Planetary Cooperation for Regional Self-Organization
Discussion
James Quilligan:
"As the ecological limits of humanity’s demand for energy are crossed and ecosystem deficits expand across the planet, many people are questioning the capacity of state sovereignty to address the relentless disintegration of planetary habitability (Chakrabarty 2021, 196--204; Blake and Gilman 2024, 8--9). The main problem is that sovereign states cannot account empirically for the sources of natural energy that empower their economies because the social data that is measured within their political boundaries is not aligned with the ecological data measured within their ecosystem boundaries (B. J. Cohen 2000, 131--49). The areas don’t match. Nations contain ecosystems, but nations are not ecosystems (except for some tiny nations and small island states). Because this data must be computed within a naturally bounded ecosystem, national measurements like energy extraction or economic growth cannot be used to evaluate the carrying capacity of a nation’s resources for its population (B. J. Cohen 2008, 214--22).
Little wonder that people are losing trust in their economic and political systems. Nation-states cannot act responsibly because the principle of sovereignty was never designed to measure or allocate the natural energy that empowers their economies. The industrial, technological, and financial forms of state organization that emerged from the first two laws of thermodynamics were intended to guarantee material goods and security to people within their political borders, not to create energy sustainability locally or transregionally within bioregions. This lack of scope and specificity in the measurement of natural borders goes back to the human myth of material progress through economic growth, the vision of agricultural/agro-industrial societies that relied on the transfers of thermodynamic value from a periphery to a core, wherein the energy-value in a periphery is replaced with money in a core. Through two distinct processes, net energy is transported from one physical place to another, and an assigned value for net energy is conveyed from one financial account to another. In this way, the logistic value of net energy in the periphery is turned into exponential exchange-value in the core. Restricted to this rural-urban paradigm, sovereign nations are struggling to foster organic growth and self-sufficiency, limit entropy, and meet the collective needs of their population through existing policies and institutions."