The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals: An Exercise in Omnicidal Duplicity

FEATURED RESEARCH PAPER, 30 Dec 2024

Dr. Glen T. Martin – TRANSCEND Media Service

Abstract

28 Dec 2024 – This article opens by offering an overview of the paradigm-shift that has taken place on our human self-understanding as a result of the scientific breakthroughs that have occurred since the works of Max Planck and Einstein in the early 20^th century. It proceeds describe the two aspects of our world system that we institutionally inherent from the earlier ‘Newtonian’ era going back to the 17^th century: an interfacing of capitalism and sovereign nation-states. Third, the article reviews the responses of the U.N. to the climate crisis beginning with its earliest major conference in 1972. Next the article examines each of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals with reference to the major environmental literature concerning climate change as well as with regard to the disparities between the goal and the world system within which it is tasked to actualize its mission. Finally, the article presents a “summary and conclusion” showing how and why the SDGs are impossible of realization within this world system and in what ways they contradict the environmental literature. The article argues that only global democracy under a global constitution like the Earth Constitution can effectively deal with the accelerating climate crisis.

 Our Human Situation in the Universe

The topic of sustainable development goals is one about human life on planet earth. It must be examined within the context of who and what we are as a species that has, over several million years of evolutionary development, colonized the entire surface of the Earth as its dominant species, a species that today comprehends that this colonization has become highly problematic to the point where we are clearly facing our own self-induced extinction.

The very fact that we alone (unlike other species that have gone extinct) appear self-aware to the point where we become cognizant of this existential danger and understand that we have the corresponding duty to take action directed to avoidance of our own impending self-induced extinction. It may be that this level of self-awareness making us capable of protecting life for future generations has only arisen in the past four centuries since the turning point in human self-awareness known as the “Copernican Revolution” that developed after the publication of Copernicus’ De revolutionibus orbium coelestium in 1543.

Our relatively naïve mythological consciousness prior to that point had assumed that the entire cosmos was created with the human drama of spiritual fall and redemption in mind thereby placing us physically at the center of the cosmic process. (This “Western” mythology was paralleled in the East by different content but with a corresponding mythological consciousness.) Such conceptions were exploded by the Copernican Revolution that began a process not only of decentering humanity within the cosmos but, with the invention of each ever more powerful telescope, shrinking our cosmic significance even further toward myopic insignificance within the cosmic process. Today, since Edwin Hubble’s breakthroughs in the late 1920s, we find ourselves not only as a microscopic dot within billions of stars but an inconceivably insignificant blip within billions of galaxies.

If our emerging human self-awareness is left at the level of this realization, then our impending self-extinction appears entirely irrelevant and insignificant. Why should it matter? Why should we be concerned with sustainable development goals when existence appears meaningless, and all that is left to our personal lives is to strive for pleasure and ego-gratification as much as possible during this fleeting life? My inevitable end within this meaningless process is not more or less significant than the inevitable end of the entire human species. Today, after the first quarter of the 21^st century has transpired, such nihilism remains pervasive in the background of human awareness.

Apparently corresponding to this scenario of awakening to our physical situation within the cosmic process, the cosmology associated with early modernity in the 16^th and 17^th centuries gave us the “Newtonian world view” that saw the cosmos as composed of “bodies in motion,” making no conceptual room for “mind” and the apparent absolute uniqueness of human consciousness as was suggested by the 17^th century work of Rene Descartes who argued that mind was a different kind of “substance” from matter. Nevertheless, much of early modern cosmology saw the entire cosmos as composed of matter, as determined by the laws of matter, and as resolving into the tiny, invisible components of matter called “atoms.” By contrast, human aspirations, values, and hopes appeared as “merely subjective,” epiphenomenal reactions to the “reality” of materialism, determinism, and atomism. Again, such nihilism lingers in the background of today’s human self-awareness: human life with its subjective hopes and values apparently having no “objective” meaning within a “realistic” scheme of things.

However, this early modern cosmology with its apparent implications was challenged by the scientific discovery of holism in the cosmos beginning with the work of Max Plank and Albert Einstein during the first decade of the 20^th century. In a movement of critical self-awareness that had been developing since the time of Immanuel Kant in the 18^th century, along with these scientific breakthroughs of the 20^th century, the Copernican revolution was now manifesting as a counter-Copernican revolution placing humanity back at the center. The early 20^th century work of such thinkers as Henri Bergson in France, Alfred North Whitehead in the USA, and Sri Aurobindo Ghosh in India began to see human life within the framework of the entire cosmic evolutionary process, now understood to be some 13.7 billion years in the making.

Today, thousands of major scientists and philosophical thinkers across the globe articulate a worldcentric and cosmocentric awareness in which human life is understood in terms of the evolutionary nisus of the cosmos having become conscious of itself in us. The atomistic assumption that each of us exists as a human ego directed toward its own self-indulgence and individualized self-interest has been replaced within a large portion of humanity by an understanding that the ego-illusion must be penetrated to the deeper reality of a universal consciousness pervasive within us and connecting the human phenomenon, not only to one another, but to the very foundations of all existence, as paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, physicist David Bohm, and many others have declared.[1]

The whole that is manifest within us is more than the sum of its parts. The so-called material dimension, the dimensions of consciousness, and the groundless ground of ‘emptiness’ cannot be simply added together to make the whole. Philosopher Raimon Panikkar describes the whole that manifests itself in each human person: “The whole is not divisible into parts, and therefore the sum of the parts does not constitute the whole; each member is an image of the Whole and the Whole is reflected in its members. Each being is unique and indispensable because the Whole is reflected in that being in order to be whole. Reality has inter-in-dependent order. This is the sphere of ontonomy…. If rhythm were not the very Rhythm of Being, the order thus created would become a competitive chaos”[2]

Concomitant with the evolution of human awareness to cosmic consciousness has been a progressive realization of human dignity. This dimension of the counter-Copernican revolution also has deep roots in the work of Kant who formulated the distinction between human beings and “things,” deriving from this a fundamental form of the moral “categorical imperative” to “always treat every person as an end in themselves never merely as a means.” “Things,” Kant said, have “price.” They can be compared in terms of their relative economic worth as one thing more or less valuable than another on a relative scale of comparative worth.  Persons, by contrast, have “dignity,” and an infinite value that, by this very token, cannot be compared or evaluated as more or less valuable.[3] This realization, that every person is an end in his or herself and hence of incomparable value, has become the basis of the idea of human rights.  Human rights derive from our common human dignity.

The U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights of December 10, 1948, represents a major step forward in human awareness of this depth dimension of our existence. It begins with the famous but little understood affirmation that “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equality and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.” Human dignity is “inherent” and “inalienable” precisely because it is not objectifiable within the world of “things” that have price, that are comparable as “more or less valuable.” As I have shown elsewhere, most of the literature on human dignity and/or rights today, cites its sources in this Kantian distinction between persons and things.[4]

The World System of Global Capitalism and Sovereign Nation-states

The counter-Copernican Revolution has placed human beings back in the center, linked the evolution of ever greater levels of human self-awareness to the comic nisus at the heart of cosmic evolution, and recognized a depth-dimension to the human person that can be characterized as “infinite worth.” Yet this has not significantly impacted the world system institutions that have evolved from 16^th and 17^th century early modern assumptions. Our world system constitutes an inextricable synthesis of global capitalism interfaced with sovereign territorial nation-states. Both aspects of this synthesis were formed in their essential characteristics during the 16^th and 17^th centuries. Scholars often cite the Peace Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 as the foundational document defining the modern system of militarized sovereign states.

