A Social Contract for the Planetary Commons—A Conversation with James Quilligan

In Episode 2 of Mapping the Planetary, we sit down with our host, James Bernard Quilligan. 

With over three decades of experience in international development and monetary policy—as both analyst and administrator—Quilligan now serves as Senior Research Fellow at the Center for New Critical Politics and Governance. 

In the conversation, we explore key concepts shaping our planetary future—the idea of the planetary commons and the ecological limits of carrying capacity. Quilligan reflects on the importance of distinguishing globalization from planetization, and considers how principles from thermodynamics might shed light on the climate crisis. 

What forms of planetary governance and stewardship could help us navigate these complex challenges? Most importantly, we ask whether embracing a degrowth mindset is essential to building a sustainable future. 

Quilligan argues for the need to adopt a new worldview—a new epistemology and narrative—that can guide us through the planetary transition ahead.

Academic Reference:
James Quilligan, Hagen Schulz-Forberg; A Social Contract for the Planetary Commons—A Conversation with James Quilligan. Global Perspectives. 10 March 2025; 6 (1): 144292. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/gp.2025.144292

This podcast was created and produced by the Research Center for New Critical Politics and Governance (CPG).

To watch the video version of this episode, please visit the link below:
https://cas.au.dk/en/cpg/podcast/mapping-the-planetary

Chapters

• 0:00 Planetary Commons, Ecological Interdependence and Global Stewardship
• 23:00 The Laws of Thermodynamics
• 36:00 Geopolitics and Planetary Commons
• 1:00:00 Biofinance

Transcript

Hagen Schulz-Forberg (HSF): 0:10

Hi, I'm Hagen and today I'm joined by my colleague James Quilligan for a discussion about the planetary commons. Since 1975, James Bernard Quilligan has worked in more than 30 countries as an analyst and administrator in the fields of international development and monetary policy. He's joined us at the center as a senior fellow and is presently very involved in the emerging research on planetary carrying capacity. James, how did you get into this field and where's the connection to planetary commons? What are planetary commons?

James Quilligan (JQ): 0:13

Well, that's a great question. So, from my experience in monetary policy, it led me into figuring out what's really behind monetary policy, which is carrying capacity. And then that led me into the planetary. Meanwhile, I got interested in the commons. So, essentially, what are the commons? Let's start there. Before there was a private sector or a public sector, meaning government, the territories in which we live were actually referred to as commons in ancient times. And then gradually, as Elinor Ostrom has discussed, while people were beginning to privatize their commons, other people were still managing the commons from within and more or less disregarding the private control that they had through governance. So, in other words, there were two kinds of governance that developed in parallel. One was a sort of public sector, meaning government. And then the local commons had a governance through the local people who were managing their own commons. So, there’s always been that dichotomy, but it's gotten more pronounced now. So, now that we're taking it to the planetary level, one of the distinctions I think we're making is that as we move from what we see as global, which has to do with private sector and public sector managing the Earth, now we're moving into a more different kind of sector, which moves us back into the understanding that the Earth is ecological, which is something that the private and public sectors don't treat. So, the ecological component is very pronounced. It also has to do with the fact that the public sector and the private sector are really dedicated to exponential economic growth. And the planetary commons are more into, I wouldn't call it degrowth, but I would say a slowing down of growth to what's also called logistic growth. But we can get into that in a while. So, it's just a different kind of framework for looking at the Earth from a more holistic point of view.

HSF: 0:16

So, we can understand these commons as something third alongside the private and the public. Am I right?

JQ: 0:19

Yes, that's correct.

HSF: 0:22

Yeah, so, that's okay. So, I got you right there. And this third, who's going to define it? How is it defined? How are we going to use it? How are we going to not use it? How can we avoid as humans to interfere with it? And what role should it nevertheless play in the way we design societies, human interaction, governance models, and so, on and so, forth? I guess this is what we want to talk about today, right?

JQ: 0:25

That's exactly right. There's a lot there to attack. That is the big challenge. It's a very interesting topic because it has a lot of different facets, and we can take them one at a time.

HSF: 0:28

Take it away. Where do you want to start?

JQ: Well, I think one of the things is that we need to look at a little bit of the history and why we're distinguishing globalization from planetization or the global from the planetary. Why would we do that? What sense does that make? I think from a historical perspective, we can look at it like this: 0:31

The age of globalization, even though the term was only coined in the 1980s, I think we could really say that there has been a process of globalization taking place since the age of exploration of 1500s or Columbus and Vasco da Gama and all the earlier explorers. They were really made in globalization.

HSF: 0:34

The age of colonialism, if you wish, the age of colonial expansion, the age of conquest.

JQ: 0:37

Exactly. I think that had everything to do with what we now call globalization. In some sense, you could actually say that the age of globalization went from about 1500 to let's say 2000. You could also say that given that 500-year cycle, we're beginning maybe another 500-year cycle of planetization, something like that, looking far ahead into the future because we can recognize that planetization is not something we're going to do through some treaty that happens through the IPCC or anything like that. It's going to be a long process. We know how long globalization took from, as you say, the early colonial days through industrial capitalism and all the interpretations of science that went into creating the new industry and technology and all of that. The history of that is very involved. The future will be just as complex and as involved.

HSF: 0:40

Could I ask you to maybe just ... Yeah, let's put some bullet points to this globalization or this cycle of globalization, as you call it. First of all, if I hear it correctly, this is Western agency beginning in European imperial expansion. What is the content of this? What were the expectations? What were the models and the epistemologies coming with that age of globalization, as you describe it? Then, maybe we can pinpoint it against the new, necessary, probably hopefully emerging age of planetization.

