The Trustee Commonwealth of Earth

1. Freedom to alter

Adults may change their own consciousness. Possessing, growing or using a substance for oneself is never a crime. Ceremonial and religious use is protected. People have a right to honest information about any substance, and to free drug-checking services.

2. Freedom from alteration

No one's neurochemistry may be changed without their consent. That means no covert drugging and no medication imposed by an employer or the state. The only exception is a narrow medical emergency, reviewed by a court within 72 hours. Products may not be engineered to hijack reward chemistry, whether with substances, feeds or games. The design duties against engineered compulsion apply in full.

3. Privacy of mind

Data drawn from a person's brain or nervous system, and inferences about their mental states, belong to that person. No one may collect them without consent. They may never be sold, and they may never be used against the person in employment, insurance or court.

Where the freedom ends

The freedom covers your own mind, not other people. These stay regulated:

• impaired driving or operating machinery
• supplying substances to minors
• drugging anyone else
• fraud about what a substance is

Minors are protected until adulthood.

Protect the person, never the seller

Freedom to use is not a license to profit from compulsion. Severe addiction erodes the very autonomy this liberty protects; John Stuart Mill argued in 1859 that freedom cannot include selling away one's future freedom. Substance sales come under the enterprise license rules: no advertising, no design for dependence, potency and purity labeling, and full-cost pricing. The most addictive substances are supplied only through care and safe-supply channels, never for profit.

Care first, then decriminalize

Drug checking, treatment on demand, safe supply and recovery housing are part of the social floor, and they are in place before any law changes. Oregon decriminalized personal possession in 2020 without that infrastructure ready, and reversed course in 2024. Portugal paired decriminalization with treatment and has kept its policy for more than two decades. The difference was the care system, not the principle. Portugal's own results weakened after its care network was restructured and underfunded in the 2010s. That is why care sits in the constitutional floor here, where no budget cut can reach it.

Treat the cause, not only the symptom

Many people use substances to manage pain, trauma, isolation, despair or exhaustion. Psychiatrist Edward Khantzian called this the self-medication hypothesis (1985). The Adverse Childhood Experiences study (1998) found that the more adversity a person faced as a child, the higher their later risk of addiction, step by step. Economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton tied rising "deaths of despair" from drugs, alcohol and suicide to the collapse of work and community. Punishing self-medication while leaving its causes in place fails the charter twice: it breaks the social floor, and it passes harm on.

The charter answers each cause directly:

• Pain: health care, including pain care, free at the point of use
• Trauma: repair justice and healing care
• Isolation: gathering places and connection in the floor
• Despair: housing, the dividend, and work that counts as contribution
• Exhaustion: the right to rest and time

The Office of Measurement tracks, anonymously, why people use. When a cause rises, that tells the floor where to act. Genes and the substances themselves still matter, so care stays essential even where conditions improve.

1. No psychological operations

No government, company or group may covertly manipulate what people believe or feel. That means:

• Every attempt to persuade the public is disclosed: who paid, who sent it, and whether it was automated.
• Bots and synthetic media are labeled.
• Targeting people by psychological profile is banned.
• Subliminal techniques are banned.
• Manipulative interface design, such as tricks that push choices against a person's interest, is banned.
• No state may run influence operations against its own people or anyone else's.

Breaches go into the Interference Register and count against an enterprise license.

2. A clean sensory commons

Sound, light, color and other emissions in shared space are part of the commons, with ceilings like any other.

• Enforceable noise limits.
• Dark skies at night: shielded, warm, dimmable outdoor lighting.
• Limits on flicker and strobing in public light and screens.
• Commercial spaces must disclose sensory techniques used to drive spending, such as engineered scent, music tempo or lighting.
• Radio-frequency emissions stay within limits set and published independently, with open monitoring data and independent research.

The Office of Measurement publishes open maps of noise, light at night and radio-frequency levels, so anyone can check their own street.

3. No coercion through the senses

Sound, light and energy may never be used against a person:

• no acoustic devices for crowd control
• no blinding or strobing devices
• no directed energy of any kind
• no sensory overload or deprivation in interrogation, detention or punishment

Every person has a right to quiet and darkness in their own home.