As one might surmise, this means that neither capitalism nor sovereign nation-states structurally recognize human dignity. Capitalism contains what economist William Greider in The Soul of Capitalism calls a “legalized fraud” as its foundational principle: “The ‘fraud’ is the economic pretense that people can be treated as things, as commodities or machines, as lifeless property that lacks the qualities inseparable from the human self, the person’s active deliberation and choices, the personal accountability for one’s actions.”[5] Duncan K. Foley in Adam’s Fallacy: A Guide to Economic Theology, observes that “the organization of the social division of labor through commodity exchange and wage labor systematically inverts the ordinary logic of human relationships. The logic of the commodity system assumes the universal assertion of self-interest in opposition to others…. The logic of commodity exchange is opposed to moral logic in both its principles and its conclusions. But more important, the reality of commodity exchange and its laws tends to defeat moral action.”[6]

Human dignity, and our moral capacity deriving from that dignity, is defeated by capitalism. I have developed this thesis at length in a number of books from the publication of Millenium Dawn in 2005 to Human Dignity and World Order in 2024, and there is no space here to elaborate this theme more fully. The same is true of the system of sovereign nation-states that structurally denies human dignity at every turn in spite of the fact that the constitutions of many nations include the concept of dignity as part of the text.[7] In their book Priceless: On Knowing the Price of Everything and the Value of Nothing, Frank Ackerman and Lisa Heinzerling describe the functioning of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) within which both of them worked. The Agency was staffed by people trained in classical economics (capitalism) who could not comprehend the “priceless” character of human persons. These authors describe the absurd contortions the Agency went through as it required a dollar value to be assigned to everything, and anything that could not be so assigned was valued at zero.[8]

The doctrine of “sovereignty” means “ultimate authority.” Each nation has ultimate authority to make laws and govern its “internal affairs.”  Humanity is divided into absolute fragments deriving from the false, atomistic, assumptions of early modern science. The government of each nation is also entirely free (since there is no effective law above sovereign nations) to do what it wills in foreign policy. Has G.W.F. Hegel put this, each state as “sovereign” is represented by a “particular will” without a “Praetor to adjucate between” them, with the consequence that “conflicts between states can only be settled by war.”[9] Emery Reves in 1945 made the same point: “War takes place whenever and wherever non-integrated social units of equal sovereignty come into contact.”[10]

Any such “war system” necessarily denies human dignity, since it structurally sees every other nation as a potential enemy with whom it might go to war. To go to war means to have a military that trains its soldiers to kill or destroy whomever or whatever they are commanded to destroy. Real recognition of intrinsic human dignity would make such a system impossible. The categorical imperative makes no exceptions: “Always treat every person as an end in themselves never merely as a means.”

The U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, also recognizing universal human dignity, correctly concludes that “Everyone has the right to life, liberty, and security of person.” This is not a conditional right making exceptions “in case of war or other emergency.” It states that “everyone-always” has this inalienable right. The sovereign nation-state system structurally makes exceptions to this universal right. It states in effect that everyone has this right except in case of war. Kant similarly affirms the principle that a supposed sovereignty recognizing no law above itself is necessarily in a condition of de facto war even if hostilities are not presently being conducted.[11] The sovereign nation-state system therefore structurally denies our universal human dignity.

As many world federalist thinkers, from Kant, to Emery Reves, to David Ray Griffin have pointed out,[12] sovereignty can only belong to the people of Earth since law (genuine law) derives from the authority of the people to regulate their common affairs, keep the peace, and implement just relations among free persons. Therefore, we have seen that capitalism intrinsically violates human dignity through structurally treating people as a means (as commodities) and nation-states intrinsically violate human dignity in a similar way—through treating all persons external to their sovereign fragmentation as potential enemies to be murdered through war if necessary.

As the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights makes clear, all government arises from the will of the people and requires that its laws follow a non-military due process in which human rights and fundamental freedoms are respected. Even the possession of a military violates this principle. After 1948, human rights thinkers have more deeply understood the implications of human dignity. They have articulated both the universal “right to peace” and the “right to a healthy, sustainable environment,” so-called “third generation rights.”[13] These rights are truly planetary, transcending individuals and demanding a world system that can actualize and protect them. Today’s advanced thinkers have understood that legitimate government arising from the people can only be non-military democratic world government such as that envisioned by the Constitution for the Federation of Earth.[14]

Historical Background to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

Throughout the 1960s evidence rapidly mounted that human fossil fuel wastes (greenhouse gasses) were causing a warming of the Earth’s climate. With the advent at the time of ever more powerful computer modeling of the warming process, climate science was born. This science has exploded around the globe and engendered numerous sub-specialties to the point where today there is overwhelming scientific agreement about the threat to human existence from a runaway warming process that may make the Earth unlivable by the close of the 21^st century.[15]

The first U.N. Climate Conference took place in Stockholm in 1972. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), founded by the UN in 1988, issued its first assessment report in 1990 and two years later a truly major international climate conference was convened at Rio de Janeiro. That year (1992), the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was implemented as a universal treaty to negotiate and coordinate national responses to this on-going threat. Today the Convention has 198 parties. Within this framework agreement major steps forward have been taken, such as the Kyoto Protocol of 1997 and the Paris Agreement of 2015.

In sum, while the Conference of States Parties (COPs) meets every year within this Convention and the IPCC has issued comprehensive and detailed scientific reports every two to three years,[16] and the process has been punctuated by major agreements such as these, the overall record of our planetary response to climate change has been a major failure to control the cascade of warming and ever-increasing extreme weather events from superstorms to super-floods to super-droughts to unprecedented wildfires to rising ocean levels to killer heat waves. The Rio Conference in 1992 formed an “Agenda 21” agreement as to the serious reductions in fossil fuel wastes that had to be achieved by the dawn of the 21^st century. The dawn of the new century came and went with little or no real progress. Voluntary agreements among sovereign nation-states within the context of a competitive global capitalist growth economy have proven to be worth little.

At the Millennium Summit in New York City in 2000, the participants formulated a set of goals named the “Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to guide transformative action from 2000 to 2015. In 2002 another global climate conference was held in Johannesburg where the ongoing failure to deal with climate change was recognized. The year 2015 arrived with little success, so the UNFCCC formulated another set of goals aiming at the years 2015 to 2030. The lame rationale given was that the MDGs were not specific enough and needed the elaboration found in the newly articulated and expanded Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which now included 17 major goals and 169 specific targets.

Needless to say, today in the year 2024, the prospect of even attaining a moderate portion of these SDG goals by the year 2030 appears very remote. Since 1965, fossil fuel consumption worldwide (combining coal, oil, and gas) has increased from approximately 40,000 terawatt-hours to some 140,000 terawatt-hours in 2023, an increase of 350 %![17] Surely there must be some deeper explanation for this ongoing failure. That is what this paper attempts to uncover. It examines each of the 17 goals in turn, with an eye to the world system (today, dominated by the global hegemon, the USA, with an eye to the world system that undermines and defeats these goals.

The US empire has long been the ideological promoter of unrestrained global capitalism, and the influence of the US on the United Nations System has always been considerable. Johan Galtung in The Fall of the US Empire: And Then What?  lists various dimensions of this influence as: “controlling the Security Council through veto; controlling UNGA against Uniting for Peace Resolutions; controlling by spying on delegations and arms-twisting; controlling the budget through 25% clause, non-payment, and GAO, the General Accounting Office, and arm of the US Congress; controlling the UN civil servants through short term contracts; showing who is in charge through material breach, illegality; and, getting away with it all, because of the above.”[18] In our critical overview of each of the goals we will see the influence of this empire and this dominant world system in the background.

 Critical Overview of Each of the 17 Goals

 The U.N.’s SDG document called “Transforming our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development,” takes its stand directly on the dual aspects of the World System inherited from the early modern “Newtonian” cosmology. Item 18 of the document’s Introduction declares as its foundational principle that “every state has and shall freely exercise, full permanent sovereignty over all its wealth, natural resources and economic activity.” The truly global and holistic problem of climate destruction can alone be solved, they declare, though the cooperation of some 193 sovereign fragments. Similarly, without using the word “capitalism,” the document insists that the only solution to the climate crisis will involve “sustainable economic growth” (see Goals 8 and 17) along with the system of loans, debt, and repayment as provided by the world’s current global financial system (Goal 17). As we will see in our critical review of each goal, this commitment both ignores the essential messages of climate science and in effect denies the fundamental paradigm-shift to a counter-Copernican holism that humanity has developed since the early 20^th century. Let us briefly examine each goal in turn.

