Earth Constitution

“The world is my home, life is my family and love is my religion.”

The World Alternative Movement is built upon a cornerstone: the ethical charter and its subsequent constitution. The charter and the constitution will provide a common ground for the entire WAM and inspire and regulate the movement’s organization.

Here’s a constitution’s first draft. Have a read and feel free to suggest any changes. We are now looking to form a multidisciplinary group of experts that will work together as a constituent assembly to outline the charter’s and constitution’s official drafts.

Individual rights & duties

1. Right to life and security

• No human being can be deprived of its life without its prior consent. Abortion is a prerogative of mothers until the third month from conception.
• No human being can be physically harmed by another human without its prior consent, unless he/she is directly threatening the security of another.

2. Right to voluntary death

• Every human being has the right to terminate its own life or to ask for assisted suicide if unable to do so him/herself.

3. Right to free movement and settlement

• Every human being has the right to move freely all across the Earth and in outer space.
• Every human being has the right to settle in any previously uninhabited area which is not maintained as a natural reserve.

4. Right to free thought and expression

• Every human being has the freedom to hold or consider any thought, opinion or belief.
• Every human has the freedom to seek, receive or impart any information or idea, regardless of the medium used, unless it threatens the security of other people or of life as a whole.

5. Right to free association

• Every human being has the right to form or participate freely to any peaceful assembly and association.
• No human being may be compelled to belong to any association.

6. Right to food and shelter

• Every human being has the right to be provided with free food and shelter when unable to provide for him/herself.
• Every human being able to do so has the duty to provide free food and shelter to another human being unable to provide for him/herself.

7. Right to free education

• Every human being has the right to be provided with free primary and secondary education, from birth to the age of 18, by its family or community of birth.

8. Right of free access to the Internet

• Every human being has the right to connect to the Internet free of cost.

9. Right of free access to public transport

• Every human being has the right to access free of cost to the local and global public transportation grid.

10. Right of access to the universal welfare program

• Every human being of at least 18 years of age has the right to participate in the universal welfare program.

11. Right of ownership

• Every human being has the right to own private property alone or to share it with others.
• No human being shall be deprived of his private property by another human without its previous consent.

12. Right of free trade

• Every human being has the right to trade any privately held good or service on the free market, unless that good or service threatens the security of other people or of life as whole.

13. Duty of respecting the world’s ethical charter and constitution

• Every human being supporting this constitution must abide by the values expressed in the ethical charter and exercise its rights and freedoms with due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and for the general welfare of humanity and life.
• These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the WAM.

Family

14. Every couple of adult individuals has the right to form a family, regardless of sex, age or ethnic group. Individuals can choose to partake to one or more families at the same time. No one can be compelled to form a family, and family ties can be broken at any time by the decision of any one of the partners involved.

15. Every individual has the right to have a maximum of two offspring throughout his/her life, either with the same or with different partners.

16. Both parents have the duty to provide for their offspring’s maintenance and education, until their 18th year of age. Parents will be supported in this endeavor with an extra income for each child. If one parent dies or is unable to perform the parental duty, both shares of the income will go to the remaining parent. If both parents die, the parental income will be given to any adult willing to assume that responsibility.

Property

17. The following are to be legally considered as world commons and as such can not be privately owned nor traded as commodities:

• Earth (Sea, land, atmosphere, natural resources)
• Living creatures (DNA, bacteria, fungi, plants, animals)
• Communication infrastructure (Internet)
• Transportation infrastructure (Railway, water shuttles)
• Intangible goods (Ideas, knowledge, design)

Currency (WE-credits) is the only intangible good which is privately owned (see Economy section below).

Land, being a world commons, will be rented free of cost but not owned, and tenants will have to respect a care-taker contract that requires from them a positive ecological footprint and monthly self-reports on operational procedures (See community standards). Along with land, also local natural resources and buildings (real-estate) are included in the renting contract. To keep hold of a care-taker contract, an individual must prove to have resided at least 4 months of the previous year in such property, otherwise contract will be revoked. Hence, an individual can maintain a maximum of 3 different residencies at a time.

18. Tangible goods can be privately owned and, along with services, they can be traded in the free market.

Inheritance

19. Individuals can leave to their offspring/friends any of their privately owned goods. Offspring will be granted a preferential option to inherit their parent’s land and care-taker contract.

Although currency will be privately owned and freely transferable at all times, at the time of death of an individual his/her wealth will be automatically transferred to the Redistribution Scheme (see below).

Economy

20. We-Credits will function as the world reserve currency. Individuals will acquire WE-credits either by participating in the Universal Welfare system or by trading services and goods with other individuals.

21. Universal Basic Income

A monthly wage in the form of a WE-credits, received by each member of the Coop Network directly on its personal account.

22. Time Bank

In addition to the UBI, members can receive extra funds for dedicating their time to socially useful activities such as parenting, healthcare or education services, research, government, infrastructure maintenance etc. The allocation of these grants will be decided by a transparent and user-generated feedback system.

23. Ecological Incentives

Sustainable and regenerative practices such as living in an Ecological Community, cleaning up a river bed or planting new trees will also be rewarded. In this case, applicants must present standardized self-reports which can be later verified by third party enquiries.

24. Ethical Regulations

Excessive interest rates, financial speculation and unethical business practices will either be strongly discouraged or made outright impossible by design. Since the history of each person’s transactions will be recorded and available to everyone doing business with that person, breachers of the ethical code can and will be held accountable by the network.

