Gaian DemocraciesRoy Madron & John Joplin
Green Books, for The Schumacher Society, 2003
 It as been estimated that from the 1980s the human race has been taking more from the planet than the planet can replenish. If this is true then we are on a downhill path to oblivion. In 1997, 1,670 scientists including 110 of the 138 living winners of Nobel prizes issued this warning:
’We are fast approaching many of the Earth's limits. Current economic practices which damage the environment cannot continue. Our massive tampering could trigger unpredictable collapse of critical biological systems, which are only partly understood. A great change in our stewardship of the Earth and the life on it is required if vast human misery is to be avoided and our global home on this planet is not to be irretrievably mutilated.'
The authors of Gaian Democracies believe that the despoliation of the planet is a consequence of the economic system which governs the world. They call it the Global Monetocracy - a debt-based money system which has to grow continuously in order to avoid financial collapse. This is source of the unjust and unsustainable form of globalisation that we have today. The solution, they suggest, is to turn to the Earth's natural rhythms, to return to Gaia . 'Gaia' is the name of the Greek goddess of Earth, and the Gaia theory sees the Earth as a self-organising and self-regulating ecosystem.
The problem is how to dismantle the existing system and replace it with what the authors call Gaian Democracies. Clearly it needs a fundamental change in the way we think. Although there are few people prepared to make changes, there are plenty of people expressing their dissatisfaction with the world we have today. The authora list three groups of these: ’disaffected insiders' - workers in universities, schools, hospitals, corporate bureaucracies and government departments. ’Angry outsiders' are agitators and analysts like Noam Chomsky, John Pilger, Michael Moore, George Monbiot and others. And then there are the ’victims' - whether they be exploited workers, or the poor, the old and the sick.
The book mentions organisations which have stepped outside the system the Mondragon co-ops in Spain, Visa International (a credit card company owned by its functioning parts). It could have added the John Lewis partnership and the Co-operative movement in Britain. But despite these exceptions, the authors believe that we are not genetically designed to co-operate on a large scale. What we prefer is to work in highly cooperative small groups, as our hunter-gatherer ancestors did. With control at this scale participants become aware of public issues and actively involve themselves.
’Apart from the human benefits, there are substantial practical benefits derived from the much better quality decisions that arise from the much more comprehensive range of information and ideas that active citizens generate and integrate. Such benefits are unavailable to the command-and-control leaders of the Global Monetocracy. The current political paradigm is specifically designed to deny citizens the chance to give expression to even a fraction of the competence, the knowledge and the ideas they possess. By contrast, the Gaian Democracy paradigm is designed to liberate the competence, knowledge and ideas of active citizens, and nourish their capacities for liberating leadership.'
Geoffrey Lee
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