The United States of Earth
by John Spietz
by John Spietz
WHY
“It’s totally unacceptable,” said a TV news broadcaster concerning Putin’s war.
But “unacceptable” has no meaning without an entity that can discipline an errant nuclear-armed state. The United Nations is as close as our shared planet community has come to an organization capable of reining in a misbehaving member, but its woeful inadequacies are painfully apparent. The situation in Ukraine highlights the increasing need for a central planetary authority.
Many global issues threaten civilization besides recalcitrant states like Russia and North Korea. Climate change and other international-scale problems require we abandon the sovereign nation-state model in favor of a holistic Earth management system.
The story of human history advancing from hunter-gatherers to centralized society traces people embracing governments that improve their food, clothing, and shelter security. First, seasonal agriculture administered through city-states delivered improvements to these goals. Then interconnectivity and technological advancement evolved to bring us to the contemporary nation-state.
Putin’s war underscores the need to abandon this arrangement.
“It’s totally unacceptable,” said a TV news broadcaster concerning Putin’s war.
But “unacceptable” has no meaning without an entity that can discipline an errant nuclear-armed state. The United Nations is as close as our shared planet community has come to an organization capable of reining in a misbehaving member, but its woeful inadequacies are painfully apparent. The situation in Ukraine highlights the increasing need for a central planetary authority.
Many global issues threaten civilization besides recalcitrant states like Russia and North Korea. Climate change and other international-scale problems require we abandon the sovereign nation-state model in favor of a holistic Earth management system.
The story of human history advancing from hunter-gatherers to centralized society traces people embracing governments that improve their food, clothing, and shelter security. First, seasonal agriculture administered through city-states delivered improvements to these goals. Then interconnectivity and technological advancement evolved to bring us to the contemporary nation-state.
Putin’s war underscores the need to abandon this arrangement.
*****
The industrial revolution and the rise of sovereign nations were a raid on nature, though we were unaware of it as it unfolded. We achieved our modern world through a relentless attack on the environment.
Nevertheless, this model has sustained us because the Earth’s resources could absorb our assault without rendering the ecosystem immediately toxic to humans. Something resembling this historical trajectory was a planetary inevitability until we bumped up against nature’s absorption limitations. The sovereign nation paradigm won the battle but will lose the war. If the Earth continues to soak up our abuse, it will become inhospitable to people.
Nevertheless, this model has sustained us because the Earth’s resources could absorb our assault without rendering the ecosystem immediately toxic to humans. Something resembling this historical trajectory was a planetary inevitability until we bumped up against nature’s absorption limitations. The sovereign nation paradigm won the battle but will lose the war. If the Earth continues to soak up our abuse, it will become inhospitable to people.
This trajectory is not sustainable.
The nation-state model appears ill-equipped to resolve other issues unique to the modern world. Below is a list of concerns for which everyone on the planet shares a common interest:
A. Atmosphere
1. Greenhouse gas emissions
2. Carbon dioxide consumption offsets
3. Air traffic routes
4. Terrestrial radio frequencies
B. Planet surface
1. Oceans
a. Trade routes
b. Resource use
c. Pollution
d. Temperature
2. Land
a. Minerals
b. Freshwater
c. Energy
d. Supply lines
C. Extraterrestrial management
1. Earth orbits
2. Moon and planetary issues
D. Social effects
1. Basic freedoms
2. Religion
3. Immigration
4. Asset allocation
5. Pandemics
6. WMDs
7. Other weapons
8. Money laundering
9. Currency misuse
10. Multinational corps
11. Transnational crime
12. Intellectual prop. theft
13. Taxation
14. Cyber security
1. Greenhouse gas emissions
2. Carbon dioxide consumption offsets
3. Air traffic routes
4. Terrestrial radio frequencies
B. Planet surface
1. Oceans
a. Trade routes
b. Resource use
c. Pollution
d. Temperature
2. Land
a. Minerals
b. Freshwater
c. Energy
d. Supply lines
C. Extraterrestrial management
1. Earth orbits
2. Moon and planetary issues
D. Social effects
1. Basic freedoms
2. Religion
3. Immigration
4. Asset allocation
5. Pandemics
6. WMDs
7. Other weapons
8. Money laundering
9. Currency misuse
10. Multinational corps
11. Transnational crime
12. Intellectual prop. theft
13. Taxation
14. Cyber security
It may be worth noting that in 2021, world military expenditures exceeded $2.1 trillion. I’ll bet we could maintain a centrally managed world order for considerably less by reallocating this money.
