado River, with the Nile River. So sometimes we have shortages of rivers and sometimes there's flood or sometimes there's melting ice caps. But water is a place that's very basic to begin to understand the interconnections. The production is the basics. People in the community work together first to project the environment, second to invest in each other, health and education, socialization. So everybody has a job, which is to take care of everyone else. And so the incentives could be developed within a community, within rules. So the local part I think is pretty straightforward because we already live in communities that are distinct from markets. So we could say, OK, community's first market is down the line. But then looking at the global level, we say, oh, we all live in communities. We all live in watersheds, various types. We need to understand the connection among them. And so if the earth is fragile and if humans are now multitudinous, we need to take the fragility of the earth as primary, as priority. And then if we use resources like cutting down trees, we say, OK, what's the impact of that on the global system? If we have enough trees, if forests are re-growing, then, OK, fine. We can cut them for wood and furniture and art projects and so on. But if they're not, then you say, instead of cutting trees, we need to plant more. And we need to understand the global relationships of where we plant and what kind of trees we plant to make the habitat and to have biodiversity so that then the whole system becomes more resilient. And so I think the work of the humans residing in a given place depends on the ecology of that place. And then if you have surplus, you can trade it or you can travel or you can understand cuisines and art from different cultures. But the first priority is restoration. I think the climate leviathan is interesting because there would need to be rules that people would follow based on ecology. So yes, those are rules you have to follow. But if there's understanding among the public, if there's education, and I'm saying like the water cycle is pretty basic, I don't think ecological knowledge is beyond most people's understanding. I think it's accessible and we need to just educate ourselves. But then we have the regional communities. We have a global collective that's looking at the global indicators like temperature, like CO2 accumulation, like nitrogen runoff. We know what those indicators are. So at the global level, we have people looking at the science and collaborating among the regions. And then the regions understand, well, let's say I'm a desert, but you're an area with lots of water. How do we make use of each unique aspect in common? If I have surplus water, maybe I export it to you. OK, water is hard to transport. Or maybe with solar panels, I do desalination. And so there could be exchange of knowledge, not just commodity production and trade, but knowledge collaboration and innovation. OK, so is fusion going to work? Is that going to be so successful we should make that the priority of investment? Or is solar panels really viable and when are already available? They're getting cheaper. We simply do the renewables first. But I think the prioritization of the ecology and the human skills in education, if people understand the ecological urgency that we can make it a priority for education and participation. So so get back to the Leviathan. Once people understand the urgency and the need to collaborate, I think you could have a democratic system instead of top down. Finance is relevant here because since 1688, more or less, we've had a fiscal military state, which builds on commodity production and trade, takes the revenue we invest in the state to build more military and market capacity. So the existing fiscal systems are assuming competition among competing states, often with military. So I think we could have an alternate system where credit is based on this kind of ecological restoration. And so you have smart people, you have resilient planet. That's where growth comes from, not from money itself. It comes from people and land. So I see the international institutions, like the IMF and the UN and the environmental program and WTO, they're all kind of specialized and fragmented. Seems to me we take global institutions and we put them together with ecological knowledge. And then the investments and the credit are based on restoring people and the planet.