FOUR BIG ROOT SOCIAL PROBLEMS TO WORK ON RIGHT NOW
Brent Emerson  brent@oxhouse.org  2003-2008

U.S. Electoral Reform | Economic Democracy
Population Control | Intellectual Property

Let's assume that we want to make world society into a system 
characterized by sustainable, just, comfortable and beautiful 
relationships between humans, other animals, plants, other biotic 
features, and other abiotic features.  What are the most immediate root 
problems impeding our progress toward this goal?  And what can we do 
(aside from generally supporting and participating in practices that we 
believe are just and sustainable) to overcome them?

Here are my ideas:

(1) The government of the United States of America, the most wealthy and 
powerful nation on the Earth, is elected via a process that (given its 
current diverse citizenry) is undemocratic and produces inaccurate 
representation.  [Witness the 2000 presidential election, in which 
slightly more voters selected the loser than had selected the winner.  
What's more, significantly more voters selected "progressive" and 
"liberal" candidates than selected "conservative" candidates, yet the most 
popular conservative candidate won.] Because of (a) the advantage given by 
our media systems to candidates who have most money to spend on their 
campaigns, and (b) the outdated technical assumptions built into our 
voting models, our election system concentrates a massive amount of power 
into the hands of a group of people who should not have it, assuming we 
believe that representative democracy is just.

CORE BECAUSE: We spend a lot of time campaigning and voting for mainstream 
and sub-mainstream and fringe party candidates for many different levels 
of office, hoping to eventually influence government policy in many 
important areas.  Our means are educating and outreaching to voters, which 
assumes that our leaders will be elected by the will of the voters.  This 
is not the case - the system underlying our electoral process is broken.  
Until we fix it, most political investment is wasted and may even be 
counterproductive.

SOLUTION: (a) Campaign finance reform.  If candidates were given equal 
access to the citizenry, and their campaigns limited as to expenditure or 
contributions from powerful wealthy entities, voters would get the 
information they need to make an informed decision as to their 
preferences.

(b) Structural voting reform.  If Instant Runoff Voting and Choice Voting
schemes were adopted and the Electoral College eliminated, the preferences
expressed by voters would be much more accurately expressed in the leaders
they elected.

(c) Other election reforms: Election day holidays, Election-day 
registration, uniform ID requirements, voting by mail, transparent and
verifiable election technology, felon re-enfranchisement, etc.

ACTION ITEMS: (a) Lobby your elected officials to support campaign finance 
reform.  Support advocacy groups working on this issue.

(b) Educate yourself and other people about alternative voting models.  
Use them on as many small levels as possible - in your homes and 
businesses.  Encourage your local government to study or adopt them at the 
city and county level.  Lobby your elected representatives to study or 
adopt them at the state and federal level.  Support the work of advocacy 
organizations working on this issue - the Center for Voting and Democracy 
(www.fairvote.org) is a good place to start.

(c) Support election reform campaigns!


(2) The world's power not held by governments is largely concentrated into 
large and powerful capitalist corporations and other nondemocratic 
entities that are given the rights of individual humans without any of the 
experiences that could create a compassionate being.  As a result of their 
most foundational structures, corporations must aim to constantly profit 
while disregarding to maximum extent possible the costs paid by society, 
the physical environment, and other parts of the system they interdepend 
on.  The humans constituting the corporation are forced to participate in 
this process: if an individual human's intentions collide with corporate 
goals, the person is removed from office and another springs up to replace 
them, or the corporation does poorly in the market and may fail; if a 
corporation fails, another springs up to replace it.

Industrial capitalism has done great work for humanity in terms of 
harnessing the work of generations into ever-faster technological 
development, enabling the possibility of making human life longer, more 
satisfying, and more comfortable. Unfortunately, it has also routinely 
allocated society's resources inefficiently and unjustly, created and 
enforced a narrow concept of personal interest and identity, and made 
liberal use of resource sources and waste sinks in careless disregard of 
the interdependence of all natural systems, including human society. We 
can do better.

CORE BECAUSE: Justice and sustainability are not often maximally 
profitable for those who make decisions, so corporate decision-making 
contributes on many different levels to practices that run counter to 
these values, including: corporate media and the way it educates us about 
and creates our world; corporate involvement in political campaigns; and 
corporations' relationships with their employees, physical resources and 
waste.

