Author’s Note

The World We Inherited

Every member of the species Homo sapiens is born into a world already made. We receive it from people we will never see. Along with the language, knowledge, culture and achievements of the past, we inherit states, borders, economic arrangements and ideas about work, property, power and human success that were established before us. We did not choose these foundations. But after living within them long enough, we begin to see them as natural and as the only ones possible. It may seem that the necessities of life must inevitably be bought, that most of life must be spent earning the right to continue living, that a machine capable of freeing a person from hard labour must instead threaten them with the loss of their livelihood. But none of these are laws of nature. They are features of a human social order that arose under particular historical conditions. The fact that we inherited the world in this form does not mean that this is the only form it can take.

Examine it with the same rigour ordinarily applied to proposals for changing it. Members of Homo sapiens continue to kill other members of Homo sapiens over territory, power, resources and differences between states created by human beings. Humanity maintains and refines weapons capable of threatening the existence of civilisation. Access to food, housing, education, safety and medical care depends to a large extent on the ability to pay. Some people possess more property than they could use in a lifetime, while others lack what they need for a dignified existence. We have grown accustomed to calling this state of affairs realistic, and an attempt to remove its underlying causes utopian.

Human attention, fear, loneliness, desires and vulnerabilities become means of generating profit. People are encouraged to replace a functioning item with the next one, even though it still serves its purpose. A technological advance that makes production less resource-intensive can be used to increase total resource consumption still further. Profit can be taken today, while waste, pollution and a damaged environment are passed on to society and future generations. What benefits an individual participant in such a system can harm the whole on which that participant’s own life depends.

Imagine that the modern world does not yet exist, and someone is presenting you, for the first time, with a proposal for a civilisation divided by militarised borders, dependent on the continual expansion of material consumption and capable of destroying itself. A civilisation in which people must constantly earn the means to continue existing, natural resources become a source of power over others, and technological progress can deepen their dependence. Perhaps, after reading such a proposal, you too would say: “This is madness. A system like this cannot function properly.” But we were born into it. So its contradictions seem like reality to us, while an attempt to resolve them seems like fantasy. Familiarity does not make the organisation of the world reasonable. We cannot demand that a possible new society be free of every error while forgiving the present one its wars, poverty, exploitation and destruction of nature simply because it already exists.

The Existing Order Will Have to Change

Behind the question of whether our social order is just lies the question of whether it can endure. Civilisation depends on conditions that human desire alone cannot create. It needs water, food, energy, materials and an environment capable of sustaining life. Money and power allow us to control what is available, but they do not make it infinite. No collective decision increases the surface area of Earth or makes a forest, soil or water system regenerate at whatever speed we require.

Earth receives energy from the Sun, but its material reserves and the capacities of its living systems are limited. What is renewable remains so only while the conditions for its renewal are preserved. Many resources are not replenished within a human lifetime. Reuse and recycling help reduce losses, but they themselves require energy and do not recover everything that has been consumed. If the consumption of an essential resource persistently exceeds its replenishment, society lives by drawing down its reserves. If production damages the environment faster than it can recover, it undermines the conditions for further production and for human life itself. Such activity cannot continue indefinitely on a finite planet.

Severe consequences do not require every resource on Earth to run out. It is enough to lose the ability to provide people with the necessities of life in the quantities and places where they are needed. When supplies of food, water and energy are disrupted, the question of limits becomes a question of daily survival for families and entire societies. Inequality and struggles for power can make these consequences still more severe: some will continue to command a surplus while others struggle for the essentials. Under such conditions, scarcity can intensify hostility, break down social bonds and lead to violence. Keeping familiar rules in place offers no protection in itself.

A social order that sustains itself by destroying the conditions necessary for its own existence will have to change. Refusing to undertake deliberate change does not preserve the possibility of living as before indefinitely. It allows contradictions to accumulate until the former way of life can no longer be sustained. Change will then take place under the pressure of shortages, lost opportunities and the need to deal immediately with the consequences. We do not need to know the date of a future crisis to acknowledge this responsibility. We need to understand what sustains our lives and what we are doing to those foundations.