JQ: 0:43

One thing is the field that let's say, of economics, which really didn't start until Newton's law of gravity was discovered. With Newton's law of gravity, a few people began to think, "Oh, well, there's some kind of ... What Newton's really talking about with gravity is a kind of equilibrium. The early people getting into economics said, "Oh, well, we could look at an equilibrium between supply and demand." That essentially has become the economics that we have today. As I get into that a little bit, it's been modified by the three laws of thermodynamics, but I'll save that for a moment. Another characteristic other than the physics of gravity has been a kind of rationalism that has developed, where we've started with science and then we began to create ideologies around that. By doing that, we have really specialized in a kind of rationalism. One of the drivers behind that is the rationalism of economic growth. We've always assumed that economic growth is infinite. As I said before, it's exponential growth. That's an interesting factor because once we convinced ourselves that resources were infinite on the planet, then that led into this rationalism of saying, "Well, we can do pretty much anything given the fact that we don't have to worry about the abundance of resources on the planet." That's one factor, but there's others because rationalism really has a broad scope in the history of Western society in politics and in other fields, but that's a key point though. Colonialism as you mentioned is a form of rationalization, but it's also taken on a life of its own in terms of the determinism it created and how we expanded and the assumptions that we made in terms of privatizing other people's territory and treating them culturally in a certain way that was repressive. That's another characteristic of globalization. All of that led to the economic expansion that resulted in trade networks and finance and industry and technology and the competition in geopolitics that we understand today. It all came from, I would say, the equilibrium model in physics and rationalism and colonialism, and it all emerged from there. I think that defines what globalization has entailed for us and the problems we're actually facing right now having just been through the last phase of globalization, which was neoliberalism.

HSF: 0:46

I agree with that totally. I would add maybe a question here about the role of technology in all of that. There's a naive assumption that if we only had the right technology, we would always kind of get our head out of the sling up until climate change. Now, there's a belief in technology. If we develop the technology just in time, then we can get away. But there was also this long held believe that a technology, an advancement in technology, would mean more efficient governance. It would mean a more efficient use of resources, and it would also define who's advancing, who's backwards in this race of globalization because it was never an equal playing field globalization. It was always a power game. It was always, not a power game. It was clearly just power inflicted on the rest of the world from the European empires and later also the United States. That role of technology, I guess, needs to be reinterpreted when we come to a planetization because of course we cannot do without the technology.

JQ: 0:49

I agree. It's partly our penchant for rationalization or rationalism that we think that technology will always give us out of any kind of scarcity conditions that we have and always take us to the next level. But there's something called the Jevon's Principle, which says that if you rely on technology, you're making a big mistake because if you use technology to make things more efficient, then that efficiency will lead people to produce more. The more that they produce, the more resources they burn up. The more resources they burn up, the more technology they have to develop to correct that problem. In other words, technology is a great benefit to humanity, but at the same time, it's created its own shortcomings, which have to be measured as well. Technology is not the magic bullet. It's an enabler, but we've applied all of our understanding of rationalism and exponential growth to technology, forgetting that there are limits to growth. So, that's a very good point.

HSF: 0:52

Yeah, that's unfortunate, of course, that we keep forgetting that despite the fact that we have the limits to growth study ever since the early 1970s. But now we come to this planetisation, what you call planetisation. I'd be interested in what that is according to you. When we integrate or when we have globalisation as the interaction, yes, of market actors, of nation states and also market actors, transnational businesses and companies as well, kind of super, you know, on a higher level, cutting across nation states, but always driven by mostly human agency. And now planetisation brings in an ecological perspective. So, it's not only the interdependence of or the assumed interdependence, which would have a peaceful effect on relations between nations, which was kind of old liberal or economic idea that if we if we grow interdependent on each other, we don't go to war. Well, we only need to look around what's going on today. But so, now comes ecological interdependence. How does that what's that?

JQ: 0:55

Yeah, globalisation was saying there are no limits to growth. Planetization says, yeah, the planet does have its own limits. The work of Johan Rockström shows the planetary boundaries. But it's even broader than that in some ways, because it really means that we need a new kind of paradigm, which I think is what planetisation is, because in the past, we didn't have the problem of climate change. And we didn't see the world as ecologically interdependent. We always just assumed that it would always be working. Nature would work it out in the background, and we didn't have to assist it in any way, or we didn't have to worry about it creating scarcity on a level that would be a major collapse to civilization or anything like that. Those are some of the challenges we're facing right now. And so, part of this has to do with the fact that the way things are being governed right now is through the paradigm of Westphalian sovereignty. Nation states are individual. They can do what they want. And there's an idea of noninterference that other nations can't interfere in the internal affairs of one state. At least in theory, that's the case. In theory, right. But when it comes to international negotiations, that theory is stressed very strongly. Of course. Yes. So, that's right. And that's a factor that I'd like to get into in a little bit about sovereignty. But that's a characteristic of planetisation that we need to get beyond the area of sovereignty. And then, of course, there's the idea of becoming stewards of the planet, which actually is a field that I'm very interested in. And it's a part of what I'm calling planetary commons is that we can be.

HSF: 0:58

James, how can I become a steward of the planet?

