2. Goal: Restore accountability.
In a system in which even shareholders must struggle to hold corporate management accountable, citizens have lost virtually all vestiges of control over the ways in which corporations affect their lives. Physicist Amory Lovins has said that "any system that doesn't use feedback is stupid." Although corporations will point to the marketplace as a powerful source of control and feedback, it is only one source and doesn't take into account the lives of workers, the long-term effects on resources, the destiny of communities, or the injuries and harm due to long-term exposure to toxins and pollution.
Strategy: Take back the charter.
Although corporate charters may have little to do with environmental sustainability on the surface, their status is critical to any long-term movement toward restoration of the environment. Read "Taking Care of Business: Citizenship and Charter of Incorporation," a pamphlet by Richard Grossman and Frank T. Adams (Charter Ink, PO Box 806, Cambridge, MA 02140; 508-487-3151; 1992). In it you will find a history of lost corporate power and citizen involvement that addresses a basic and crucial point: corporations are chartered by, and exist at the behest of, citizens. Incorporation is not a right but a privilege granted by the state, one that includes certain considerations such as limited liability. Corporations are supposed to be under our ultimate authority, not the other way around. The charter of incorporation is a revocable dispensation that was supposed to ensure the accountability of the corporation to society as a whole.
When any corporation continually harms, abuses, or violates the public trust, citizens should have the right to initiate a process that would revoke the company's charter, cause it to disband, sell off its enterprises to other companies, and effectively go out of business. The workers would have jobs with the new owners, but the executives, directors, and management would be out of jobs, with a permanent notice on their rÉsumÉs that they managed a corporation into charter revocation. That would be not merely a deterrent to corporate abuse but a critical element of an ecological society, because it would create negative-feedback loops that would prompt accountability, citizen involvement, and learning.
* * *
3. Goal: Make prices reflect costs.
The economy is environmentally and commercially dysfunctional because the market doesn't provide consumers with proper information. The "free market" economics that we love so much are excellent at setting prices but lousy when it comes to recognizing costs.
In order for a sustainable society to exist, every purchase should reflect or at least approximate its actual cost, not only the direct cost of production but the cost to the air, water, and soil; the cost to future generations; the cost to worker health; and the cost of waste, pollution, and toxicity. For example, the World Resources Institute, in Washington, D.C., has estimated that the cost of a gallon of gas, when pollution, waste disposal, health effects, and defense expenditures like the Persian Gulf War are factored in, is approximately $4.50, four times what we pay at the pump. A study by the University of California at San Francisco showed that a pack of cigarettes costs citizens in the state another $3.63 in health care and related costs. Economist Robert Repetto estimates that traffic congestion costs an extra $200 billion a year in wasted fuel, lost time, wear and tear, accidents, and higher insurance premiums.
Simply stated, the present market system is giving us the wrong information. It tells us that flying across the country on a discount ticket is cheap when it is not. It tells us our food is inexpensive when its method of production is destroying aquifers, soil health, ecosystem viability, and workers' lives.
Whenever an organism gets the wrong information, it's a form of toxicity. In fact, that's how pesticides work. An herbicide is a hormone that kills by telling the plant to grow faster than its capacity to absorb nutrients. It literally grows itself to death. Sound familiar? Our daily doses of toxicity are the prices in the marketplace. They're telling us to do the wrong thing for our own survival. Such patterns of production and consumption are not only unsustainable but profoundly shortsighted and destructive. It's surprising that "conservative" economists don't support or understand this idea, because they're the ones who insist that we should pay as we go, have no debts, and take care of business.
Let's do it.
* * *
Strategy: Replace the entire tax system.
The present tax system sends the wrong message to virtually everyone. It encourages waste, discourages conservation, and rewards consumption. It taxes what we want to encourage -- jobs, creativity, payrolls, and real income. And it ignores the things we want to discourage -- environmental degradation, pollution, and depletion. The present U.S. tax system costs citizens $500 billion a year in record-keeping, filing, legal, and governmental costs, more than the actual amount we pay in personal income taxes. The only incentive in the present system is to cheat or hire a lawyer to do it.
The entire tax system should be incrementally replaced over a 20-year period by green fees -- taxes that are added onto products, energy, services, and raw materials, so that prices more closely approximate true costs. Those taxes would not be a means to raise revenues or reduce deficits, but should be absolutely revenue neutral so that people in the lower and middle classes would experience no real change in income, only a shift in expenditures. The result: eventually, the cost of nonrenewable resources, extractive energy, and industrial modes of production would be more expensive than renewable resources, solar hydrogen, or biological methods of agriculture.
