Robert MacNeil Christie, Author

Image Credit: “Azote for Stockholm Resilience Centre, based on analysis in Richardson et al 2023”

I hear a lot about the assertion of sovereignty these days. And I see even more evidence of the confusion and destruction surrounding it as a fact and a value. Each nation values its own sovereignty above all else. However, most nations do not value the sovereignty of other nations if it becomes inconvenient to do so.

Putin even denies the existence of Ukraine despite its long cultural and political history, and the frequent violation of its sovereignty throughout history, and his own desire to conquer it. Netanyahu and Hamas deny each other’s right to exist, making sovereignty a non-issue. But with U.S. bombs and other weapons, Netanyahu’s attempts to kill or drive out all Palestinians from Gaza (and the West Bank) forestalls any question of national sovereignty for a population that he seeks to destroy.

The U.S. has invaded, occupied, and attempted to govern by force of ruthless client dictators around the world, often with clandestine efforts such as funding death squads in El Salvador for over a century. Similar actions have been taken in other nations in Central America and too many other nations around the world to count. It refuses to join most other nations in signing on to the International Criminal Court or other efforts at enforcing global civility and justice, citing its sovereignty over anything related to the U.S. government or its actions.

U.S. leaders, and some long-standing elements of our political culture, imply a level of sovereignty over the rest of the world that is just too presumptuous to state openly, even as the CIA and other agencies of U.S. policy act as if we have absolute authority over the entire world. The Monroe Doctrine lives, though the words that assert global sovereignty have changed over time.

I suppose we should also mention the most extreme (and anti-national) ideology of sovereignty of all, the ideology of the sovereignty of the individual, perhaps the extreme far side of libertarianism. The so-called “sovereign citizen” believes she or he is exempt from the laws of the government, from federal, state, and local laws, including those related to taxes, driver’s licenses, and court orders. Such beliefs are often associated with various conspiracy theories.

These folks believe that all government is illegitimate and that a vague ‘common law’ should govern human relations. Well, it seems that liberals, conservatives, Republicans, Democrats, and independents tend to agree that government often overreaches and ought to be constrained in some degree. But they generally agree that government is necessary.

Earth System Reality versus Political-Economic Ideology

 But there is another source of sovereignty—a very different kind of sovereignty—which pre-exists humanity and endures and supersedes whatever sovereignty may be asserted by humans. It is a sovereignty not of political authority, but of the primacy of the Laws of Nature—physics, chemistry, biology, and ecology—as elements of the Earth System in which we live. The Earth System has certain parameters, which determine the conditions under which we must frame our politics, economics, and culture in order to survive. We have already overshot the boundaries of seven of the nine key processes that assure stable conditions in the Earth System in relation to humans. These nine critical global processes regulate the stability and resilience of the Earth; they are not negotiable, nor are they subject to any form of human authority or control.

The sovereignty of Nature is a reality over which we cannot meaningfully declare war or assert our own authority, although modern humans have tried to do so many times. To declare war on Nature is to piss into a strong wind and reap the results. Nature, as found in the Earth System, consists of a set of fixed parameters that constitute boundaries humans cannot cross without serious consequences. We cannot escape detection of our crimes against Nature, for they are committed directly in her presence and will be punished automatically by the system itself.

Nature, as expressed in the stable Earth System, allows a certain range of human action to which its complex adaptive features can adjust and re-establish its stability, up to a point. It is an interesting and dangerous fact that humans are the only species that have developed the capacity to ‘cross the line’ beyond which any ecosystem would no longer support its existence, resulting in a rapid population collapse. Well, yes, that has happened to individual societies at various times in history when their actions overshoot the capacity of their local or regional ecosystem to sustain them, but never until now has it happened to the entire species.

But today we are faced with the fact that the global political economy of capital accumulation and the wars fought over control of the so-called ‘resources’ needed to feed that system is rapidly destabilizing the planet. Even the World Economic Forum has admitted that we have already crossed seven of the nine basic boundaries that assure Earth System stability—which is not to say that the billionaires who dominate the WEF are willing to change their behavior.

We are already on a path to deep instability and both environmental and societal chaos, which make it very hard to imagine avoiding societal collapse without taking extreme transformational action. No human notions of sovereignty or attempts to assert it can change that.

Only be returning to a level of harmony with Earth System parameters can humanity survive long term. And that will require a rather rapid New Great Transformation of the globalized political economy to achieve an ecological civilization—the only way to align humanity with the sovereignty of Nature. That will involve many changes that very few have even contemplated.