One World
by Roedy Green ©2000-2009 Canadian Mind Products
Introduction
- We are citizens of Planet Earth.
- A global problem is the whole planet’s problem, no matter where on earth
it manifests.
- The welfare of Planet Earth, as a whole, is more important than the welfare of
any individual country.
- We need political institutions to solve global problems.
Economic Justice
Imagine how you would survive on 1/20th of your
income the way a person in the third world must.
Ecology
- Pollutants created anywhere on earth show up everywhere. We all live in one
house.
- Despite vaccines that ensure child survival, the third world birth rates remain
high. Religious leaders demand still more fecundity.
- Many political leaders ignore ecology because they are focussed on short-term
economic indicators.
Terrorism
- It is now possible to carry an atomic bomb in a suitcase, or to bring the
Internet to its knees from a PC in Bulgaria. A technological society is highly
vulnerable to terrorism.
- Terrorists are brainwashed to perform their insane acts. The world deserves the
right to interfere with such brainwashing. Freedom of religion is not
absolute.
- Terrorists can exploit the airline security of the laxest country. We need
uniform global standards.
- Terrorists can threaten to kill us and our families. All the countries of earth
must be compelled by law to stop them.
- The deeds of terrorists often go unpunished. We cannot allow terrorists to hide
in protected enclaves anywhere on earth. It takes only one rogue nation to
provide safe haven for them. The world will not be safe from terrorism until all
the nations of the world agree to co-operate.
Disease
- Even with the drastic measure of killing healthy livestock, Britain had great
difficulty bringing the hoof and mouth epidemic under control. It would be even
more difficult to control a human epidemic. Airlines allow new diseases to
travel around the earth in hours.
- When the US Immigration service discovers a person coming into the USA infected
with tuberculosis, they immediately put them in strict isolation. Yet 1/3 of all
people in the third world are infected with TB, and American tourists mingle
with them, sometimes quite intimately, every day.
- The most effective way to control disease is to wipe it out globally. Polio and
malaria continue to stalk the planet even though we had the technology to wipe
them out decades ago. We made the mistake of leaving pockets of infection to
fester.
- It costs $275 to cure a case of leprosy. It costs $0.60
to cure river blindness, yet most of the people who have these diseases cannot
afford the cures. Our economic system does not provide baseline medical coverage
for all.
Dictatorships
“Take the year a country first reaches 50% literacy, and add one or two
generations to allow the idea to sink in, and, democracy, more or less
automatically, appears.”
~ Gwynne Dyer (born: 1943-03-17 age: 65)
Out of economic advantage, (e.g. to get cheap oil) democracies often support
dictatorships. Dictatorships should be discouraged because they are:
- much more likely that democracies to start wars.
- suppressing their citizens.
- more likely to behave in ways that are planetarily irresponsible.
If a dictator took over your country, surely you would want your neighbours to
help get rid of him. Democracies should work non-violently to eliminate all the
remaining dictatorships, e.g. through literacy programs and trade sanctions.
Theocracies, which look somewhat like dictatorships, would require democratic
ratification.
Other Species
- We humans tend to act as if we were owners of Planet Earth. Some of our
religions foster this naive view.
- Other species have just as much right to live here as us. At a bare minimum, we
must stop destroying the habitat of plants and animals. Extinction is
Planetary Genocide.
- We treat the oceans as a giant sewer. That is no way to treat the dolphins
and whales, or ourselves, since we too feast on the bounty of the sea.
Fourth Level Of Government
To handle global problems we need global institutions. In the USA and Canada we
have three levels of government.
- Municipal to deal with sewers, roads, public transport…
- State/Provincial to deal with education, tourism, welfare, mining…
- Federal to deal with external affairs, immigration, defense, criminal law,
money supply…
Sometime there is another level between municipal and state/provincial called
county or region. Each level has its exclusive areas of responsibility.
We need to extend to a fourth level, that would not meddle in the affairs of the
existing three levels, that handles global problems such as ecology, waste
management, inter-country conflicts, aviation rules, terrorism and disease
control.
It would work like the American system of checks and balances with a with a
president, senate and congress. Even a giant global bureaucracy could not be as
short sighted and blind as the system we have now where each country cares only
for its national interest at the expense of everyone else.
People are often afraid of a new level. This mirrors the suspicion of the
original thirteen American colonies considering federating. Today, the benefits
to creating America are obvious and the drawbacks don’t seem all that
dreadful, but back in 1776, the founding fathers had
serious doubts.
Options
- We have tried theocracies. They lead to the dark ages and the Spanish
Inquisition.
- We have tried anarchy. It leads to chaos.
- We have tried the UN. It is not democratic and it has no teeth. It runs by rule
of men rather than rule of law.
- Let’s give a fourth level of government a try.
I love my town; I love my country;
I love my planet.
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