 GOAL 1: End poverty in all its forms everywhere.

While the ending of poverty is indeed a key element in any sustainable world system, the narrative under this SDG goal includes no analysis of the causes of poverty. In addition, the document, whether from deep naivete or from propagandistic guile, never mentions the population explosion on Earth in which the global population has multiplied more than 8 hundred percent since it reached the one billion mark in about 1800 and is now at well over 8 billion. The substantial literature concerning population increase in relation to poverty is entirely ignored. In fact, within the entire SDG document the word “population” only occurs five times, each time in entirely innocuous contexts. Yet on our planet the population increases by about 80 million new persons per year, which is equivalent to adding another nation the size of Mexico to the planet annually. This major phenomenon is entirely ignored and not at all linked with the problem of poverty. Here, as elsewhere, the SDG document reveals its nature as “omnicidal duplicity,” as a feel-good document systematically ignoring the real causes behind the looming extinction of human life on planet Earth.

GOAL 2: End Hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture.

This goal states: “By 2030, double the agricultural productivity and incomes of small-scale food producers, in particular women, indigenous peoples, family farmers, pastoralists and fishers, including through secure and equal access to land, other productive resources and inputs, knowledge, financial services, markets and opportunities for value addition and non-farm employment.” There is no hint as to how this is to be achieved in the light of a global economic system dedicated to perpetual increase in wealth for the few at the expense of the many. In addition, agricultural lands are diminishing worldwide, fisheries are declining worldwide, droughts and irregular seasonal cycles are interfering with food production on all continents, at the same time that the world’s population continues to explode, and yet the authors of Goal 2 ignore these deeper causes of hunger in the fragmented world system itself.

GOAL 3: Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all ages.

In poor countries around the world, such as in Africa and elsewhere, quality health care is practically non-existent for the great majority. In the richest country in the world, a privatized health-care system makes accessible care an impossibility for some 50 % of the population. Healthy lives and well-being require access to healthcare, education, a decent income, and deep social cohesion, all of which are included in the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights but are substantially lacking under the fragmented system of exploitative capitalism and militarized nation-states. In the U.S., the nation’s wealth is spent to the tune of trillions of dollars on militarism while much of the population goes without adequate healthcare. The SDG document never mentions such facts.

GOAL 4: Ensure inclusive and equitable education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.

Does education include the ability to think deeply and critically concerning our human situation and its multiplicity of problems?  If this is the case, then the authors of the SDGs must have missed a quality education and never learned the techniques of lifelong learning. Millions of bonded labor children in India and elsewhere are enslaved and denied an education. Millions of girls in Afghanistan and other countries are denied the right to an education. That these atrocities may well reflect a world system fragmented by national sovereignty and an economic system that requires the tiny fingers of child slaves to manufacture carpets for international sale appears beyond the comforting scenario framed by these SDG provisions.

GOAL 5: Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls.

This U.N. goal urges nations to “Adopt and strengthen sound policies and enforceable legislation for the promotion of gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls at all levels.” Nations are urged to pass “enforceable legislation” to address this fundamental human problem, yet the U.N. system advocating this solution takes its principled stand on the refusal to recognize anything that might be called “enforceable world law.”  The U.N. Charter institutionalizes a “sovereign nation-state” anarchy and sugarcoats this chaos through the deceptive concept of “international law.” As multiple philosophers of law such as H.L.A. Hart have pointed out from the 20^th century to the present, so-called international law is no law. It is not democratically legislated, it is not enforceable, and it is not adjudicated by courts that have a binding power of mandamus, and it recognizes legal arrangements, including new nations, founded on violence and war.[19]  The U.N. system structurally opposes “enforceable legislation” at the planetary level – exactly where it is absolutely needed if there is ever to be gender equality and empowerment of women and girls.

GOAL 6: Ensure availability and sustainable management of water for all.

Everywhere climate chaos increases planetwide and the Earth’s population continues to multiply. At the same time water tables are dropping around the world diminishing the water supply the number of people requiring water continues to increase dramatically. Scholars have begun to speak of the coming “water-wars” while today the militarized sovereign nations of the world are fighting wars over access to fossil fuels.[20] Major water wars, along with fossil fuel wars, and other resource wars loom on the horizon while the SDGs never mention this inevitable feature of the world system.

Vandana Shiva, an Indian activist defender of people and their environment, has written extensively about how transnational corporations are privately appropriating huge quantities of water in India and elsewhere (2002, Chap. 4). These giant capitalist enterprises cause the water tables to drop, making water impossible to get, especially for the poor who depend on shallow wells. These companies then insert their privatized water into environmentally destructive plastic bottles, and sell water to the people, immensely profiting from the private sale of what should be a public resource. The SDG document appears to know nothing of these practices. It never mentions the problem of corporate domination of the global economy.

GOAL 7: Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all.

The sources of energy, as we have seen, have not significantly evolved away from fossil fuels. In his 2021 book, The New Climate War, climate scientist Michael E. Mann details the dozens of ways that the fossil fuel industry, right wing billionaire investors, climate change denying “think tanks” and fossil fuel producing nations (such as Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the USA) work to deflect, defeat, derail, and de-legitimize the solid facts of climate science and the ever more strident warnings found in the regular reports of the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Scientists (IPCC).

Mann details the way in which major fossil fuel nations work to prevent action to convert away from fossil fuel use.[21] The two dimensions of the world system described above (sovereign nation-states and global capitalism) function to defeat the survival of humanity within a fossil fuel free future. Naomi Klein in This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate (2014) similarly details how the fossil fuel transnationals spend untold of millions of dollars to spread doubt about climate science and its conclusions.[22]

As Pepe Escobar examines in Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (2006), huge economic forces and powerful nation-states have allied against the goal of sustainable energy. These forces struggle to find new reserves of fossil fuels, from beneath deep oceans to fragile polar environments. The nations and energy industries of the planet fight for new fossil fuel resources, to build ever more pipelines, and to ensure dependency on these climate destructive sources. None of this is mentioned in the SDG document.

GOAL 8: Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment, and decent work for all.

In one voice the major economists of climate change declare that “you cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet.” Richard Heinberg, Senior Fellow at the Post-Carbon Institute, writes:

We have created monetary and financial systems that require growth…. This is a self-reinforcing destructive feedback loop that is very difficult to stop once it gets going…. With the fossil fuel revolution of the past century and a half, we have seen economic growth at a speed and scale unprecedented in all of human history…. The underlying contradiction at the heart of our entire economic system [is] the assumption that we can have unending growth on a finite planet…. We must discover how life in a non-growing economy can actually be fulfilling, interesting and secure.[23]

The ‘dean’ of this sustainability economics literature, Herman E. Daly, defines “sustainability” as “development without growth beyond environmental carrying capacity, where development means qualitative improvement and growth means quantitative increase.”[24] A sustainable global economy is a “steady-state” economy focusing on “qualitative improvement” rather than quantitative increase. Such “qualitative improvement” might include the majority of the SDG goals, such as ending poverty and hunger, promoting health and well-being, education for all, gender equality empowering women and girls, clean water for all, etc.

But the dogma of capitalism has long been that these goals are not allowed to happen through any form of democratic socialism but only through capitalist growth. Any social-economic experiments outside the capitalist growth model have been severely punished by US sanctions and imperialism. Out of dozens of examples of this, I cite here a few of the major events: the Cuban overthrow of a U.S. supported capitalist dictator in 1959 resulted in brutal sanctions continuing to the present, the NATO destruction of the federated socialism of the former Yugoslavia in 1998-99,[25] the election of a democratic socialist in Chile in 1970, the 1979 Sandinista overthrow of a US supported capitalist dictator in Nicaragua, the dismantling of a poverty stricken U.S. client state with the election of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela in 1998. All of these and dozens more have been subjected to crushing sanctions, CIA attempts at destabilization, and/or military invasion.[26]

Under the capitalist system, this goal in terms of productive employment for all is clearly impossible. Capitalism strives to maximize profit margins and socially this requires significant unemployment with a desperate workforce willing to work for the lowest marketable wages. This goal also uses the catch-phrase that has become the emblem of operation for nearly every industry on Earth. They all claim to be guided by “sustainable economic growth.” They all care about the environment according to their advertising, at the same time that their investors require that they maximize profits and minimize expenditures. Are these two goals compatible at all?

