the Pledge
While holding that a sustained acceptance of ecological responsibility of some certain kind is essential for the maintenance of our planet, the nature of what we, as its occupants, owe to our environments and our own descendants will never be fixed, finite or properly quantifiable. As events unfold and conditions change, our individual efforts and energies might be best directed in one way one century, and in another the next. The pledge taken by members of the Project, accordingly, will transform as we need it to, infrequently, and with due consensus. But at the beginning of our efforts, in the world of today, there are three ways in which any of us can contribute to the cause of hastening a more harmonious and sustainable relationship between our species and the rest of the planetary ecosystem. These actions are a minimum threshold, a demonstration of shared value and commitment upon which all else that we do will be built, and moreover are, we believe, absolutely necessary on a wide scale and immediate time frame to mitigate the most devastating consequences of our species’ ecological overburden.
i pledge a portion of my financial earnings, in the amount of 2% of gross yearly income, to the alma project fund.
A portion of the capital we earn, however much it is and howsoever we earn it, is dedicated to the furtherance of our shared ambitions. Only through funding, in quantity substantial and consistent enough to generate further revenue and seed diverse initiatives, will the Project build leverage of consequence and sustain operations over significant time spans. The fund is the Project, and makes the Project possible. Fund operational details are here.
I pledge a limit in the amount of yearly carbon emissions for which I am solely responsible, as calculated by the Alma Carbon Tool, with annual cap limitations as set therein by income and location.
A lessening of our own consumption of energy, today synonymous with our burden on the planet’s natural and technological resources, is of immediate and measurable consequence. Carbon footprinting is the most relevant and quantifiable method of measuring individual impact, and carbon measurement is the best indicator we have of the most dangerous and irreversible impacts of anthropogenic climate change. Scientific consensus is by now universal and overwhelmingly supported, that environmental disasters – from species loss to deforestation to catastrophic weather events – will occur in direct proportion to the levels of CO2 present in our atmosphere and the consequential increases in average global temperature. The oft-cited goal of 350 ppm is meaningful, and necessary, but will not be reached without policy enforcement far exceeding what any extant institution or government is capable of establishing or implementing. It is, for now, up to a global populace, acting directly, with unprecedented levels of coordination and commitment, sometimes in opposition to our own levels of comfort and in many cases with a meaningful reduction in a quality of life to which we have become accustomed or have been led to feel entitled to. It is, in other words, up to us, and only possible if we want it to be. The Alma Carbon Tool and FAQ are here.
I pledge my commitment to a reduction in the global human population, to the limits established by the Alma Growth Index, as established therein by income and geographic location.
Our planet supports our human population, but only to a degree, and with tremendous and eventually catastrophic consequences – conversely, there is no major problem facing the planet today, ecological or humanitarian or otherwise, that does not become exponentially more soluble or vanish altogether if our numbers were held within sustainable bounds. The forces and outcomes of industrial development and globalization have allowed our species’ growth rate, or its ability to utilize the planet’s resources to support a delta between our birth rate and death rate, to reach an extreme and profoundly overextended upper limit. Advances in food production technology, medicine, urban infrastructure and the other tools of our civilization have allowed our population to grow almost 2000x larger than it was only 12,000 years ago, with steady increases in average health and life expectancy – but the necessary bargains we have made along the way, whether with the chemical byproducts of fertilizers and factory farms and building products, or the economic systems that have consolidated industrial power and resource development, are the very reasons our planetary systems stand collapsing today. There are a certain number of humans that can be supported by our landmasses, waters and natural resources without wildly destructive exploitation; we know this to be true because it has been demonstrated for most of human history. Less important than the number itself, is the reality that it is a limit drastically less than any possible reduction in global population projected over the next several centuries, and the coinciding certainty that by then, for much of our ecosystem, it will be far too late. Our work to balance the planetary population ledger must begin immediately, and if it is to proceed at all, must rest firmly on foundations of an equitable and rational moral philosophy, global consensus and widespread adoption of practice. No such proposal will be perfect in its allocation of growth limits and responsibilities, or welcomed by the authoritative bodies of most nations and religions and cultures, or easily implemented, or enforceable by any political structure. But yet, nothing else that we could hope to accomplish can matter even a fraction as much. The Alma Growth Index and population datasets, and further reading, are here.
These resolutions are sacrifices. They are efforts that we make, and have committed to make for the remainder of our lives, in spite of their difficulty and with full awareness that no compensation or recognition will be forthcoming. Those who would potentially realize any benefit from these efforts, if they exist at all, will not be born for hundreds of years. But the sacrifices, such as they are, are relatively small, and are well within our capability, and simple sacrifices spread widely are the best and perhaps only chance we have for delivering our descendants a planet worth sacrificing for at all. Which is, though we may struggle to see it, what we have.