WE’VE DONE IT BEFORE
We humans have experienced massive reorganizations before. European nation-states—where the industrial revolution took off—are a relatively recent political structure. The French Revolution (1787-99) brought us the first nation-state. [Unfortunately, The Rights of Man, embraced by the Enlightenment, failed in the critical aspect of separating the ownership of terrestrial and personal property. This error has become clear since we have been able to measure global data. Individual control of lifeboat planks is not a sustainable model for keeping the boat afloat.]
Technological improvement and interstate competition caused a coalescence of territories into the nations of the 19th century. I subscribe to Max Weber’s definition of the State: A “human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.” Historically, might makes right. Military authorities have imposed national boundaries with scant regard for established relationships.
African countries, for example, are primarily an artificial amalgamation created at the Berlin Conference in 1884. European powers partitioned the land with little regard for preexisting African states, language, ethnic identity, local trade, or hostilities.
The winners of World War I divided Austria into Austria-Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia. They expanded the boundaries of Romania and created Poland from portions of Germany and Russia. The allied powers split the African German colonies between the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, and South Africa. They divided the Asian interests of Germany, China, Samoa, and New Guinea between the UK, New Zealand, and Australia. They broke up the Ottoman Empire into modern Turkey, with France and the UK taking over territories that became Iraq, Jordan, and Israel. They drew the maps with little regard for religious, tribal, or ethnic differences. Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia declared independence in the war’s chaotic aftermath.
After the demise of the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia split into the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic. Yugoslavia broke up into Serbia, Macedonia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro. Moldova formed itself out of Romanian territory. The point is that “sovereign states” are a human construct subject to reorder.
I believe the planetary situation with the United Nations is analogous to that faced by the United States with the Articles of Confederation. The Articles created a weak central government with no executive or judicial branches. They did not grant authority to tax, regulate commerce, establish justice, provide for the common defense, or promote the general welfare. Then, when the lack of a centralized military power to quell an uprising in Massachusetts (the Whiskey Rebellion) made these weaknesses clear, the States got together and produced our Constitution. They solved their shared problems by giving up some of their sovereignty to a robust dominant republic.
Like the United States in 1787, we can effectively address most of the problems all humans face with a strong central organization. I believe it is time for our planet’s nation-states to come together and resolve their shared challenges by ceding some sovereignty to a dominant authority and reorganizing the world. We’ve done it before.
WHAT
A world reorganization requires a new understanding of what constitutes property. Like other vagaries of history, our property rights evolved through happenstance. However, Weber’s definition of the state holds up well for property rights. You own what you control. This meaning works for everything except that which is a natural commons, like the atmosphere. Therefore, any proposed restructuring must be able to manage the commons in the interest of all.
What is a commons? The commons are the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of society, including natural materials such as air, water, and a habitable Earth. These resources are a commons even when controlled privately or publicly.
An example would be a village green at the center of an agricultural settlement used for grazing or watering sheep in the middle-ages. Envision a village with thatched roofs and stone walls surrounding a green pasture with a watering hole—that today is probably a park. The community shared the responsibility to protect the flock, maintain the walls, and care for the field to graze their individually owned animals.
Everyone in the village knew who owned which sheep. Profit from the sale of a sheep would go to the sheep’s owner. This system worked so long as grass consumption did not exceed its ability to reproduce and feed the sheep grazed thereon. The grass can only support a fixed number of sheep eating at the rate sheep eat. However, the more sheep a person places in the village common, the more benefit he gets. In effect, a person’s near-term self-interest—income from the sale of a sheep—is at odds with the long-term interests of his community. Overgrazing causes the collapse of the flock and losing the grazing pasture.
The commons are an element of the village’s capital. If the town withdraws capital faster than it makes deposits, it will soon be gone. Known as the tragedy of the commons, a term coined by Garrett Hardin, it is an economic theory of a situation within some shared-resource system where individual users act independently according to their self-interest. If they behave contrary to the common good, their collective action depletes the resource until it no longer functions.
Our planet is the most critical commons. Failure to organize management of this irreplaceable resource allows individual users to act according to their self-interest, contrary to the common good.