Environmental thinkers such as James Gustav Speth in The Bridge at the End of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing the Crisis to Sustainability (2008) argue powerfully that the dogma of capitalist growth is the fatal flaw defeating the environmental movement. In his 2021 book, They Knew:The US Federal Government’s Fifty-Year Role in Causing the Climate Crisis, Speth documents the behind the scenes derailing of genuine climate protection initiatives by the U.S. government in favor of the ideology of perpetual capitalist growth which has its global epicenter in Washington, DC.[27]  Did the framers of the SDG document also “know”?  The United Nations is centered in New York City and an in-person inspection of the many displays in its large reception hall reveals that US imperialism and militarism are systematically and quietly omitted from all these exhibits. Could it be that the physical host of the U.N. (and its largest financial contributor) also helped write the SDG document in such a way as to obscure the anti-climate forces that dominate its government? SDG Goal 8 appears oblivious to the realities of the economic world that dominates most of our planet. It presents a pie-in-the-sky goal that has little or nothing to do with present realities.

In a truly sustainable world, as Daly, Heinberg, Joel Kovel, and many others have argued,[28] all industrial production goods must be manufactured for durability, must be able to be repaired instead of discarded, and must be designed to be recycled and reused. Such a world would appear to make capitalism as we know it impossible since much of today’s profits are made precisely through creating products to be discarded, making products intentionally to break after the warranty period has expired, and producing cheap products that cannot easily be recycled. Similarly, these sustainability economists tell us that the industrial extraction of resources from the Earth must be scaled back to a minimum, and non-recycled waste products must also be reduced to an absolute minimum. All this would require a major transformation into some form of democratic socialism.[29]

GOAL 9: Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization, and foster innovation.

“Inclusive and sustainable industrialization” is perhaps especially important for poor countries. Does this mean industrialization without using fossil fuels (which is today largely impossible)? Does it mean industrial” production for durability and recyclability? This goal omits mention of these qualifications for sustainability. Exactly what is “resilient infrastructure”?  Does it include big dams produced by companies that come into Africa and elsewhere, build and reap the profits, and then leave?  World Trade Organization (WTO) regulations contain dozens of pages dedicated to “intellectual property rights” that make technology transfer very difficult (since this might cut into profits). The SDG document does not mention these WTO regulations except in a positive light as an “equitable multilateral trading system under the World Trade Organization.” Apparently, the worldwide restrictions on “inclusive” and cooperative development are not relevant enough to be mentioned in this SDG manifesto.

GOAL 10: Reduce inequality within and among countries.

This goal does not detail the facts of global inequality, making it appear as if reducing inequality within and among countries was somehow an attainable goal by the year 2030. However, global inequality has increased throughout the entire period since the founding of the U.N. Convention on Climate Change in 1992.

Today, according to World Bank statistics, the top 10% own 76% of the world’s wealth while the bottom 50% own a mere 2%. The top 1% own half of the world’s net wealth. “Wealth inequality has persisted over the past century, despite significant changes to the world economy. The number of billionaires has nearly doubled in the 10 years since the [2008] financial crisis.”[30]

The International Debt Report (IDR) of the World Bank for the year 2022 states that developing countries spent a record 443.5 billion US dollars to service their external public debt. “The poorest countries eligible to borrow from the World Bank’s International Development Association (IDA) paid a record $88.9 billion in debt-servicing costs in 2022, 4.8 percent more than in 2021. The world’s poorest face the risk of debt crises as borrowing costs surge. The increase in costs shifted scarce resources away from critical needs such as health, education, and the environment.”[31]

According to the Pew Research Center, 96 out of 167 countries with populations over half a million claim to be democratic. Yet most of these are ruled by a tiny super-rich class, and the other 71 countries are ruled by self-interested oligarchies. As of 2019 in the U.S., the bottom 50% of households had $1.67 trillion or 1.6% of the net worth, while the top 10% has 94.4% of all wealth. With that kind of power in the hands of so few – a power that is institutionalized toward continuing to increase their wealth at the rate of billions of dollars per day – how can Goal 10 possibly be achieved?  As I argued above, only a true paradigm-shift to holism can address this and all these other problems. Human beings must come to see themselves as one family and one civilization if we are to achieve any of the SDGs. Only real planetary democracy can bring reasonable economic equity.

GOAL 11: Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.

Perhaps the authors of the SDGs live in relatively clean, comfortable European cities like Brussels, Paris, Copenhagen, Munich, Milan or perhaps they live in New York, Washington, DC, or San Francisco. Perhaps they live in Manhattan apartments paying rents of some $5000 per month while they fashion ideal goals for the rest of humanity. Perhaps they have never walked through the world’s dozens of crisis-ridden megacities like Mexico City, Lagos, Mumbai, Kolkata, Dhaka, or Manila. My travels have shown me miles and miles of unmitigated slums, uncounted millions of impoverished people packed tightly into filthy cities, many of whom cannot even find a hovel or tent in the slums and who live their entire lives on the streets without shelter. If you walk through these cities early in the morning before sunrise, bodies lay everywhere, families sleeping on the pavement, with their entire set of worldly possessions jammed into a plastic bag or two, used as a pillow for their heads.

In short, there is no way these centers of chaos and misery will be converted to “inclusive, safe, resilient, sustainable” habitats by the SDG target year 2030. Even with the advent of a planetary civilization such as that envisioned by the Earth Constitution, in which people holistically care for the well-being of the whole of humanity, we would be hard-pressed to meet that deadline. However, we would at least have a fighting chance, since the Earth Constitution was designed using an integrated and holistic approach, such that all of humanity’s challenges are seen in their true interdependent and interrelated context. In essence, we either solve all the problems together on a planetary scale, or none at all. To fragment the task among nearly two hundred sovereign entities is madness.

GOAL 12: Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns.

This goal is absolutely fundamental if Earth is to have a sustainable civilization. One item under this goal declares: “By 2030, substantially reduce waste generation through prevention, reduction, recycling and reuse. Encourage companies, especially large and transnational companies, to adopt sustainable practices and to integrate sustainability information into their reporting cycle.”

As previously mentioned, there is no critique of the profit motive in this document and no critique of capitalism. Yet even an elementary analysis of capitalism must admit its tendency to externalize costs in order to maximize profits. Waste, like unemployment, is essential to capitalism, and externalization of costs is essential to profit maximization. To “encourage” companies is clearly not enough to make it happen. Some multinational companies have more assets and more leverage than the nations who host them. And many WTO rules prohibit these countries from even making laws that cut into the profit margins of these corporations.

With the U.S. ruling class owning 94.4% of the wealth generated by this unsustainable system, who is going to convince them to give up the system – the U.S. government that is run by them? Both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are run by super-wealthy persons and corporations. Are protestors in the streets who are beaten up by the police going to make a real difference? Only planetary federation can ensure that sustainable production and consumption patterns become effective and equitable without undue suffering or injustice with regard to any of the parties involved. Right now, the top 10% who control everything, including the U.N., have zero interest in achieving such equality.

GOAL 13: Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts.*

This goal hits the nail on the head in that urgent action is clearly needed. But this SDG directs nations to “Integrate climate change measures into national policies, strategies and planning.” And the asterisk indicates that any urgent action means “acknowledging that the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is the primary international, intergovernmental forum for negotiating the global response to climate change.”

Nevertheless, affirming this U.N. Framework Convention does not constitute the “urgent action” we need. Only addressing the root causes of the entire nexus of global problems will produce success. The world is suffering not only from climate collapse, but also from the consequences of a global pandemic, immense poverty, population explosion, endless wars, worldwide militarism, mindless competition among nations, and social, moral, and spiritual chaos. The U.N. Convention on Climate Change is in truth a prescription for human extinction because it ignores the root causes and deep interconnections of our dire planetary problems.

