Expanding the Commons

Beware of the Destructive Black Swans

Reducing the impact of humans occupying virtually all land on which they can live is an opportunity to address several SDGs.  There is also an opportunity to reduce the risk of encountering destructive black swan events. Often humans live in locations that provide ideal living conditions for years. Until a black swan arrives. An extended drought occurs, and a famine decimates the population. Or a city grows at the base of a volcano that has been inactive for hundreds of years.  And then, it erupts and kills the entire population with hot poisonous gas. Or an earthquake in the ocean causes a tidal wave to wipe out a city located at the focal point of a narrow bay, killing thousands of people in the tsunami path. 

“Buy land, they're not making it anymore” Mark Twain.

We could replace land with something better. Standardized general-purpose climate-controlled spaces floating on ocean-based platforms have some interesting properties. Indoor space is much more versatile and valuable per square meter than the best farmland. Climate conditions can be optimized for the activities taking place within the space. A controlled environment can be reconfigured to switch between operational functions, regardless of the outdoor weather conditions. 

There are other advantages to building floating, climate-controlled enclosed spaces. Suppose you locate the space on very large and modular ocean platforms. In that case, it is possible to move the platforms to avoid natural disasters or to achieve some other advantage, such as moving to a location with longer days or fewer clouds.

This new type of human habitat also makes it possible to reconfigure floating cities. It is not possible to insert a new building between two adjacent buildings on land but two floating buildings can be detached and separated to allow new buildings to be inserted between them. Or a row of buildings can be reconfigured into a different shape, such as an oval or circle. 

SDG15: Protect, restore, and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems

Transitioning from a land-based civilization to a sustainable circular economy located on a high-density, climate-controlled platform floating in the ocean offers an opportunity to address several SDGs. For instance, it is an opportunity to address SDG15 by restoring the wetlands that have been destroyed when humans decided to "improve" the land. Draining wetlands and turning them into mono-crop farms is only an improvement if you are human.  Before the land had been cleared and drained it was a natural .ecosystem that was home to many plant and animal species. 

The transition to ocean-based habitats is also an opportunity to rebalance wealth inequality by replacing privately owned land with a sustainable infrastructure that is owned in common.  This is an opportunity to build large common areas within the ocean-based platforms.

Humans have overrun terrestrial ecosystems, and it will be challenging to reverse this destructive activity if humans are not offered a preferable substitution. They must be persuaded to give up this property for something of greater value to stop human activities that continues to degrade the natural land-based ecosystem.

A second problem is the hoarding of property. Wealthy elites who claim land ownership may hold a paper stating their rights of ownership, but do they have the moral right to the land? If the land was stolen from the indigenous people by a colonizing despot, then as that land was sold and resold, how can that ownership claim be legitimate? 

The legal system's bias in favor of the wealthy is by design. The laws have changed over time and since the 1980s they have been systematically altered to protect the hoarders of wealth.