JQ: 1:01

Well, by adopting a perspective of the idea that politics and economics are not going to save us, people are going to have to take greater care of the planet. We don't know how to do that. We've lost our we've lost our understanding of what the commons are. So, we have to create a new epistemology around the planetary commons because most people growing up either say the solutions will come from the private sector or the public sector, meaning government. And we don't have a third point like commons to say, no, the commons are all of us together without the private and the public, again, public meaning government. But the common sector, and that's more understandable as through David Bollier or Elinor Ostrom as being something local or regional where communities could be defined as commons. Now we have to transport that idea, transpose it really to the to the earth. And that's really where the planetary commons come in. And it's the idea that people in their own bioregions or own eco districts can get together and create their own form of governance so, that they can manage their resources and become better stewards. At the same time, we have to have that same principle happening at the global level. So, it's not easy to do. But that's why this idea of bridging it is also called translocal, because it means that the local is actually helping to inform the planetary decision makers about how they can work more closely with people at the global level. I'm sorry, at the local level. So, in other words, there's got to be it can't all be top down or bottom up. There has to be a kind of symbiosis taking place between the two. So, that's what I think planetization is going to really entail.

HSF: 1:04

All right. Let me just let me just get back to this one point you made about bioregional governance and people caring about their own resources and almost like a democratic bottom up. Process of a new ownership. I guess is what you mean here? This could be this would be the really reliable source of information is how we care and know how to care for our own equal district, as you called it. Now, if I if I were to care for my equal district, how do I know a planetary common when I see it? Is it being it what is it? If we were to make a list, is there something concretely we would put into onto that list or the field of meaning, a field of semantics of resources?

JQ: 1:07

Well, I think that's what the conversation here is now that we don't have a list of the things that the elements of the planetary commons. And that's what I like to be able to see. Well, that's what we're sketching out in this entire conversation, I think, because it does have some steps. But I think we're working our way through those steps as we discuss this. But what I can say is that, in generally speaking, we need a new worldview, a new epistemology, a new narrative for how we define what the planetary commons are. And it's not simple because I said that we need to start with history, but we also need to start with the elements in science that have led us to the understanding that of why things are breaking down as they are. Because once we understand how science has failed us, then then we can begin to move ahead and begin to itemize the kind of list of things that comprise the planetary commons.

HSF: 1:10

OK, let's go. So, why what's wrong with science then? What do we need to change when we come to epistemology, i.e., when we come to gathering knowledge and acting upon the knowledge that we gather?

JQ: 1:13

Well, so, it's not that there's anything particularly wrong with science, although there are some disputes within science that are holding humanity back. But the main thing is how we've interpreted science. So, I mentioned earlier about thermodynamics. Yes, this is something really important because it has emerged in the whole field of thermodynamics has emerged as something called biophysical economics. And it is very important to look at because it is probably the leading alternative to economic growth in today's world. So, it's worth exploring the science a little bit. The first law of thermodynamics says that there's a conservation of energy and matter, meaning that you can turn energy into matter, you can turn matter into energy. But nothing is ever lost. It's all there's a conservation between the two. And that's been interpreted, actually, by industry as meaning that there is a free market because the conservation will guarantee the conservation of energy and matter will guarantee that we can follow the same kind of principle of the free market. It also has to do with political liberty and freedom to do whatever we want. So, the first law of thermodynamics has given us a kind of rationalism in our governance and economics that has led to some of the problems that we're facing today. But let me just go to the second law of thermodynamics, which says that it's all well and good to say that energy and matter have some kind of equivalency. But in fact, there's another element to it because in heating, take industry, for example, in heating something, increasing the temperature of energy to produce a product. So, you're taking energy to create something material energy into matter. Yes. If you do that or if you if you melt down matter to go back into energy, then the process of increasing the temperature creates heat. And that also creates waste. And so, the second law of thermodynamics is the principle of entropy, that the first law of thermodynamics leads to entropy. So, so I've mentioned that the first law of thermodynamics is a lot like freedom and liberty as it's defined in modern society, in modern liberal society. But entropy is also given rise to the idea that government should be able to protect people from entropy, meaning that entropy is not only climate change, but the carbon dioxide also that we dispersed into the atmosphere. It's also…

HSF: 1:16

Maybe James, sorry to interrupt. Maybe we could just, you could just make a little bracket here and explain to the to our audience what entropy is. Maybe not everybody knows that.

JQ: 1:19

Entropy is really a principle of disorder. So, what it's saying is that in in terms of the industrial process, it's saying that we're creating pollution, we're creating waste and we're creating toxins that are going into not only the atmosphere, but also into the seas, into our soils. It's everywhere. And that we have an epidemic now of entropy because we're not paying attention to it. And that's what I was beginning to say, the governments have stepped in or at least had been stepping in to say, well, we've got to slow this down, and we've got to protect people from the ill effects of heat waste or entropy. So, you can look at it as that the first law of thermodynamics and also of freedom in government has to do with order. The second law of thermodynamics has to do with disorder because what's been created through the process of over-determination of order has led to disorder. So, it's nothing that we're doing wrong. It's that we we've actually failed to understand science to the extent that we could create our economics and governance around it to make sure that we did that are our administration of order didn't actually lead to disorder. And in fact, many theories of civilization have said that that's exactly what happens. We build up order and then the costs of the order get so, great that it begins to create disorder. The societies collapse as a result of that.

HSF: 1:22

And then there's a third law, which is still unproven. Or it's something about it.