While We Can Still Choose

The Earth Code calls on us to seize the opportunity for deliberate change while humanity still has room to choose. We can reconsider the purposes of production in advance, reduce wastefulness, restore natural systems, change how resources are distributed and prepare people for new working conditions. This allows us to choose the sequence of our actions, test our decisions, correct mistakes and support those whose lives are changing. The more of the conditions we depend on have already been destroyed, the fewer means remain for this work, and the greater the cost of delay.

Reorganising civilisation will require immense effort. It involves the economy, infrastructure, education, the exercise of power and the habits of everyday life. This work may take several generations. People will have to resolve conflicts of interest, give up some familiar practices and answer for the consequences of their decisions. A deliberate transition offers the possibility of making change less harsh, but it does not remove the difficulties. Its purpose is to enable us to determine our direction in advance and prepare for change while preserving as much as possible of what makes a dignified human life possible.

Self-restraint must become a responsibility at every level. Individuals weigh their desires against the consequences of consumption. Production takes account of material use, the lifespan of goods, waste and the environment’s capacity to recover. Society brings its needs, population size and economic practices into line with the conditions for life on the planet. Those who exercise power are subject to limits, answer for their decisions and remain under public oversight. The duty to care for our shared world must also apply to those who set the rules and control the greatest resources.

Food, housing, education, medical care and free time require work, knowledge and functioning social relationships. They do not come into being merely because a right to them has been proclaimed. Society must be able to provide them today while preserving its ability to provide them tomorrow. A dignified life therefore involves each person’s contribution according to their abilities, and each person’s responsibility. Society has the right to require such a contribution and to hold people accountable for deliberately evading it. But the violation itself does not make a person expendable or remove the limits on the power exercised over them. Nor does Earth’s finite nature give anyone the right to treat people as disposable or to shift the entire burden of restraint onto those who already lack the necessities of life.

It is for this purpose that the Code connects the preservation of civilisation with human dignity. Progress must give people back their time, medicine must seek to free them from illness, and technology must serve life. Knowledge can deepen, goods can become more durable and work can become safer without making increased material consumption the highest goal. If preserving the conditions for life requires abandoning destructive production or slowing the introduction of a technology whose consequences we cannot control, society must be capable of making that decision. The ability to sustain civilisation requires the ability to govern our own power.

The World We Will Pass On

Humanity has much to learn from nature. In living systems, growth meets limits, matter enters new cycles, and what remains from one process often becomes the basis of another. An organism’s existence depends on a multitude of connections with the surrounding world. Studying these connections helps us understand the conditions for recovery, the consequences of intervention and the importance of the time needed for life to continue. Nature is not a ready-made moral code or a blueprint for society. But civilisation must learn to remain part of the world on which it depends and to preserve what allows it to exist.

No human system will free us from mistakes, conflicts of interest or the need to make difficult decisions. What matters is which purposes guide those decisions, which consequences society is willing to acknowledge and what it is capable of correcting.

Neither money, nor states, nor borders, nor the market, nor corporations, nor the existing way of organising work are laws of physics. They were created by Homo sapiens and can be changed by Homo sapiens. Whether they should be preserved must be judged by the lives they sustain and the futures they make possible. We inherited Earth along with the achievements and mistakes of previous generations. The generations that follow will inherit it along with the consequences of our decisions. It is up to us how many possibilities we leave them and how much of our responsibility they will have to shoulder.

The Earth Code appeals to the human capacity to consciously change the world we have created. While we have the opportunity to discuss, choose, prepare and act, we must use it to reshape our world in ways that preserve the conditions for life to continue. This work must be begun by those alive today, even if it will be completed by those not yet born. Before another world can be built, it must become thinkable.