The Earth’s atmosphere is the most apparent and easily defendable as a commons. No one can control it, and it affects everyone. Pollution into the air and loss of carbon absorption anywhere impacts everyone everywhere. Uneven heat distribution creates the wind, yet air distribution is uniform compared with other common interests.
Similarly, arable land is also a constrained planetary fact—the only cost-effective area available to grow food crops. It, too, is a commons without regard to political borders. Through a capitalist system with reasonable market restraints of competing states, we must manage food distribution, so everyone has enough to eat.
Putin’s disruption of Ukraine’s exports makes that clear. Ukraine usually feeds some 400 million people worldwide. Losing this food supply puts the world on the brink of mass famine. 1.6 billion humans don’t get enough to eat.
Other commons, such as freshwater, critical metals, essential elements, and fossil fuels, are less clear as commons. Modern civilization cannot survive without them, and their distribution is uneven. We are sitting in a lifeboat floating in a cosmic sea with the responsibility of deciding how to allocate a limited supply of rations.
HOW
If you arrived at Earth in a spaceship and analyzed all the data, how would you logically organize the planet to accommodate over ten billion people? What form of government would make sense without regard to the historical events that gave us what we have? Popular sovereignty, free speech, resource control, and the Earth’s physical features are the most critical organizational elements.
I believe watersheds are the single most salient, empirically provable, universal, geographic principle on which to reorganize the planet. The World Resources Institute recognizes 154 main watersheds. For example, there are 20 in Asia, 13 in Australia, 23 in South America, and 30 in Europe, including the UK. Hence, I propose watersheds as the first principle for Earth’s reorganization. I suggest 154 states based on watersheds.
The second principle is a political organization capable of maintaining stability. Stability ensues from longevity expectation. What follows is a positive long-term investment climate. Autocracy is a clear loser. While “strong-man” rule may work for short periods, it fails in durability. I am skeptical that the Chinese model can endure. The only demonstrably successful multigenerational form of government is democracy—government of the governed—popular sovereignty with equality before the law. I still believe the arc of history bends toward the rational. Here’s a thought experiment from The Economist: If Russia had a free press, how many Russians would support Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine? How might Covid-19 have unfolded if the virus emerged in a free press country? Could their governments have hushed it up for those crucial early weeks?
For me, a global republic makes the most sense. Inherent human fallibility makes the checks and balances envisioned in a separation of equal power between the legislative, administrative, and judicial branches of government most likely to skirt the autocracy trap.
I want a bicameral global legislature with all powers not explicitly granted to the central government given to the states. Each state should have two senators elected to an upper house for at least a staggered six-year term, or maybe longer, to rise above their constituents’ narrow concerns and represent the world’s best interests.
The lower house should comprise elected legislators by the states based on an A.I. generated computer algorithm to determine voting districts. I would establish the boundaries on physical geographic features, size, population, religion, partisan symmetry, and cohesiveness—eliminating weird shapes and gerrymandering (I’d ignore “race” as a district-defining aspect. “Race” is a false social construct that became the critical psychosocial factor in elevating the white identity. People of European stock used “race” to identify a different type of person as inherently inferior. I would not allow this fundamental error to perpetuate.) I’d fix the number of representatives at 1,000 related to population, with no state having less than one. Try to imagine a legislative hall for such a gathering.
I foresee three levels of government and voting districts within most states, each based on an A.I.-generated computer algorithm to establish boundaries considering physical features, size, population, religion, partisan symmetry, and cohesiveness.
However, a successful representative system requires informed voters. Toward this end, I cannot overstate the importance of a free press. Free speech is an essential element for the promotion of knowledgeable voters. It would be nice if those with their hands on the levers of media power could exhibit inhuman virtue, but it is too much to ask. I would like to see some control of outright falsity, but I do not know how it would work. A person needs to decide what is false and what is not. I’m not comfortable with that. I can tell a falsehood is when I see it, but I’m subjective. Maybe someone can write an empirical fact screening program, but until they do, we must rely on people to filter out the falsehoods. Is this a fundamental democratic flaw in the modern world?
Finally, I’d make an independent judiciary chosen for life, hoping that they’d resist political polemics. However, the example of Clarence Thomas illustrates the need for an ethics element in the setup.