GOAL 14: Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development.

This goal is critical because the oceans are dying. If the oceans die, most life on the planet dies, and we die. Environmental experts produce volume after volume of data confirming this fact – the implicit premise of Goal 14. Environmental leader Bill McKibben in his 2019 book Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? details the acidification of the oceans, their carbonization, the growing multiple dead zones, the diminishing oxygen production of the oceans (already suffocating some species), their rapid warming, and the immense quantities of plastic waste polluting them.[32] James Gustav Speth in his 2004 book Red Sky at Morning writes, “In 1960, 5 percent of marine fisheries were either fished to capacity or overfished; today 75 percent of marine fisheries are in this condition. … Data reveal that the global fish catch has shown a strong and consistent downturn every year since 1988.”[33] The oceans are indeed dying.

Callum Roberts, in his 2012 book, The Ocean of Life: The Fate of Man and the Sea, details the intimate connection between all life (including human life) and the well-being of the oceans. He documents the almost unbelievable bounty of the seas prior to the industrial revolution during which engines and monster machines began to exploit and destroy the ecosystems of the oceans.[34] Alan Bates, in his 2020 book, Dark Side of the Ocean: The Destruction of Our Seas, Why it Matters, and What We Can Do About It, writes: “The UN Sustainable Development Goal #8 calls for “sustained and inclusive economic growth,” which it proposes to accomplish by expanding access to financial credit to create more jobs. Looking at this from a biological perspective, in any ecosystem—and human dominated ecosystems are no exception—individuals and institutions can only exist at a scale determined by biophysical limits.”[35] As we saw in our discussion of Goal 8 above, it is precisely this fact that the SDGs have largely ignored. We have surpassed biophysical limits in all the ecological domains of the planet, including our treatment of the oceans. You cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet because crossing biophysical limits means destroying the very ecosystems that support our lives.

Nation-states and multinational corporations have developed sophisticated technologies that allow mining of the ocean floor up to two hundred miles offshore, with some truly disastrous events like the Deepwater Horizon blowout in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. This onslaught has intensified the technological devastation of the oceans already well advanced in the previous century, a devastation that includes bottom trawlers that destroy the breeding grounds of the very fish they scoop up, and dragnets and fish lines many miles long, raking the sea for all living creatures within their grasp, as well as the dumping of endless junk and massive amounts of plastic into the oceans.[36]

In 1994, the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) went into effect after sixty countries endorsed it. This convention, of course, attempts to protect the oceans.  But the U.N. is helpless in the face of claims of national sovereignty (i.e., lawlessness), rendering the Law of the Sea Convention weak and practically unenforceable. In addition, the U.S., the nation most destructive of the oceans, refuses to ratify this treaty, claiming it infringes U.S. sovereignty. Roberts cites examples of the fierce competition of nations for designated ocean fishing grounds and the ways in which even small nations have prevented the UN General Assembly from creating an effective policy for protecting the oceans.[37]

Goal 14 urges nations to “enhance the conservation and sustainable use of oceans and their resources by implementing international law as reflected in UNCLOS, which provides the legal framework for the conservation and sustainable use of oceans and their resources.” But is an unenforceable treaty really a “legal framework”? Because ratification is voluntary for each nation, the U.N. treaty system cannot possibly save the environment. James Gustav Speth (former Dean of Environmental Studies at Yale University) writes:

The bottom line is that today’s treaties and their associated agreements and protocols cannot drive the changes needed. … Typically, these agreements are easy for governments to slight because the treaties’ impressive – but nonbinding – goals are not followed by clear requirements, targets, and timetables. And even when there are targets and timetables, the targets are often inadequate and means of enforcement are lacking. As a result, the climate convention is not protecting the climate, the biodiversity convention is not protecting biodiversity, the desertification convention is not preventing desertification, and even the older and stronger Convention on the Law of the Sea is not protecting fisheries.[38]

Clearly, the SDG goals will not prevent climate collapse nor give us effective sustainable development. Ratifying the UNCLOS will not prevent the oceans from dying either. Under the Earth Constitution, by contrast, the oceans of Earth belong to the people of Earth and the oceans are made a protected global commons.

The deeper answer to the climate crisis is not to double down on the principle affirmed by the SDG document that “every state has and shall freely exercise, full permanent sovereignty over all its wealth, natural resources and economic activity.” The real principle is the opposite of this: the planetary biosphere, the oceans, the atmosphere of Earth, its polar caps and rainforests belong to the people of Earth as our legally protected global commons.

Here is a fundamental principle of the global democracy that is essential for a sustainable civilization. National sovereignty must be limited to the internal affairs of nations so that sovereign nations may no longer freely exploit the seas for their own interests. Similarly, the atmosphere and forests of Earth are essential to the biosphere and human life on Earth, so all these must belong to the people of Earth as well.[39]

GOAL 15: Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss.

Reaching this goal by the year 2030 is absolutely essential to the future of life on Earth. Yet the U.N. tells the nations of the world to “mobilize and significantly increase financial resources from all sources to conserve and sustainably use biodiversity and ecosystems.” Does anyone seriously think that third world countries can do this while continuing to pay back their immense international indebtedness to first world banking cartels (as identified above), while maintaining military preparedness by buying expensive weapons from first world arms dealing countries, and while dealing with their own internal social poverty and chaos? One supposes they are to do this while carrying out “structural adjustment” programs imposed by the World Bank and the IMF that require them to sell off their infrastructure and social programs to profit-making first world corporations.

Poor nations, of course, are clearly not going to be able to “finance” the protection of their environment, nor the natural resources that cross national boundaries, making this demand quixotic at best. Such attempts will only put them ever further in debt to the super wealthy banking cartels that control global finance. To attain sustainable development goals requires a world system that makes this possible, and the world system presupposed by the SDG document, we have seen, is precisely a system that makes their attainment impossible. Global democratic socialism alone, outlawing war and disarming the nations while acting to protect and restore our planetary commons of air, water, forests, and ecosystems alone can suffice to create a sustainable civilization.

GOAL 16: Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels.

The omnicidal duplicity of the SDG document is nowhere more glaring than in Goal 16. Nations are called to be internally peaceful while multinational weapons manufacturers stoke their fears and hawk the need for nations to purchase the latest instruments for destruction and murder. This goal never mentions global militarism, global terrorism much of which is financed by nation-states, or the proxy wars waged by the imperialist nations who funnel weapons into one side or the other in the wars raging in such places as Sudan, Yemen, Palestine, Ukraine, DR Congo, and elsewhere. There is no mention of the global environmental impact of a world system that spends some 1.8 trillion US dollars per year on militarism and endless wars.

Societies around the world such as these are ripped apart by an empire trying to maintain its global hegemony in the face of a rising multipolar world led by BRICS nations such as Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. The U.N. SDGs are required to ignore all this and pretend that we have a world order ready to cooperate and meet the SDG goals by the year 2030. Since 9/11, when the U.S. government declared its endless global war on terror, this process of warmaking has intensified rather than diminished. As historian Tom Engelhardt writes:

Since 9/11, the result has been a religion of perpetual conflict whose doctrines tend to grow ever more extreme. In our time, for instance, the NSS has moved from Dick Cheney’s “1 percent doctrine” (if there is even 1 percent chance that some country might someday attack us, we should act “as if it is a certainty”) to something like a “zero percent doctrine.” Whether in its drone wars with presidential “kill lists” or the cyberwar – probably the first in history – that it launched against Iran, it no longer cares to argue most of the time that such strikes need even a 1 percent justification. Its ongoing, self-proclaimed Global War on Terror, whether on the ground or in the air, in person or by drone, in space or cyberspace (where the newest military command is already in action) is justification enough for just about any act, however aggressive.[40]

As long as our planetary “war system” continues, there is little hope of ever accomplishing the SDG agenda. In his overview of the world’s history of wars, military historian Gwynne Dyer observes that “Although people told themselves each time that the war was about something specific…it was really the system itself that produced the wars…. We have reached a point where our moral imagination must expand again to include the whole of humankind or we will perish.”[41]

If the SDG agenda is about helping to prevent human beings from perishing from climate collapse, they present only half the picture.  The other half, directly and intimately connected with success in the first half, requires that we end the war system in the world through overcoming the outdated convention of absolute sovereignty that prevents success in both ending war and achieving the SDG agenda. We need a world governance system that accomplishes both tasks simultaneously.

