Trusteeship of Creation

Gifts of creation were produced only once and are irreplaceable. By contrast, products made by corporations tend to be mass-produced and highly disposable. It’s hard to imagine a deity who’d view such temporal goods as equivalent to his or her enduring handiwork. The question is whether creation’s irreplaceable gifts are different enough to merit different treatment by our economic operating system. A strong case can be made that they are.

The case is moral as well as economic. The moral argument is that we have a duty to preserve irreplaceable gifts of creation, whereas we have no comparable duty toward transient commercial goods. The economic argument is that any society that depletes its natural capital is bound to become impoverished over time. I find both arguments convincing.

It’s time to treat creation’s gifts differently, to put different “tags” on them so markets will recognize them and apply different rules to them. One way to do that is to place gifts of creation in trust.

Trusts are centuries-old institutions devised to hold and manage property for beneficiaries. The essence of a trust is a fiduciary relationship. Neither trusts nor their trustees may act in their own self-interest; they’re legally obligated to act solely on behalf of beneficiaries. These rules are enforceable by the courts.

Imagine a goodly number of ecosystem trusts at the local, regional and national levels. The beneficiaries of these trusts would be future generations and all living citizens equally.

These trusts would fundamentally change our economic operating system. What are now unpriced externalities would become property rights under accountable management. When corporation want to pollute, they couldn’t just do so; they’d have to buy permits from a trust. The price of pollution would go up; corporate illth creation would go down. If the trust pays dividends, income would flow to all. Nonhuman species would flourish; human inequality would diminish. And government wouldn’t be enlarged—our economic engine would do these things on its own.

How can we be sure that commons trustees won’t succumb to corporate influence? While there
can be no guarantees, the odds of escaping corporate capture are better with trustees than with elected officials. Trustees are constrained by their fiduciary duty. Though they may differ over what’s in their beneficiaries’ best interest, they’re subject to court review and can’t betray their beneficiaries too brazenly.

It might be argued that, by shielding trustees from political influence, we’d make them—and commons trusts generally—undemocratic. The same could be said, however, for our courts. The fact is, there are certain decisions, both economic and judicial, that should be shielded from politics and markets. Moreover, neither government nor corporations represent the needs of future generations, ecosystems, and nonhuman species. Commons trusts can do this. In that sense, they’d expand rather than constrict the boundaries of democracy.