The world’s richest 360 people have the same amount of money as the world poorest 2.4 billion.
420,000 years of climate change history, revealed to us in ice cores, tell us industrial pollution is heating the planet and killing us — and rather quickly.
Snow and ice are our planet’s air conditions and we have turned them off.
Iran has mobilized 40,000 suicide bombers to lay waste to Western democracies if it is attacked by the United States.
This war is about to begin.
Several high level military experts acknowledge there are already US troops fighting there.
It is a good bet Bush will attack Iran just after the November elections. When he does, gas prices will immediately rise and could go as high as $100 a barrel.
What a world we have managed to roll out for ourselves.
Solutions to the problems we have unfurled will most likely come from some very radical ideas.
Yet some of the more radical will in fact be quite sensible, even old fashioned.
But, this is not the time to be timid in our thinking.
We have to back away from this whole notion of democratizing the world. If fact, we may have to give it up at home as well.
Democracy — a state of affairs where people matter most — is old hat. It has served us reasonable well over the course of our 5,000 years of recorded political history.
It is now time for biocracy — a politics based on a deeper understanding of earth affairs.
When human population reached three billion people and when industrialization wholly defined economic theory and practice, democracy began to lose its relevance and therefore its importance.
We can no longer afford democracy.
Biocracy — a universal system of governance rooted firmly in a healthy environment and held there by an intimate understanding of natural systems — is the only thing that will allow us to stop annihilating ourselves.
Biocracy gains strength and legitimacy from science and religion.
As we step away from democracy toward a more earth-centred politics, our whole understanding of economy changes.
In short, economy becomes more and more a religious concept.
After all, serving the greater number (all God’s creatures) with the greatest good is undeniable holy.
All economies of the industrialized world are deficit economies. They take more than they give.
They take from the many and give to the few, take from the earth and are unable to replenish.
The byproducts of these economies are waste, pollution, war, famine and, eventually and inevitably, a tipping of the delicate balance of the natural systems that hold us all together.
It has tipped, we are unraveling.
We have reached that point in our multi-million year evolutionary history (racing it now seems from hunter gathering to robotics) where economics have to become a moral issue.
The world’s economy has to factor in both the time and the potential to allow the earth to renew itself continually.
At the end of the day people, countries and natural systems must have something left over. There is no room for debt in biocracy.
The most radical aspect of biocracy is not its tendency to, as some would suggest, lean toward the idealistic but rather its more mundane predisposition to be highly realistic — conservative in fact.
While adhering to politics with a propensity for living without debt is a dead giveaway to biocracy’s conservative bent, it is more to the point to acknowledge its other characteristics: holding back, proceeding with great caution, reducing the risk and living within one’s means.
Living as if the Earth matters flies in the face of both extreme capitalism and bleeding heart liberalism.
For, as practiced today by both the left and the right, economics unfolds under a banner that states the rich and the poor can find their proper place in and only in an industrialized world.
This is of course the problem.
None of us, given what we see in the world today, can deny that straight-up industrialization breeds suicide, homicide and genocide.
What is far more troubling, however, is the fact that, by insisting on a purely industrial future, it is a given that we will soon see both biocide and geocide.
In order to bring out the morality in economy we must first be willing to accept the truth of the matter: biological and economic notions are braided.
And this braiding of who we are with what we do can lead us to some rather startling conclusions.
Biocracy — the braiding of biology with economy — tells us, if we are willing to listen, that environmental impact statements are good for the economy and that the precautionary principle insisted upon by “nature lovers” is one powerful way to become a spendthrift.