25. Wealth Cap

To prevent the formation of monopolies, a universal wealth cap is applied to all accounts. It can either be an absolute value adjusted for inflation or a fixed wealth gap ratio between the richest and the poorest. Any capital exceeding that cap will be automatically transferred to the redistribution scheme.

26. Redistribution Scheme

A small flat tax will be automatically applied to all transactions. Along with the extra capital generated by the members, this funds will constitute the network’s welfare budget that is to be assigned every month according to a redistribution algorithm.

27. Swarm Enterprise

No private or public enterprise will be allowed to accumulate venture financial capital. Individuals can easily join personal finances to invest in common projects but cannot share financial capital as under a corporation model.

Ecology

28. Great Turning

Earth’s collapsing environmental systems provide the imperative to reverse humanity’s current course. A now seamless global communications web provides us the means. This convergence creates a brief moment of opportunity to birth an Ecological Civilization that brings people and planet into balance, nurtures innovation and creative expression, and provides to all an opportunity for material sufficiency and spiritual abundance.

• This transition cannot be led or imposed by institutions created to secure the relationships of the Imperial Civilization. Leadership must come from We the People.
• This transition must be peaceful and nonviolent. We must not fight the current system but create a new one from the bottom up.
• We must try not to breach the current legal system but to develop a new one on top of the old.
• We must gradually withdraw our support from the old institutions and economy as we live into being the institutions of a new economy that aligns with Ecological Civilization’s vision of possibility.
• We must discontinue use of all instruments of war and reallocate those resources for health care and environmental rejuvenation.
• We must stop using automobiles and commercial airplanes and build instead a worldwide ecological grid of public transport.
• We must boycott consumer goods and services produced by the big industry, and turn to local and sustainable production instead.
• We must move away from the cities and establish ecological communities in the countryside.
• All ecological communities must respect the community standards outlined by the Planetary Confederation and promote the development, adoption, and distribution of environmentally sound practices and technologies.

29. Planetary Stewardship

The Earth is billions of years old and it will be around long after humanity is gone. We are part of nature and we will never be more than just a part of nature, hence we have no right to claim dominion over the Earth. Our role as human beings is that of temporary stewards of the planetary ecosystem. We must learn to respect our proper place and not to disturb or interfere with natural processes as much as possible.

We can do this by:

• Making room for nature

In order to halt the loss of biodiversity and reverse environmental degradation we must restrict our civilization to at most a quarter of the Earth’s land surface and leave three quarters undisturbed. Before society at large can follow suit, we must set the right example: in all territories adhering to this constitution, humans must therefore occupy only 25% of the available space, while leaving the remaining 75% to wildlife.

• Preserving critical ecosystems

The most critical ecosystems on the planet are the more biodiverse ones. They maintain our planet’s life supports. They are the lungs of the earth and the incubators of life. They purify our water, oxygenate our air, enrich our soils, regulate precipitation, and keep the planet stable. They determine pollination and seed dispersal, stabilize climatic conditions, and control pests and diseases. They are therefore essential to our food security, to our health, and to the viability of our civilization.

We must therefore establish and safeguard viable nature and biosphere reserves, including wild lands and marine areas, to protect Earth’s life support systems, maintain biodiversity, and preserve our natural heritage.

We must pledge to avoid any human settlement and extractive activity in those areas, in order to promote the preservation and recovery of endangered species and critical ecosystems.

• Establishing corridors of life

We must establish corridors of life so that all ecosystems across all climate zones are connected and species are not separated and encircled by human civilization, as is currently the case.

Establishing corridors of life may imply the organized displacement of people on a very large scale. We can succeed only if the plan is clear, mapped out well in advance and carried out with concern for the people that will be uprooted.

30. Planetary Wellbeing

In order to establish an ecological civilization that is sustainable far into the future, we must abandon the self-aggrandizing motive of the present human civilization and embrace human and planetary wellbeing as the new guidelines for our socio-economic development. We must move from quantitative goals (how to get more for ourselves) to qualitative goals (how to make it be better for everyone). This new approach implies a radical shift from the endless growth paradigm to one of sustainable development.

Therefore, we must:

• Adopt at all levels sustainable development plans and regulations that make environmental conservation and rehabilitation integral to all development initiatives.
• Manage the use of renewable resources such as water, soil, forest products, and marine life in ways that do not exceed rates of regeneration and that protect the health of ecosystems.
• Manage the extraction and use of non-renewable resources such as minerals and fossil fuels in ways that minimize depletion and cause no serious environmental damage.
• Reduce, reuse, and recycle the materials used in production and consumption systems, and ensure that residual waste can be assimilated by ecological systems.
• Act with restraint and efficiency when using energy, and rely increasingly on renewable energy sources such as solar and wind.
• Internalize the full environmental and social costs of goods and services in the selling price, and enable consumers to identify products that meet the highest social and environmental standards.
• Prevent pollution of any part of the environment and allow no build-up of radioactive, toxic, or other hazardous substances.
• Control and eradicate non-native or genetically modified organisms harmful to native species and the environment, and prevent introduction of such harmful organisms.
• Place the burden of proof on those who argue that a proposed activity will not cause significant harm, and make the responsible parties liable for environmental harm.

Feel free to leave any comment or question below, and join the discussion on the dedicated forum.

Also in Eden Planet:

• Alternative Culture — A new vision for humanity
• World Ethos — Ethical charter for the new era
• Planetary Confederation — Grassroots glocal organization

Other WAM! publications:

Life Tribe

A new humanity

Coop Network

A new economy

Conscious Forum

A new consciousness