JQ: 1:25

Yeah, it's unproven because there's a debate between physics and biology over the meaning of the third law of thermodynamics, which has been very divisive. Physics wants to say that there's something about an absolute zero temperature, which could actually resolve entropy. Biology says, well, we don't know about that. It's not our field. But what we do know is that life, living creatures develop and grow despite entropy. So, we work, we do work arounds. In fact, it's not that we're avoiding the entropy, but we've created our means of resilience. So, there's a self-organizing principle in nature that is actually that lives through the entropy and builds certain kinds of resilience to the entropy. So, this is what's really missing right now is that the sciences really need to get together and show the way forward to an understanding that this idea of absolute zero in physics is really very similar to what's called "syntropy" as opposed to entropy. syntropy is that emerging self-organization that all living things exhibit That really defy the laws of entropy in a lot of ways or at least they persist through it. and so, this is exactly what needs to be brought into our political economy and our broader social understanding of the worldview. And this is really the essence of what planetary commons will be expressing in my view, because it's something that hasn't been realized yet. And yet we're trying to frame our understanding of how to approach the future, especially as climate change becomes much more disruptive, disorderly, as a result of entropy. We need to embrace the concept of "syntropy." That's what the planetary commons really is about, bridging physical and biological boundaries as the basis for a planetary social contract. That is what happens as a result of, I think, the dialogue, the kinds of dialogue that we're creating now in this idea of the planetary commons. I see. And this is also where you see the role of science as having a really important part to play.

HSF: 1:28

Right. How do you think that's going to... Do you see any... Where do you see beginnings of this? Do you see this happening already, this dialogue, or this overcoming of the boundaries?

JQ: 1:31

Yeah, I mean, I spent a lot of time on the Internet, LinkedIn, and other places. And the conversation is getting very sophisticated around these topics. And I see it penetrating more into universities and not so, much into governments, into higher levels where this discussion has to take place. But I do think that the very fact that conversations like this can lead people into a broader worldview is a start. And so, I think we're at the very beginning stage of all that. But I also see... Go ahead.

HSF: 1:34

No, no, please. What do you also see?

JQ: 1:37

Yeah. You were saying earlier, how do people at the local level begin to talk about the planetary commons? It is already happening. There's a very vibrant conversation going on about bioregioning and creating bioregional finance and bioregional self-government.

HSF: 1:40

Yes.

JQ: 1:43

And it's very heartening to see that because it's really the building out of recognizing that the local commons have to become more resilient, have to recognize what value is and what production really means in an age where energy is not going to be as available as it's been in the past. Resources may be dwindling in the future. How do we cope with our local environment? And then how do we relate that to saving the planet?

HSF: 1:46

Yeah, I think you said something very important and something very tangible there because it may sound a little abstract to talk about physical and biological boundaries for a social contract of the planet. But when you mention how people in their own regions start to embrace new ideas of value, new ideas of monetary systems or practicing exchange based on a different worldview, a different set of values, embracing their own surroundings as commons, embracing their resources as commons and interacting in new ways, it becomes very tangible. It becomes concrete and it even has a ring of ownership of it almost sounds democratic or a new form of bottom up growing of governance units. That sounds, am I right? Am I hearing that correctly?

JQ: 1:49

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And going back to what we said earlier about the three laws of thermodynamics, once we get, once science gets clearer about this rivalry between the physics and biology over the meaning of the third law of thermodynamics, I think this is the very conversation which will illuminate the public and get them very interested in the actual basis of what the future could take. Because we're already well versed in the meaning of private property, public goods, but we don't have an understanding of commons resources or commons rights. We have the rights to the commons and that's an area that is very unclear to most people and that's what has to be discussed. Planetary commons are nebulous.

HSF: 1:52

That's a good phrase there, James. We have rights to our commons or to the commons. That's great. But let me, I think that's good. I think that's clear now and I hope that everybody who listens to this or sees this is sharing this insight as well. But arguably, there's a bit of an obstacle these days against this. So, even though this all sounds good and I'm sure this has momentum and can even have more momentum as it should. The current world situation doesn't really look like it's going to break through any day. No? I mean, if you look around, you mentioned the problem of sovereignty. That's I guess one problem of sovereignty. But then, of course, the way in which alliances have shaped up and now with this new multipolarity emerging the world as it is right now, do you see it going into a direction of the commons or do we need to really take it back and overcome a number of things before we can start building these planetary commons?

JQ: 1:55

Well, people on the ground are not going to be all that influential in the way that geopolitics is evolving right now. And as a whole new state of affairs taking place. However, I mean, people on the ground are not going to be directly involved in the way that turns out. However, we can have a good time. But an enormous impact on it if we begin the conversation around the idea of the planetary commons and also the bioregional commons because ultimately that's where nation states are going to have to be able to focus. And they're not any, you know, the geopolitics right now is so, divisive that that's not even part of the conversation. However, it's all that people can do right now is really to focus on the future of the planet as a common because that's really the end game that nation states are going to have to do. And that's what they've discovered for themselves. You know, you could take it down into the sort of the history of the east, the global east and the global west. So, the global east has been sort of known as a collective, stressing collective rights, you know, for the greater good. And the west has been more focused on individualism. That's a broad generalization, but largely speaking, culturally it holds true. But both of those are problems right now. How do we, how do we, and it's, but it's also the same problem in any individual nation, you have an individual, you have the individual rights, the private rights, and then the collective rights for society. And how do those coalesce. That's never been figured out. And it's, I would say it's never been figured out because the element of the commons has never been interjected into it to create greater cooperation between the individual and the collective. And as a result of that, we I think have a lot to teach nation states in terms of what the future is going to look like, because we have a lot to bring to the table, we can point out for example, that the multilateralism of the past was based on individualism, the anti-polar world that you were mentioning is based on collectivism. But is it really, are those really, are those really valid options? I would say no, because they're at the heart of both of those visions is clinging, clinging to the idea that interest is involved on the part of sovereign states. So, in other words, my sovereign state is non-viable, you can't come into my board cross my borders and interfere with the internal dynamics of my nation. And that's, that's, I mean, generally speaking, that's, that's fine. It's just that there's no means for international cooperation to take place on in a viable level that would recognize that it's all commons. There are, in fact, in nature, there is, there are no political boundaries. None.