The SDGs, therefore, constitute an ‘omnicidal duplicity’ lulling humanity into thinking something is achievable within a world system that structurally defeats all attempts to achieve these goals. It is that world system itself that is the fundamental cause of climate destruction and the existential threat to our common human future. It is hardly credible to expect that same system (mostly hidden and unspoken behind the SDG document) to serve as the facilitator of the goals and the savior of the environment. Not only can it not achieve this economically (as we have seen) but since it is simultaneously a militarized sovereign-state war system, neither can it achieve this politically. The SDGs, under Goal 16, prove themselves to be a pipedream and an exercise in almost criminal duplicity.

An article on the SDGs that declares it is from the point of view of “developing countries” agrees. It states that the “promotion of Justice at the national level, which stems from the spirit of the SDGs, particularly for goals 3, 4, 5 and 10, is not pursued.”[42] Goal 16 pretends that peace within nations is possible in the face of a world system that exploits the poor majority of the world’s nations causing the social chaos and desperation that poverty entails. Today’s world system, we have seen, is at least four centuries old, having been created when armies were riding on horseback and fighting with swords. It is hardly credible in today’s world in which nuclear weapons on ICBMs can reach the opposite side of the world in minutes and in which 1% of the world’s population owns 50% of its wealth with this disparity continuing to increase.

The Earth Constitution was designed to embrace both free markets and nation-states within a world system in which the people of Earth are sovereign (and therefore are legally responsible for protecting the global commons of atmosphere, oceans, polar caps, rainforests, and the planetary ecosystem). It establishes individual and national freedom and diversity within a common good framework that truly makes possible a flourishing future human and planetary civilization. It supersedes the absurd system in which sovereign nations recognize no binding laws above themselves and who consider themselves “free” to militarize and wage wars without end. Such a system is the real key, therefore, to avoiding human extinction from both climate collapse and nuclear war.

GOAL 17: Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the global partnership for sustainable development finance.

The list of SDG goals culminates in an affirmation of the global economic system that caused the climate crisis in the first place. It reaffirms the Addis Ababa Action Agenda which allows nations access “to domestic public resources, domestic and international private business and finance, international development cooperation, international trade as an engine for development, debt and debt sustainability, addressing systemic issues and science, technology, innovation and capacity-building, and data, monitoring and follow-up.” Notice that there is not a word about “debt cancellation,” which would be a real key for helping poor nations strive to achieve the SDG benchmarks. The emphasis as always is on “domestic and international private business and finance,” in other words on the global financial system in which private bankers who hold vast conglomerations of private wealth, enter into arrangements with poor countries worldwide in order to increase the wealth of their investors.

These debts under the Addis Ababa framework are to be “sustainable,” that is poor countries must be able to keep on paying the interest on their debts in perpetuity without going bankrupt in the process. Here we see the global financial system (comprised of the U.N. Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization (WTO) and “international private business and finance”) offering its services to the poor nations of the world whom they have already kept in poverty for nearly a century. Under Goal 17 people are expected to believe that this system will suddenly and miraculously begin functioning to their benefit.

Goal 17 reaffirms the world system of debt enslavement. The debt will be scheduled to make the repayment of a loan’s principal and interest “sustainable,” ensuring the continued poverty and misery of the vast majority. Richard Heinberg points out clearly in The End of Growth (2011) that the debt-financing system of capitalism necessitates growth. Without growth in quantity of production and sales, and hence in profits, no country or business could service its debt. The SDG’s require growth so that the borrower can pay back the principal with interest on the debt. What Daly calls “quantitative increase” (the opposite of sustainability) is therefore a fundamental principle behind the SDGs and in direct contradiction to the ecological truth that “endless growth on a finite planet is impossible.”

In fact, unlike global militarism, our planetary population explosion, and the ecological literature concerning “limits to growth (discussed below),” this principle of economic growth is not even hidden in the SDG document. Goal 17 clearly states: “We recognize that domestic resources are first and foremost generated by economic growth, supported by an enabling environment at all levels. … Private business activity, investment and innovation are major drivers of productivity, inclusive economic growth and job creation.”  This anti-environmental principle is perhaps the most difficult to hide because the system needs nations to acquire loans and have debtors to pay back the principal with interest.

There is a significant literature on “the limits to growth” by a wide variety of economists and climate scientists, some of whom I noted above. It is difficult for informed persons to miss this discussion—from Donna Meadows, et al. Limits to Growth  that appeared in 1974, to William Caton, Jr.’s Overshoot: The Ecological Basis for Revolutionary Change in 1982, to Joel E. Cohen’s How Many People Can the Earth Support? in 1995, to Meadows, et al., Limits to Growth: the 30-Year Update in 2004, to Jorgan Randers’ 2052: A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years in 2012, to Meadows, Randers, et al. Limits and Beyond in 2022, the issue has been constantly before the informed public.[43] Nevertheless, the authors of the SDG document appear to have missed it. They are under the illusion that the environment can be saved through a globalized growth economy as they plainly state in Goal 17.

Summary and Conclusion

 The SDGs present a picture and an ideal of holistic, coordinated world of sustainable goals to a planetwide collection of legally “independent” (because “sovereign”) nation-states struggling within a militarized world of uncertainty, secrecy, security concerns, awash with weapons, and characterized by the immense structural violence of globalized poverty and misery. This system in turn is interfaced with a global capitalism forcing hard economic facts on everyone and geared to the private accumulation of wealth, run by systems of private wealth accumulation like the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank.  There are deep contradictions between the coordination required to collectively reach the goals posited by the SDGs and the world system within which they have been presented. As systems thinker Chuck Pezeshki writes: “We have coarse-grained culture, anchored in the 17^th century Westphalian nation-state model.”[44]

The world is divided into absolute territories, governed primarily by primitive top-down hierarchical systems, and militarized to negate any genuine unity with the rest of humankind. This system in turn defeats any growing empathy for the rest of humanity and cultivates absolute loyalty to some fragment. A publicly sponsored sign one often sees in Spanish speaking countries reads, “Patria o Muerte.” So it is all over the planet. Pezeshki observes:

The various relational ways of connecting will directly influence how knowledge is created inside an organization. And the fidelity of the information shared in the organization will be keyed to a function of the personal development of all the individuals inside the system—their developed empathy….. And higher feelings of safety inside an organization enable trying new things. Organizations with lower levels may assume mimicry of leadership, or a transfer of emotional states. Higher-empathy organizations turn their members into profound and accurate sensors, as well as people capable of taking action…. That is why empathy is vital. Duplex connection inherently drives that shift away from status and towards responsibility. We naturally become more responsible for the things were are connected to. Their paths and joys become ours. And that changes us and evolves the social structures we inhabit. Awareness increases, with multiple sets of eyes that see the outside world more clearly…. Competition—is about the individual…coordination is about the group….  And that new level of interconnection will drive that evolved set of consciousness, which will prove able to master the problems of the lower levels. Finally, we may not know exactly where we are going. But we will finally have an emergent compass.[45]

The more awareness increases of our connections with the whole, the more we move from “competition” to “coordination” and “responsibility” to the whole, and the more this process functions as an “emergent compass” for our lives and thought. This is what we must do for humanity on planet Earth. Similarly, in The Empathic Civilization, global thinker and futurist Jeremy Rifkin argues that human consciousness has evolved through a series of stages or levels that can be named or identified in different but overlapping ways. These stages move “from mythological consciousness to theological consciousness to ideological consciousness to psychological consciousness and have extended our empathic drive from blood ties to religious affiliations to national identities and associational communities.” The key to sustainability and human survival, for Rifkin, involves today making “a crossover into biosphere consciousness and an expansion of empathy to include the whole of the human race as our family, as well as our fellow creatures.”[46]

Many environmental thinkers argue that human beings must develop a new level of consciousness. It can be called a “biosphere consciousness” (Rifkin 2015) or a “planetary consciousness” (Speth 2008) or an “ecozoic consciousness” (Swimme and Berry 1992). In my own writings, I have called it a “holistic consciousness.” Such a development forms a key to establishing a planetary civilization free from the specter of planetary ecocide or, indeed, nuclear war. There is a high level of agreement among environmental thinkers and scientific cosmologists that recognition of the whole and its pervasive holism is a necessary factor in moving beyond our personal, national, racial, or religious egoisms to a worldcentric and cosmocentric awareness.

