Why don't we get the picture? It is not that we don't know the facts, and it is not that we lack the will to protect the environment. How much more obvious can it be that the world system of global capitalism integrated with sovereign nation-states ensures that the kind of changes needed to protect the planetary ecosystem are impossible. The problem is a planetary problem, and some 193 sovereign nations can never act as a legal planetary organization to regulate corporations or restrain all the nations simultaneously and equitably. To be a sovereign nation means to recognize no enforceable law above itself. In a competitive system of lawless sovereign nations, there can never be consistent global laws protecting the environment or restraining the greed of corporations.
To prevent climate change we need system change. The present world system makes climate collapse inevitable. In my 2013 book, The Anatomy of a Sustainable World: Our Choice between Climate Change or System Change, the frightening facts about the on-going destruction of our planetary ecosystem are laid out through the words of the climate scientists themselves. The book shows what is necessary for a sustainable world system: a world parliament legislating enforceable environmental laws and economic principles that end the rape of the planet's forests, oceans, and fossil resources and convert everyone: all 7 billion people, 193 nation-states, and multi-national corporations, to sustainable ways of producing, recycling, and drawing on renewable clean energy sources. This book shows in detail how this sustainability system has been carefully designed within the Earth Constitution.
It has to be everyone or it will be no one. The U.N. can be the vehicle for this system-transformation, if its unworkable Charter, premised as it is on the absurdity of lawless sovereign nation-states, is replaced with the Constitution for the Federation of Earth. The Earth will then have a World Parliament, a World Court system with universal jurisdiction, and a civilian World Police that can make sustainability happen, protecting the future of our planet and our children. All the nations will then flourish as democratic units within this Earth Federation. But this conversion based on the simple truth that it has to be everyone or no one simply cannot happen under the anarchy of lawless, militarized sovereign states who put environmental concerns way down on the list while they promote their influence, power, struggle over natural resources, and competition for markets.
The Paris Conference this month will be a failure, and all the environmental protests and marches in the world will be a failure, as long as we fail to demand the conversion of the world from a fragmented war and greed system to a coherent Sustainability System, under a democratic World Parliament and enforceable world law. This must be the basis of our protests, our speaking out, and our influence as citizens. We must demand system-change, for the present world system is inherently destructive of the climate and our future. And the most practical means for true system change will be to replace the present U.N. Charter with the Constitution for the Federation of Earth, transforming our present planetary disorder to a system that is truly democratic, sustainable, and free.
(Glen T. Martin is President of the World Constitution and Parliament Association (WCPA), President of the Institute on World Problems, and Professor of Philosophy at Radford University in Virginia. Author or editor of 10 books, he is a member of the Board of the Democratic World Federalists and a frequent contributor to progressive on-line journals.)
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