SOLUTION: Gradually eliminate capitalist corporations by doing most of 
society's work through cooperative organizing models that build in
large-scale conscious behavior flowing democratically from the bottom up
rather than large-scale disregard that flows from the top down.

ACTION ITEMS: Educate yourself and others about the history of such 
organizing models.  Organize your work and consumption around cooperative 
principles and transfer your consumption to flow through channels so 
organized.  Research and develop tools and policies by which large-scale 
organization of labor and consumption is made more efficient and possible.  
Lobby your elected officials to support legislation which limits 
capitalist corporations' legal rights and advantages and supports 
a cooperative economy.


(3) There are too many humans!  If we follow our current policies and 
social norms, U.N. projections suggest population will eventually level 
off at 10-12 billion, or roughly twice our current population.

CORE BECAUSE: Many of the society's emerging social and environmental 
problems boil down to this: the human population of the earth is near its 
carrying capacity and growing, and we are making more per capita demands 
of our planet than ever, and so we are running out.  Running out of clean 
water, out of clean atmosphere in which to deposit carbon, out of fuel to 
power our ever-more-energy-intensive lifestyles, out of arable land to 
farm, out of fish stocks, out of forest...  The solution is typically to 
work on the supply side and try to provide more.  So we might develop 
systems to eek out a little more grain from the land, a little more fish 
from the sea, a little more energy efficiency ... but frequently these 
solutions feed back in ways that enhance other problems, and they're not 
keeping pace with increasing population.

There is no good reason to not instead work on the demand side.  Reducing 
per capita resource use by simplifying lifestyles will help to reduce 
demand, but can't possibly do all the work if we're to remain 6-12 
billion.  It seems that we can have 12 billion humans who live in a 
damaged ecosystem under pre-industrial conditions, 6 billion humans who 
live simple, restricted lives routinely teetering on the edge of 
eco-collapse, or 1-2 billion humans with no space or resource limitations 
who can continue to advance technologically and live in harmony with their 
healthy ecosystem.

SOLUTION: Slow population growth to stabilize on the smallest possible 6+ 
billion population, and then hopefully go through a period of contraction 
until the human population of the Earth is 1-2 billion.  Keep it there!

Surely every problem arising from a resource limit can be solved by changing
the three factors of demand: population, efficiency, and conservation.  And
conveniently these factors interact in a multiplicative way, so that (for
instance) decreasing population by 1/2, conserving by decreasing resource use
cases to 1/2, and increasing efficiency by 2x produces a net drop to 1/8 of
our previous resource use, allowing the supply-side solutions to work on a
much smaller resource requirement problem.

# people * (resource use/person) * (utility/resource use) = demand = supply

ACTION ITEMS: (a) Have 0-2 children.

(b) Foster the social norm of having 0-2 children.

(c) Foster the concept that it's possible and just and compassionate and 
makes sense to work to engineer ourselves an optimal population size.  
Foster the conversation about how to do this without coercive interference 
into the creative and difficult work of raising children.


(4) We have a damaged and incoherent view of "Intellectual Property".  
"Property" is a terrible metaphor for ideas or information (software, 
music, text, film) in the first place because it relies on the exclusivity 
of possession: when I give you my property, I no longer have it.  This in 
not true of information.  The only thing I lose when I give away my ideas 
is the exclusive right to control and profit from them.

CORE BECAUSE: Many recent technological innovations in our new 
"information age" are, at root, ideas or information that would benefit 
far more of society far more quickly if they could be used and extended 
without restriction.  These innovations can increase economic efficiency 
and improve quality of life for everyone.  Other forms of information 
could more broadly educate or entertain if they were freed.

SOLUTION: Information creators should free their creations to be used and 
extended by others.  In cases when they are unlikely to do this or where 
it would actually hinder productivity, their work should be protected by 
copyright or patent for an optimal 14 years, no more.  This term balances 
society's interest in rewarding creators (with limited exclusive rights to 
control and profit from their creations) with its interest in making the 
broadest, quickest use of humanity's creativity to serve all.

ACTION ITEMS: (a) Use and propagate free software and other free 
information using licenses like the GPL and Creative Commons licenses.

(b) Lobby the government to restrict copyright and patent protection to 14 
years.