HSF: 1:58

And so, we all have the responsibility to protect, if you wish to say it like that.

JQ: 2:01

The longer we assert the boundaries of national sovereignty, the more we're going to violate the boundaries of nature. And it's happening right before our eyes. So, I'm not saying that we have to eliminate all our political boundaries. but what I am saying is that we need to develop an understanding at the international level of private property, public goods and commons resources or commons rights. That all has to be put together in terms of a vision of the future and I think that adds up to the planetary commons. It can all be worked out, but it has to be worked out, I think, first, by people on the ground, seeing the broader vision, or in creating a new epistemology for what this might look like.

HSF: 2:04

I see. So, that would mean that the planetary commons, or the rights, the commons rights that you would describe are not simply human rights in a different form, but they're human rights are integrated as are other rights, as are, am I hearing this correctly, as other say ecological, the rights of certain resources, of rivers, of forests, of air, of all of our resources that we should frame them as inalienable rights. Is that what you're saying? That we need to understand them like that?

JQ: 2:07

Yes

HSF: 2:10

And take this understanding of, this holistic understanding of humans embedded in non-human environments and all of these incredibly fundamentally important resources as the basis for how we build our societies.

JQ: 2:13

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

HSF: 2:16

Well, let's do it. How do we do it?

JQ: 2:19

Well, I think we've got to work through a lot of this. I think that if the nation states and the power blocks that are forming right now, it was easier. You know, I mentioned East and West, but we can't even look at it viably at this point as in East and West. It's more like a tricontinental kind of affair where what's happening in North America is that the United States is saying that all of North America needs to be integrated, from Greenland to Panama. Right. Yes. And at the same time, Europe is faced with the dilemma of Russia and the interaction between those two. How is that going to eventuate? And then China has its own sphere of influence in Asia and the greater region in the Pacific. So, I think it's really kind of moved into three separate domains at this point, at least its emerging.

HSF: 2:22

Arguably, China has even expanded its reach of influence beyond that, let's say, home base of the Pacific, but it's going into Africa.

JQ: 2:25

Right. So, it's not it's anyone's guess how this is going to work. However, when it comes to the negotiations, whether it's in the prevention of war, whether they're trade negotiations or negotiations after chaos is taken place. You know, there will be a bargaining table. And when it comes down to that, I think that that's when the conversations we're having right now need to be formalized into treaties that can begin to lead us to a new order. Because the new order that they're talking about right now, both on the part of all of the different three sectors that are forming at the moment, they're not they're not tracking the ecological. They're not putting that as a primary basis. They're not looking at a planetary balance. They're going to try to continue the old order into the future. And so, here's the problem with that. The there are more and more people on the planet. We're using up more and more resources. We are violating the planetary boundaries, as Rockström has said, but just on the basis of, you know, the basic necessities for people. May well get very scarce as a result of the planetary, the climate conditions that are taking place. So, where do we go with that? And, you know, the negotiations that take place in the future are going to have to deal with this directly. And we should be dealing with it now. All three of those sectors need to be looking at these things right now because this is an emergency kind of condition, but they're not. There are a few people in those. The tensions between the sectors are so, hostile at the moment that we, you know, we've got to be able to step back and say, oh, wait a minute, you know, this is exactly a pattern that's happened before. And where will it lead in the future? Well, if we look at it in terms of, you know, in the past, the winner of a war or the winner of a, of an economic. Chaotic implosion has, has become the Political and monetary hegemon of the planet. Yes. So, they were the ones that we call the shots and there's a whole history of that. And we can't go through that again. We must not go through that again. And so, but that's the way it's moving. The momentum is going in that direction. I think it's up to us to be able to say, no, look, there is another alternative, and we can get this right, we can, we can develop a planetary common right from the grassroots up through planetary institutions, including a new economic system. If you would only begin the process of negotiations to, to make this happen. Stop worrying about your petty stuff and look at the bigger stuff.

HSF: 2:28

Well, that will be, I mean, I second that. Of course, also now with the current American, US administration and what's happening. It's not really likely to happen tomorrow, you know, it should've happened yesterday. But let's just say, let's go back to the more analytical point of view here or hopefully not just theoretical in the sense that we're talking about it and then nothing's going to happen. What are the major changes that need to take place?

JQ: 2:31

We're going to need to go beyond. We're going to be able to focus on the limits to growth. And we need to look at ecological and social interdependence, regeneration, the rights of nature, other rights to access and stewardship of nature. That's also necessary. Those are beginning points that will anchor us. And the recognition that the exponential growth is an era of the age of globalization from the past. We've got to get away from that. And industry and commerce will not be happy about that. But the necessity will take place that we need a new accounting system for resources. And one of the things that I got very interested in 25-30 years ago was this idea that thermodynamics had a dimension that could pertain to economics. Now it's being expressed in the field of biophysical economics. So, different scenarios are being worked out in terms of rather than look at supply and demand, we recognize that there are stocks and flows of matter and energy that we need to pay attention to rather than supply and demand. Because supply and demand were based on that in the beginning, it's just that we lost the idea of within our general equilibrium models in market research or in terms of neoclassical economics. We've forgotten about how matter and energy are actually quite apart from the commerce that we have in the marketplace. It has a lot to do with how much resources we're actually drawing from nature and how much they can support the needs of the population as it continues to grow. All of that needs to be reexamined at the moment.