WE’VE DONE IT BEFORE
We humans have experienced massive reorganizations before. European nation-states—where the industrial revolution took off—are a relatively recent political structure. The French Revolution (1787-99) brought us the first nation-state. [Unfortunately, The Rights of Man, embraced by the Enlightenment, failed in the critical aspect of separating the ownership of terrestrial and personal property. This error has become clear since we have been able to measure global data. Individual control of lifeboat planks is not a sustainable model for keeping the boat afloat.]
Technological improvement and interstate competition caused a coalescence of territories into the nations of the 19th century. I subscribe to Max Weber’s definition of the State: A “human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.” Historically, might makes right. Military authorities have imposed national boundaries with scant regard for established relationships.
African countries, for example, are primarily an artificial amalgamation created at the Berlin Conference in 1884. European powers partitioned the land with little regard for preexisting African states, language, ethnic identity, local trade, or hostilities.
The winners of World War I divided Austria into Austria-Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia. They expanded the boundaries of Romania and created Poland from portions of Germany and Russia. The allied powers split the African German colonies between the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, and South Africa. They divided the Asian interests of Germany, China, Samoa, and New Guinea between the UK, New Zealand, and Australia. They broke up the Ottoman Empire into modern Turkey, with France and the UK taking over territories that became Iraq, Jordan, and Israel. They drew the maps with little regard for religious, tribal, or ethnic differences. Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia declared independence in the war’s chaotic aftermath.
After the demise of the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia split into the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic. Yugoslavia broke up into Serbia, Macedonia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro. Moldova formed itself out of Romanian territory. The point is that “sovereign states” are a human construct subject to reorder.
I believe the planetary situation with the United Nations is analogous to that faced by the United States with the Articles of Confederation. The Articles created a weak central government with no executive or judicial branches. They did not grant authority to tax, regulate commerce, establish justice, provide for the common defense, or promote the general welfare. Then, when the lack of a centralized military power to quell an uprising in Massachusetts (the Whiskey Rebellion) made these weaknesses clear, the States got together and produced our Constitution. They solved their shared problems by giving up some of their sovereignty to a robust dominant republic.
Like the United States in 1787, we can effectively address most of the problems all humans face with a strong central organization. I believe it is time for our planet’s nation-states to come together and resolve their shared challenges by ceding some sovereignty to a dominant authority and reorganizing the world. We’ve done it before.
WHAT
A world reorganization requires a new understanding of what constitutes property. Like other vagaries of history, our property rights evolved through happenstance. However, Weber’s definition of the state holds up well for property rights. You own what you control. This meaning works for everything except that which is a natural commons, like the atmosphere. Therefore, any proposed restructuring must be able to manage the commons in the interest of all.
What is a commons? The commons are the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of society, including natural materials such as air, water, and a habitable Earth. These resources are a commons even when controlled privately or publicly.
An example would be a village green at the center of an agricultural settlement used for grazing or watering sheep in the middle-ages. Envision a village with thatched roofs and stone walls surrounding a green pasture with a watering hole—that today is probably a park. The community shared the responsibility to protect the flock, maintain the walls, and care for the field to graze their individually owned animals.
Everyone in the village knew who owned which sheep. Profit from the sale of a sheep would go to the sheep’s owner. This system worked so long as grass consumption did not exceed its ability to reproduce and feed the sheep grazed thereon. The grass can only support a fixed number of sheep eating at the rate sheep eat. However, the more sheep a person places in the village common, the more benefit he gets. In effect, a person’s near-term self-interest—income from the sale of a sheep—is at odds with the long-term interests of his community. Overgrazing causes the collapse of the flock and losing the grazing pasture.
The commons are an element of the village’s capital. If the town withdraws capital faster than it makes deposits, it will soon be gone. Known as the tragedy of the commons, a term coined by Garrett Hardin, it is an economic theory of a situation within some shared-resource system where individual users act independently according to their self-interest. If they behave contrary to the common good, their collective action depletes the resource until it no longer functions.
Our planet is the most critical commons. Failure to organize management of this irreplaceable resource allows individual users to act according to their self-interest, contrary to the common good.
The Earth’s atmosphere is the most apparent and easily defendable as a commons. No one can control it, and it affects everyone. Pollution into the air and loss of carbon absorption anywhere impacts everyone everywhere. Uneven heat distribution creates the wind, yet air distribution is uniform compared with other common interests.
Similarly, arable land is also a constrained planetary fact—the only cost-effective area available to grow food crops. It, too, is a commons without regard to political borders. Through a capitalist system with reasonable market restraints of competing states, we must manage food distribution, so everyone has enough to eat.