In a certain obscure way, the SDG document assumes something similar. It speaks of “inclusion,” “cooperation,” “partnerships,” “equality,” and “empowerment.” In this way it attempts to promote the conversion of consciousness in the direction that is needed for a planetary and compassionate civilization. However, as we have seen, it attempts this while at the same time assuming without question the fragmented world system founded some four centuries ago. We must be thinking and acting holistically not only in consciousness, but in economics and politics as well. As sustainability scientists Goerner, Dyck, and Lagerroos express this: “Sustainability activists see global civilization, the global economy, and the biosphere as one fundamentally entwined ecosystem. Their goal is to develop sustainable patterns of relationship within and among all three.”[47]

Speth affirms that “Students of globalization must surely take seriously the possibility that underlying structures of the modern (now globalized) world order—capitalism, the state, industrialism, nationality, rationalism—as well as the orthodox discourses that sustain them, may be in important respects irreparably destructive.”[48] By “rationalism” Speth means the out-of-date linear thinking descending from the early modern paradigm that we examined above. This early modern “rationalism” is at the heart of standard textbook economics, still taught in most universities, an orientation that economist Kate Raworth names “cuckoo economics.”[49]

Today, we understand that the intelligibility of the universe is not linear but holographic, organic, and dynamically “fractal”—fields within fields mirroring basic patterns resulting in a dialectical upsurge of ever greater harmony, integration, and synergy.[50] Buckminster Fuller comes to mind as a global futurist who understood the immense synergy that would and should arise when human beings overcome the nationalistic prejudice and unite as one civilization.[51]

With the ascendency of globalized neoliberal economics since the late 1970s, and with the geometrically increasing human population, our planet has been moved into radical “overshoot.” As systems expert Donella Meadows and colleagues define this: “The carrying capacity has a limit. Any population that grows past its carrying capacity, overshooting the limit, will not long sustain itself. And while any population is above the carrying capacity, it will deteriorate the support capacity of the system it depends upon.”[52] For at least the past half century, human beings have been in dramatic overshoot on planet Earth. We have exceeded the environmental carrying capacity for our planetary ecosystem and that is why that ecosystem is unraveling all around us. Environmentalist Lester Brown places our condition of overshoot at about the same time as the rise of neoliberalism:

Humanity’s collective demands first surpassed the earth’s regenerative capacity around 1980. By 1999, global demands on the earth’s natural resources exceeded sustainable yields by 20%. Ongoing calculations show it at 50% in 2007. Stated otherwise, it would take 1.5 Earths to sustain our current consumption. Environmentally, the world is in overshoot mode.[53]

If this is accurate, then the environmental carrying capacity of Earth was well under 5 billion persons when this was calculated with reference to 1980. But overshoot seriously degrades the overtaxed ecosystems that protect life, which means that today our planet’s sustainable carrying capacity has become dramatically less than 5 billion. The Neoliberal economic ideology apparent behind the SDG document functions in open contradiction to the ecological holism of climate science. As Goal 17 declares in so many words, business must be “free” to address the SDGs without excessive regulations or restrictions. Neoliberalism demands the privatization of public facilities, lowering taxes on wealthy persons and corporations, and the “free movement” of capital planetwide with few restrictions on investment opportunities.[54]

This ideology measures the success of nations in terms of increasing gross domestic product (GDP).[55] By contrast, ecological economists have with one voice been crying “you cannot have endless growth on a finite planet.” Yet as we have seen, the world’s collective GDP, the use of fossil fuels, and the ongoing destruction of our planetary ecosystem have continued unabated since the first U.N. environmental conference in Stockholm in 1972 to the present. Today we are six years prior to the end of another failed UN environmental initiative. Joel Kovel calls this movement “suicidal insanity”:

The culture of advanced capital aims to turn society into addicts of commodity consumption, a condition “good for business,” and correspondingly bad for ecosystems…. Once time is bound in capitalist production, the subtle attunement to natural rhythms necessary for an ecocentric sensibility becomes thwarted. This allows the suicidal insanity of an ever-expanding accumulation to appear as natural. People with mentalities warped by the casino complex are simply not going to think in terms of limits and balances, or of the mutual recognition of all beings.[56]

The SDG document is framed in terms of noteworthy aspirational goals but not in terms of limits or planetary balances. It affirms the absolute sovereign possession of the internal resources of each nation-state fragment and utterly fails to see our planetary oceans, atmosphere, rainforests and ecosystem as the global commons that they are, inherently belonging to the people of Earth. This is precisely what I meant above when I spoke of the “third generation rights” to a healthy environment and world peace. These rights cannot be parceled out among “sovereign” states. They belong to the people of Earth as a whole and require holistic political and economic embodiment.

Kovel points out the holism of our planetary ecosystem requires an “ecocentric sensibility” connected with limits, balances, and harmonies, and not a spurious “sustainable economic growth.”  For him, as well as for the many others I have cited in this article, we need to think in terms of wholes, to ourselves become whole, in harmony with the holism of our common humanity, our planetary ecosystem, and our evolving cosmos. The central problem with the destructive form of globalization represented by the ideology behind the SDGs is false consciousness, a false consciousness fixated on growth rather than on limits.[57] and on sovereign fragments rather than our common human community.

We need to be thinking in terms of global democracy as process thinker David Ray Griffin so clearly articulates: “In arguing that global democracy is now necessary, I am using the term in the strictest sense: necessary for the very survival of human civilization.” And this is not simply because global democracy alone can end militarism and weapons of mass destruction: “Global democracy,” he writes, “is necessary if human civilization is not to be destroyed by the excessive use of fossil fuels.”[58] Historian Afred McCoy, in his massive 2021 volume titled To Govern the Globe: World Orders & Catastrophic Change, concludes his detailed analysis of the world system with the following statement:

Given that Washington’s world system and Beijing’s emerging alternative are largely failing to limit carbon emissions, the international community will likely need a new form of collaboration to contain the damage…. The current world system—characterized by strong nation-states and weak global governance at the UN—has proven inadequate to the challenge of climate change…. Any world order, whether Washington’s or Beijing’s that is based on the primacy of the nation-state will probably prove incapable of coping with the political and economic crisis likely to arise from the appearance of several hundred million climate change refugees by 2050…. To cope effectively with the crisis, the world would have to create an international system that privileged protection of the global commons and human rights over the inviolability of national sovereignty of the kind sanctioned by the current global order.[59]

This is exactly what the Constitution for the Federation of Earth accomplishes. It gives “privileged protection” to the global commons which is the real key to sustainability, not a series of goals set for some 193 fragmented, competitive sovereign nation-states. But it does more than this in terms of our contention that human consciousness must mature into a holistic, ecocentric awareness, free from absolutist ego identifications with nations, religions, races, genders, or ideologies. All such ego identifications reveal immature orientations operating within a world of illusory fragmentation, a world that calls out for further growth and deeper self-realization.  We have seen that the SDGs give a hint of this but fail to connect a maturing, inclusive consciousness with the need for a mature and inclusive economic and political world system.