HSF: 2:34

Yeah, I agree. We also need a new legal framework, I guess.

JQ: Absolutely. You know, Rockström has been calling this Earth law. I think that's a very good term. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, we need to be able to generate law at that level. But as I say, before we get to that stage, we are going to have to initiate or call for negotiations to make all this happen, to put everything in perspective and not preach to anybody, but just say, look, here are all the elements. Here are all the things we're facing. What makes the most sense to move forward? And everybody's view is going to be important to the process. If it wasn't that way, then we wouldn't be able to speak of this as a common. Right. Everybody's got to have an input into it. The only problem is: 2:37

Time. We are really running out of time to make this happen. And we know from looking at history that things drag on and the same arguments continue over periods of time. It's really important now that a group of people begins this conversation about how to change the paradigm. The sooner, the better, because what we're looking at is another century of things getting worse and worse until we put the brakes on. And how are we going to get to that stage? Well, we have to be able to say it's not only about agreeing to put the brakes on, but also like, what do we do after we put the brakes on? How are we going to live in a world where there are strict limits to growth? Do we want those limits to growth to be agreeable between you and me and the rest of the commons? Agreeable that we can live and prosper and have wellbeing and abundance within that area in spite of the limits to growth? Or do we want to have it controlled by countries that are more interested in the competition for resources? And in many cases, manufacturing scarcity where it doesn't even exist.

HSF: 2:40

I like that idea of James, just the difference here between an understanding of commons almost as a synonym for democracy. Everybody is heard. Everybody needs to be part of it. Otherwise, it's not commons. And to accept the limits that we have our planetary boundaries as something that is not, let's not understand it as something that limits us in the way that, oh my God, we need to get poorer. We need to have less prosperity. We need to have less mobility. We need, sure, of course, our ways of being on this planet need to change a little bit. But I hear you saying that let's phrase this as a positive thing. Let's embrace it and have an agreeable life of well-being rather than a life of restriction, which often is the political construction right now these days against any kind of ecological or planetary perspective of things like you're taking away our prosperity by telling us what to do and by having this green, almost green authoritarian viewpoint. There's a mobilization of a certain kind of politics against the ecological perspective. That is kind of easy because a green perspective comes across or is depicted as telling us what to do, telling us to limit ourselves and, you know, taking us not to enjoy our life, and all that. But you're saying that the opposite should happen, that if it's a common, then we embrace those limits and we just enjoy our life together and enjoy our planet and care for it as we care for ourselves. Am I right in hearing that?

JQ: 2:43

Yeah, yeah. We just have to break out some of the previous categories. I mean, we've been gaslighted by people who are saying that we don't need to pay attention to nature and the limits to growth. Well, that's, I mean, all the research is saying that the exact opposite is taking place. There are limits to growth and it's created an urgent kind of situation. But I think that there is a way of breaking through all this to, again, to create this discussion about, you know, the future. And in particular, what are the basic adjustments that nations are going to have to take? What kind of legal framework has to change so, that we can move into this? And I think the vision for a planetary common, at least the way I see it. And it's partly inspired by 'The children of a modest planet' by Gilman and Blake. Yeah. But it's also a little different than that. But I mean, taking some of the basic outlines they're talking about there, this legal shift from national sovereignty and corporate monopoly. And moving toward a shared planetary sovereignty, a new realm of corporate accountability, and an embrace of Earth's life support systems is possible.

HSF: 2:46

They're making a big case of subsidiarity as well, right? I mean, this is their main, one of their main arguments, to reorganize the planet on the subsidiary levels.

JQ: 2:49

Right. So, I think what the idea is, the first point is that there needs to be a downward shift of empowerment from sovereign nations to citizens through the subsidiarity we're talking about. Subsidiarity means allowing people to make decisions at the lowest possible level that's relevant. So, in other words, do nation states really understand what's going on in terms of the resources at the local levels? Aren't the people who are working at the local levels better equipped to make those decisions? Why isn't it the case that the government has trusted people to make those decisions? Sooner or later, this is a bargaining chip that can be used in the discussion between the three major blocs that are forming right now in world affairs to say, trust your citizens now. This is the time to be able to do that, because if you don't do it now, you're just going to be using your citizens as armies to fight each other, protect your own citizens. This is what sovereignty needs to turn into, is a realm where subsidiarity is the empowerment of people at the grassroots level through subsidiarity is of great importance. So, governments are going to have to give up some of their sovereignty for the greater good of their own people. And they're going to have to realize that.

HSF: 2:52

And I hear saying that they don't necessarily need to give it up to a higher level of planetary institutions, but to a lower level of their citizens.

JQ: 2:55

Yeah. And the thing is, if there were to be planetary institutions, the people at the lower levels will never agree to that. No one wants a world government unless they're given more power to in the management of their own. their own resources, but also in terms of informing their governments about what's actually happening. If people were to trust their governments and be able to say we trust our governments and we trust the planetary governance system, such as it is the United Nations. If we really trusted them or a new system that would come up, then we as citizens would agree to it. So, I see the new social contract is impossible unless governments make a downward move of giving power to citizens at a much greater level. And then at the same time, if citizens really understood it and really trusted it, then say, okay, we would agree that planetary institutions should be created that would be in our best interest in terms of the planetary limits. So, the upward empowerment of these planetary steward institutions would be capable of enforcing sustainable policies at the planetary level, which would benefit the people at the local levels. And they could not do it without the people at the local levels, providing them data and the confidence and empowerment that it should actually happen. The rule of states then would be to sort of stay in power as monitoring agencies but get out of the way of the process.