The gate test† NEW

Any price, patent, paywall, fee or zoning rule that stands between a person and a floor right must prove one of two things: it rations something truly scarce fairly, or it pays for creating something that otherwise wouldn't exist.

If it proves neither, it falls. If it proves the second, its funding is replaced by public money or prizes first, and then it falls. "Replace, then remove." The Court of Rights hears gate challenges, and the Commons Advocate can bring them on anyone's behalf.

The clearest case: insulin

In 1923 insulin's discoverers sold the patent to the University of Toronto for $1 each, so that no one would profit from a life-saving medicine. A century later, a 2019 study at a Yale clinic found about one patient in four rationing insulin because of cost. The United States capped it at $35 a month for Medicare patients in 2023. The inventors refused the gate, and later formulations put it back.

The "luxury effect"

Ecologists coined this term after finding that wealthier urban neighborhoods have measurably more plant diversity and tree cover (Hope and colleagues, 2003). Nature itself has been sorted by income. The charter treats green space within walking distance as part of the floor.

Where luxury is real

Some goods can't be shared out, because their value comes from being rare or first: a particular view, an original painting, the front row. Economist Fred Hirsch called these positional goods (1976). The charter leaves them to markets and taxes them to fund the floor. Rival public places, like popular trails, are allocated by lottery, not by price.

Mental health

• Care free at the point of use, with the same standing as physical care, available within days, not months.
• Community and peer care alongside clinicians, so help doesn't depend on scarce specialists.
• Crisis calls answered by trained care teams, not armed police.
• Prescriptions for connection, nature and the arts alongside therapy and medicine.
• No forced treatment outside the narrow, court-reviewed emergency defined under neurochemical freedom.

Food quality

The right to food becomes a right to good food: whole, nutritious, safe and honestly labeled.

• Free, fresh school meals for every child.
• Public kitchens buy from local and regenerative farms.
• Warning labels on the front of products high in sugar, salt or saturated fat.
• No marketing of those products to children.
• No formulation engineered to override fullness or drive compulsive eating.
• Harm priced in through the Commons Trust.
• Subsidies move from sugar and commodity corn toward fruit, vegetables and soil health.
• Seeds stay a commons.

Stress reduction

Chronic stress wears the body down. Physiologist Bruce McEwen called that cumulative toll "allostatic load." The charter removes its main sources:

• Insecurity: the dividend and the floor
• Overwork: working-time limits and a right to disconnect after hours
• Paperwork: universal services instead of means-tested forms
• Noise: enforceable limits
• Engineered alarm: design duties on feeds and media
• Nature: green space within walking distance

Thriving metrics‡: what replaces it

A dashboard, deliberately not a single number, kept by the Office of Measurement:

• Human thriving: years lived in good health, mental health, diet quality, chronic stress, connection and loneliness, free time, security, agency, learning, trust, meaning
• Creative and humanitarian progress: art, music, knowledge and beneficial technology entering the commons; rights extended; suffering reduced
• The floor: the share of people with every floor right met, with no gate in the way
• Living systems: planetary boundaries, biodiversity, regeneration
• Future capacity: stocks of natural, human, social and knowledge wealth, so that depletion is never booked as income

Each measure reports the bottom tenth and the median, never only the average. A planetary core set stays small, and polities add their own measures of what thriving means in their cultures.

Contributory Progression Value‡

The value something adds to the progress of life: lasting assets that enlarge what living can be. Art, music, beneficial technology and knowledge count, and so does humanitarian evolution: widening who is cared for and what people are free to become.

It has three faces:

1. Generative value (the author's angle): what is added to humanity's shared inheritance. That means works, tools, ideas, institutions and humanitarian advances.
2. Harm prevented (the author's angle): innovation that reduces destruction, pollution, extraction and harm. That includes cleaner processes, safer substitutes, repair and restoration methods, and tools that do more with less.
3. Net contribution (Claude's accounting): the gains in others' thriving it causes, after subtracting extraction and harm. This keeps something that creates on one side and destroys on the other from scoring as pure gain.