Promotion and study of the Earth Constitution is powerfully helpful in this domain as well, for by promoting a holistic document that articulates a non-military democratic government for the Earth, we are simultaneously promoting a holistic and ecological consciousness. The SDG’s cannot and will not move humanity out of the trajectory toward self-extinction. Only true holism, true harmony with the foundational reality and principles of the cosmos and our planetary ecosystem, will allow this to happen. The Earth Constitution serves as a concrete model and means toward this end. It provides a turning point, for its holism includes the fundamental principle of the cosmos—a unity principle of networked fields in which diversity is never absolutized because the unity of the whole shines through it.

Endnotes and Works Cited

[1] See David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order. New York: Routledge, 2002. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man. New York: Harper & Row, 1959.

[2] Raimon Panikkar, The Rhythm of Being: The Unbroken Trinity. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. 2010, p. 53.

[3] Immanuel Kant, The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Trans. H. J. Paton. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1964, pp. 93-98.

[4] Glen T. Martin, Human Dignity and World Order: Holistic Foundations of Global Democracy. Lanham, MD: Hamilton Books of Roman & Littlefield, 2024, Chap. 2.

[5] William Greider, The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003, p. 60.

[6] Duncan K. Foley, Adam’s Fallacy: A Guide to Economic Theology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008, p. 85.

[7] See Erin Daly, Dignity Rights: Courts, Constitutions, and the Worth of the Human Person. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013.

[8] Frank Akerman and Lisa Heinzerling, Priceless: On Knowing the Price of Everything and the Value of Nothing. New York: The New Press, 2004.

[9] G.W.F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Alan Wood, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, pars. 331-34.

[10] Emery Reves, The Anatomy of Peace. New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1945, p. 121 (emphasis original).

[11] Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace. Ed. Lewis White Beck. New York: Macmillan,1957, p. 10.

[12] Kant Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals, op. cit. Reves, The Anatomy of Peace, op. cit. David Ray Griffin, Reinhold Niebuhr & The Question of Global Democracy. Anoka, MN: Process Century Press, 2021.

[13] Martin, Human Dignity and World Order, op. cit., p. 19.

[14] Constitution for the Federation of Earth. Online at https://earthconstitution.world/text-of-the-earth-constitution/ In print at Institute for Economic Democracy Press, Appomattox, VA, 2014.

[15] See Donald Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming. New York: Penguin/Random House, 2019.

[16]  https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2024/04/IPCCFactSheet_Timeline.pdf.

[17]  https://www.statista.com/statistics/1302754/fossil-fuel-energy-consumption-worldwide/

[18] Johan Galtung, The Fall of the US Empire—And Then What? USA 2017 edition: Kolofon Press, 2009, p. 38.

[19] H. L. A. Hart, The Concept of Law. Second Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961, p. 132.

[20] Pepe Escobar, Globalistan: How the Globalized World Is Dissolving into Liquid War. Ann Arbor, MI: Nimble Books, 2006.

[21] Michael Mann, The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet. New York: Public Affairs, 2021, pp.105-06.

[22] Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate. New York: Simon & Schuster.

[23] Richard Heinberg, The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality. Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers, 2011, pp. 6-7 & 20-21.

[24] Daly, Beyond Growth, op. cit., p. 9.

[25] https://monthlyreview.org/2007/10/01/the-dismantling-of-yugoslavia/.

[26] See Michael Parenti, The Face of Imperialism. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2011. William Blum, Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower. Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press. Douglas Valentine, The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World. Atlanta, GA: Clarity Press, 2017.

[27] James Gustav Speth, Bridge at the Edge of the World. . New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, and They Knew: The US Federal Government’s Fifty-Year Role in Causing the Climate Crisis. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2021.

[28] Daly, Beyond Growth, op. cit., Heinberg, The End of Growth, op. cit.

[29] See Joel Kovel, The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World. London: Zed Books, 2007. Herman E. Daly and John Cobb, Jr, For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy Toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future, Boston: Beacon Press, 1994. Kate Raworth, Doughnut Economics: 7 Ways to Think Like a 21^st Century Economist. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2017. See also Michael Harrington, Socialism: Past and Future. The Classic Test on the Role of Socialism in Modern Society. New York: Arcade Publishing, 1989.

[30] https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2023/12/18/2023-in-nine-charts-a-growing-inequality.

[31] Ibid.

[32] Bill McKibben, Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? New York: Henry Holt, 2019, pp 46-54.

[33] James Gustav Speth, Red Sky at Morning: America and the Crisis of the Global Environment. New Haven, Yale University Press, 2004, pp. 15 & 33.

[34] Cullum Roberts, The Ocean of Life: The Fate of Man and the Sea. New York: Viking Press, 2012.

[35] Albert Bates, Dark Side of the Ocean: The Destruction of Our Seas, Why It Matters, and What We Can Do About It. Summertown, TN: Groundswell Books, 2020, p. vi.

[36] Roberts, The Ocean of Life, op. cit.

[37] Ibid., Roberts, pp. 326-28.

[38] Speth, Bridge at the Edge of the World, op. cit., pp. 71-72.

[39] See also my 2019 article “Our Planetary Tragedy of the Commons” at www.Academia.edu.

[40] Tom Engelhardt, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single, Superpower World. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014, p. 7.

[41] Gwynne Dyer, The Shortest History of War: From Hunter-Gatherers to Nuclear Superpowers—A Retelling for Our Times. New York: The Experiment, LLC, 2021, pp. 62 & 237.

[42] Mehdi Jabbari, et al., “Global Carbon Budget Allocation Based on Rawlsian Justice by Means of the Sustainable Development Goals Index.” Environment, Development, & Sustainability 22, No.6, (Aug. 2020), pp. 5465-81.

[43] Donna Meadows, et al. Limits to Growth. New York: Signet Press, 1972. William R. Caton, Jr., Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1982.  Joel E. Cohen’s How Many People Can the Earth Support? New York: W.W. Norton, 1995.     Donna Meadows, et al., Limits to Growth: the 30-Year Update. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2004. Jorgan Randers, 2052: A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years. A Report to the Club of Rome Commemorating the 40^th Anniversary of The Limits to Growth. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2012. Donna Meadows, et al. Limits and Beyond: 50 Years on from The Limits to Growth. What did we learn and what’s next? Bardi and Pereira, eds., Exapt Press, 2022.

[44] Ibid., Chuck Pezeshki, “How Do We Grow Socially?” in Meadows, et. al. Limits and Beyond, p. 233.

[45] Ibid., Pezeshki, pp. 234-36.

[46] Jeremy Rifkin, The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, The Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism. New York: St. Martin’s Publishers, 2015, p. 369.

[47] Sally Goerner, Robert Dyck, and Dorothy Lagerroos. The New Science of Sustainability: Building a Foundation for Great Change. Chapel Hill: Triangle Center for Complex Systems, 2008, p. 16.

[48] Speth, Bridge at the Edge of the World, op. cit., p. 63.

[49] Raworth, Doughnut Economics, op. cit., pp. 30-37.

[50] Jude Currivan, The Cosmic Hologram: In-formation at the Center of Creation. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2017.

[51] Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981.

[52] Meadows, et al. Limits to Growth, op. cit., p. 137.

[53] Lester Brown, World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse. New York: Norton & Co., 2011, p. 7.

[54] Goerner, et al., op. cit., p. 285.

[55] Eric Toussaint and Damien Millet, Debt, the IMF, and the World Bank: Sixty Questions, Sixty Answers. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010.

[56] Kovel, The Enemy of Nature, op. cit., p. 69.

[57] Toussaint and Millet, Debt, the IMF, and the World Bank, op. cit., pp. 17-18.

[58] Griffin, Reinhold Niebuhr & the Question of Global Democracy, op. cit., pp. 113 & 117.

[59] Alfred W. McCoy, To Govern the Globe: World Orders & Catastrophic Change. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2021, pp. 316-17.

__________________________________________________________________

Dr. Glen T. Martin:
Professor of Philosophy Emeritus
Founder/Chairperson Emeritus, Program in Peace Studies, Radford University
President, World Constitution and Parliament Association (WCPA);
President, Earth Constitution Institute (ECI)
www.earthconstitution.world – Email: gmartin@radford.edu

 

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