HSF: 2:58

You know, to let you mention, sorry, let me jump in here because you mentioned monetary and I'm interested in picking your brain since you have such a long, you studied finances and financing systems for such a long time. How do we finance this? What's the bio finance aspect of all of this? so, if the commons are including everything that's, you know, nature, biology, what is their bio finance and how does it work? How does it combine with, how can it become a planetary financial system?

JQ: 3:01

Well, the finance is really interesting because I mentioned that, you know, I started out monetary policy, I went into carrying capacity because I realized that in monetary policy was looking at asset sheets. And then I saw that people began to refer to natural capital and natural assets. And I said, whoa, this is really going in the wrong direction. You know, ecosystem services that can be securitized and brought into the marketplace, greenwashing and making you think that, you know, you can actually help to create an ecological balance on the planet by using the same economic accounting system that actually led to the imbalance of the planet ecologically. It's not going to work. So, you have to measure it differently. So, carrying capacity does that carrying capacity measures the amount of resources, including energy and matter that are available within an area to meet the needs, the physiological needs of the people that live in that area, the population of the area. Based on that, a new monetary system can be created. And colleagues and I have worked out a way of doing that. You take, if you measure let's say the carrying capacity of a bioregion or the planet. But let's take the bioregion first, measure the carrying capacity of the bioregion, you adjust for the purchasing capacity of people within that bioregion. Then you've got what I would call sustainable value. And the sustainable value can be the value of your currency in real time at any moment. So, I'm not talking about the price system to make the adjustments, talking about the value of your currency to make the adjustments. Because if you know that your currency is worth more or less on any particular given day, you're going to be you're going to know that your value goes further or not so, far based on how much your currency is worth. So, it will have a great impact on how much we buy and consume. And which is the reason why we are. That's the reason why the sustainable value is baked into the currency itself. So, that would be the first thing I say. And then the price system will eventually out of that kind of beginning framework. We can't let prices drive us. We have to let the sustainable value of our currencies drive us. And that will influence the way the new economic system emerges. That's the most brief way I have of saying it, but I've written voluminously about it.

HSF: 3:04

That's great. I mean, the briefer, the better. I mean, the shorter. I think that was very clear. Yeah, definitely something that is important and that is fundamentally important because yes, one thing is that we all get together as people. But then the other thing, how do we exchange things and how do we what do we base the value of our currencies on if we are to move beyond the way we're doing it right now? But that's going to be again another big process.

JQ: 3:07

Oh, yeah, no, it's huge. But again, the way I see it is that it's not like people like you and me trying to figure all this out. We're trying to introduce a conversation where many more people can join in the communications and then say, oh, if this looks like it's viable, let's consider the possibility of making that work and what it would look like. Let's begin to outline it. You know, I would like to just go back to the three areas of adjustment that I think that we need to be made. We need to have subsidiarity to the local level. We need to have the empowerment of planetary institutions. And then where did what do that leave us in the middle with the role of states, nation states as we as they exist right now and the role of corporations? Because the role of corporations right now is an outlier in the sense that they don't fit readily into this model because they'll be extremely disruptive of the idea, and we will try to interfere with the idea of more subsidiarity and more planetary institutions. And incentivizing corporations would be a mistake. In other words, you wouldn't want to say, OK, planetary institutions would be, let's say, an institution for the atmosphere, climate change, air quality, satellite regulation, a department for the oceans, another planetary institution based on circulation, fisheries, oxygen production, and then freshwater cycles, an institute, a department to manage glaciers, rivers, rainfall patterns, biodiversity, looking at genetics and species and ecosystem diversity. And it goes on, you know, soil fertility and well, that's already a lot. Yeah, sure, of course. Plastics and digital commons, you know, all of those things need a department at the planetary level, but they also need to be integrated at the local levels in their commensurate way. In other words, the people at local levels have to be really, really become the experts in soil fertility, for example, and freshwater cycles and, you know, all of that needs to be developed. So, in other words, then what is the role of corporations and all that? Well, I think corporations could assist people, especially the expertise in corporations, could assist people in it. But I don't think there's a true monetary incentive in being able to do that based on the way that corporations are structured at the moment. But I do think that the other thing to focus on is that what would be the role of people at the local levels in terms of forest conservation and water rights, developing food systems and new digital protocols?

HSF: 3:10

Well, as you would say earlier, as we talked about earlier, they would have a very fundamental function, right? They would be the voice, the data providers, they would be the sovereign source, if you wish.

JQ: 3:13

Yeah, I also think that the bioregional levels could work with blockchain ledgers, not in the way that cryptocurrency is working right now, but in the way of using Web3 and biofinance to generate the carrying capacity of the region. It's very easily done. The technology is already there. I think it's just being applied to a different sort of vision. So, with cryptocurrencies, you have a group of private investors investing in that cryptocurrency. We're talking here about using the Black Lane ledgers and Web3 technology more in terms of homogenizing the local bioregion or whatever area that you're applying it to. I think that would go a long way to creating this data in a way that would be very useful. I'm talking about the carrying capacity data that's also needed not only at the local level, but at the planetary level. So, those things are vitally important.

HSF: 3:16

How's the carrying capacity data from any specific region fed into a blockchain? so, this blockchain is like planetary, global, all-inclusive blockchain? Or do you imagine each carrying capacity data being, I always imagine a blockchain ledger as something or blockchain, like a folder, your data comes in, it's locked. It's locked in that folder, and it's locked there forever. It stays there. It's securely saved and there's no fraud. It's very safe. But it's there. And so, this blockchain, this data grows and grows and grows. Right? How is that going to happen?