Putin’s disruption of Ukraine’s exports makes that clear. Ukraine usually feeds some 400 million people worldwide. Losing this food supply puts the world on the brink of mass famine. 1.6 billion humans don’t get enough to eat.
Other commons, such as freshwater, critical metals, essential elements, and fossil fuels, are less clear as commons. Modern civilization cannot survive without them, and their distribution is uneven. We are sitting in a lifeboat floating in a cosmic sea with the responsibility of deciding how to allocate a limited supply of rations.
HOW
If you arrived at Earth in a spaceship and analyzed all the data, how would you logically organize the planet to accommodate over ten billion people? What form of government would make sense without regard to the historical events that gave us what we have? Popular sovereignty, free speech, resource control, and the Earth’s physical features are the most critical organizational elements.
I believe watersheds are the single most salient, empirically provable, universal, geographic principle on which to reorganize the planet. The World Resources Institute recognizes 154 main watersheds. For example, there are 20 in Asia, 13 in Australia, 23 in South America, and 30 in Europe, including the UK. Hence, I propose watersheds as the first principle for Earth’s reorganization. I suggest 154 states based on watersheds.
The second principle is a political organization capable of maintaining stability. Stability ensues from longevity expectation. What follows is a positive long-term investment climate. Autocracy is a clear loser. While “strong-man” rule may work for short periods, it fails in durability. I am skeptical that the Chinese model can endure. The only demonstrably successful multigenerational form of government is democracy—government of the governed—popular sovereignty with equality before the law. I still believe the arc of history bends toward the rational. Here’s a thought experiment from The Economist: If Russia had a free press, how many Russians would support Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine? How might Covid-19 have unfolded if the virus emerged in a free press country? Could their governments have hushed it up for those crucial early weeks?
For me, a global republic makes the most sense. Inherent human fallibility makes the checks and balances envisioned in a separation of equal power between the legislative, administrative, and judicial branches of government most likely to skirt the autocracy trap.
I want a bicameral global legislature with all powers not explicitly granted to the central government given to the states. Each state should have two senators elected to an upper house for at least a staggered six-year term, or maybe longer, to rise above their constituents’ narrow concerns and represent the world’s best interests.
The lower house should comprise elected legislators by the states based on an A.I. generated computer algorithm to determine voting districts. I would establish the boundaries on physical geographic features, size, population, religion, partisan symmetry, and cohesiveness—eliminating weird shapes and gerrymandering (I’d ignore “race” as a district-defining aspect. “Race” is a false social construct that became the critical psychosocial factor in elevating the white identity. People of European stock used “race” to identify a different type of person as inherently inferior. I would not allow this fundamental error to perpetuate.) I’d fix the number of representatives at 1,000 related to population, with no state having less than one. Try to imagine a legislative hall for such a gathering.
I foresee three levels of government and voting districts within most states, each based on an A.I.-generated computer algorithm to establish boundaries considering physical features, size, population, religion, partisan symmetry, and cohesiveness.
However, a successful representative system requires informed voters. Toward this end, I cannot overstate the importance of a free press. Free speech is an essential element for the promotion of knowledgeable voters. It would be nice if those with their hands on the levers of media power could exhibit inhuman virtue, but it is too much to ask. I would like to see some control of outright falsity, but I do not know how it would work. A person needs to decide what is false and what is not. I’m not comfortable with that. I can tell a falsehood is when I see it, but I’m subjective. Maybe someone can write an empirical fact screening program, but until they do, we must rely on people to filter out the falsehoods. Is this a fundamental democratic flaw in the modern world?
Finally, I’d make an independent judiciary chosen for life, hoping that they’d resist political polemics. However, the example of Clarence Thomas illustrates the need for an ethics element in the setup.
*****
A CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION
I call for a Constitutional Convention of all 193 United Nations members to draft a planet management constitution. We have reached the limit of the nation-state model to adapt to the new realities of humanity. Therefore, I believe it is time for Global Constitutional Convention to reorganize the globe in a way that addresses the physical facts.
I call for a Constitutional Convention of all 193 United Nations members to draft a planet management constitution. We have reached the limit of the nation-state model to adapt to the new realities of humanity. Therefore, I believe it is time for Global Constitutional Convention to reorganize the globe in a way that addresses the physical facts.