JQ: 3:19

Well, first of all, as I said, it needs to be in the public interest or for the common good rather than the private. But the other thing is that it could be used certainly to... I was talking about sustainable value before in terms of being a product of carrying capacity. So, the more we measure the carrying capacity of resources, the more we get the basis for a new value system. That can be... In other words, having it locked down does not mean it should be kept in the private interest. Having it locked down means that no errors are creeping into the computation. And so, in other words, what's happening right now with our monetary system and our financial system, there are so, many other factors that are influencing the way decisions are made. I spent a lot of years talking to governments about their monetary policy. And one thing I can say is that whenever we looked at their asset sheets, there were a lot of things that they couldn't explain. And that's because a lot of those figures are negotiated with some of the people who guarantee the asset values, some of the corporations. Okay, so, in other words, it's not locked down. In other words, it's not a system that everybody agrees to. That's why the central banks are not airtight by any means. They can adjust their asset balance based on outside influences. This blockchain ledger would not do that. It would make sure that...

HSF: 3:22

That would be a financial revolution in terms of creating an equal playing field between... Because as you say right now, the financial institutions are the central banks you're talking about. Or those who give the loans or the credits are usually in the good old West. And this, what you described, would be equal playing field. It would really empower non-Western countries.

JQ: 3:25

Yes. And that would be a level of playing field for sure, because now we're not dealing with... Whose currency is stronger? Is it East or West? We're not dealing with balance of trade. Now what we're dealing with block ledger, if it's applied to carrying capacity, then...

HSF: 3:28

We're dealing with our biodiversity data. We're dealing with the data that nature gives us. And that's fed into a blockchain system and that's fed into a value system creating value on which we negotiate, which we act.

JQ: 3:31

So, what is locking out is all the market influences. So, in other words, the market should not influence the value of currency. It should be the other way around. So, we're guaranteeing that that happens. But the other thing I'd emphasize is this has to happen at local and regional levels first, because it's only...

HSF: 3:34

We need a lot of computers though.

JQ: 3:37

Yes, yes. That's right. Yeah. But this will influence planetary commons institutions. It would influence the creation of planetary commons institutions. If people knew that this blockchain ledger's technology was actually working at local levels to compute carrying capacity, it would give the international negotiations taking place to create these planetary institutions, give them a lot more confidence that they could actually do that at the planetary level. But my sense is that this is only going to happen by successfully doing it at the local and regional levels to have a proof of concept that people could finally say in the planetary negotiations that take place, "Ah, see, that works. Let's apply it now to the planetary level." Because it would be a big mistake to try to do it at the planetary level first, at the level of planetary institutions that is.

HSF: 3:40

Yes, yes. I see. Yes, I agree. Well, and if this all means that these carrying capacity data are out there, they're undeniably logged in, and this can be very explosive information. This can be politically taken into all sorts of directions, I would imagine. So, you need to make sure that there's a lot of... that it grows locally and that it grows from there and is sort of not tampered with. But that's what you're saying is it cannot be tampered with because of the blockchain.

JQ: 3:43

Correct. And the other thing is that I hadn't mentioned, but this is extremely important, is that... Is it the carrying capacity? So, what's it really based on? I mentioned thermodynamics and the stocks and flows of matter and energy. But so, this analyst named Howard Odum, about 40 years ago, he began to develop a table of energy values that were all based on sunlight. And he recognized that sunlight pervades all of the necessary ingredients of a monetary system from the basic units of sunlight up through the ecosystem services that are created, the minerals, the food, the basis of technology, everything is based on units of sunlight. And so, people have been developing a scale on which to track all these different levels of energy in joules and to measure how much energy is necessary. So, when you say that it would take a lot of energy to compute with the blockchain ledger, that's true. But at least that would be a cost of actually utilizing this framework of the energy scales. These energy scales are really important in the development of carrying capacity and therefore in terms of the monetary value. But that is where we should be looking right now. Now, not the trade balances of nations and the GDP of nations, that's completely specious indicator. I would say let's really get that back to the global age and the planetary age. Let's have a new series of indicators and sources of value for those indicators. And these energy values are completely fresh and ready to use. They just need to be plugged into the system. Actually, I'm working with some colleagues that are doing that with remarkable results. But we have to get people used to the idea of carrying capacity first because people still don't have a concept of what that means. Introducing them first to the commons and then carrying capacity and then block chain ledgers to track the value of commons are all important things to educate people. At the local and regional levels.

HSF: 3:46

Well, there's lots to do. There's lots to do. But all of this taken together would then become something like a rewritten constitution for the planet, if I hear you correctly. This could be something.

JQ: 3:49

Yes. So, all those levels of, we talked about subsidiary to the people of power from the sovereign nation state, the new status of sovereign nation states and corporations, and then the new level of planetary institute, steward institutions. All of those have to be congealed in some kind of new framework. You know, the like when the United Nations got together and formed a new body, or some kind of new overarching planetary commons constitution would have to be developed. Yes. That's a long way off, but the conversation needs to start yesterday.

HSF: 3:52

Yes. Yes. And we're carrying it. We had we talked about it right now. And I say thank you for all of this. There's so, many ideas, James, we will definitely come back and hopefully this will spin off in all directions, creating discussions and bringing people beyond the behind the ideas of creating new commons, all of us and embracing them. Thank you so much, James. This was amazing.

JQ: 3:55

My pleasure. Thank you so much.