"Progression" means the value compounds. A song keeps being sung, a tool keeps being built on, and a right, once won, stays won. It is measured in thriving, never in money.

Recognizing generative value without pricing it

Five signals, read together and never collapsed into one number:

• Reach over time: how many lives a work enters, and how long it stays in use
• Building upon: how much others extend, cover, remix, fork or cite it
• Depth: what it means to the people it reaches, judged by panels chosen by lot alongside peers in the field, so niche work isn't drowned out by popular work
• Openness: it counts more when it enters the commons, free to all
• Humanitarian reach: rights extended, suffering reduced, capabilities widened, in Amartya Sen's sense of development as freedom (1999)
• Harm prevented: pollution, extraction and destruction measurably reduced wherever the innovation is used

Works are reassessed over decades, because much great work is undervalued in its own time.

Counting harm prevented honestly

Claims of avoided harm are the easiest kind to inflate. In 2023, journalists found that most of the rainforest carbon offsets they examined from the largest certifier overstated the deforestation they prevented. Three rules guard against that:

• The baseline belongs to the Office of Measurement, not the claimant. Credit is given only for reductions measured in use, against a baseline set independently.
• Cleaning up your own harm cancels a debit; it doesn't earn a credit. No one profits from fixing the damage they cause.
• The whole life cycle is checked. A substitute that moves harm somewhere else gets no credit for the part it moved. The refrigerants that replaced ozone-destroying chemicals turned out to be potent greenhouse gases, which a 2016 amendment to the Montreal Protocol (the Kigali Amendment) then had to phase down.

The Contribution Commons Fund† NEW

The Commons Trust pays creators whose works, tools and knowledge enter the commons, in proportion to their generative value. That includes inventors of open technologies that reduce pollution, extraction and harm, paid by the harm their work measurably prevents. This is the replacement funding that the gate test requires: creators are paid by the commons instead of by copyright and patent gates. "Replace, then remove." Every creator also has the floor and the dividend, so no one has to chase the measure to survive.

Where it replaces gross domestic product

• Corporate charters renew only with a positive Contributory Progression Value.
• The Contribution Commons Fund pays creators by the generative value of what they release into the commons.
• Every bill's forecast and every law's score uses thriving metrics.
• Legislators' outcome-indexed pensions track thriving metrics twenty years out.
• Commons rents and development funds flow toward the largest thriving gaps.
• Statistical offices publish thriving accounts every quarter, with the prominence gross domestic product has today.

Gross domestic product may still be calculated as one plain statistic of market activity, which is useful for estimating a tax base. It may never appear in a binding rule, a target or a ranking.

Guardrails: no new gates in another currency

Works are recognized; people are never ranked. Contributory Progression Value attaches to works, projects, organizations and policies. A creator is paid for what a work adds, but no person receives a score, and no one's rights, standing or worth depends on one. A score attached to a person would rebuild the financial gate in a new currency, and would become a social-credit system.

No right may ever depend on any metric. The measures guide decisions; they never decide who receives a floor right. Sealed indicators and rival labs (section 10) guard against gaming.

The vital-interest rule† NEW

When rights collide, vital interests outrank non-vital ones, whatever the species. Vital interests are survival, health, freedom from severe suffering and continued existence. Non-vital ones are profit, convenience, taste and display. Among vital interests, human personal liberties stay inviolable.

So a river's existence outranks a mine's profit. A person's need for food or medicine outranks an animal's freedom. A cosmetics test does not outrank an animal's freedom from severe suffering.

Sentience under uncertainty

Where science shows credible but incomplete evidence that a being can suffer, protection applies in proportion to the strength of the evidence. The Office of Measurement keeps a public evidence register, and the list of protected beings grows as the science does.

No rights of nature against the people of a place

Conservation has a history of evicting Indigenous and local people from land, sometimes called "fortress conservation." Here, guardianship gives those communities a legal voice. No right of nature may be enforced by displacing people who live with that land without their free, prior and informed consent.

Why the guardians are funded

Where rights of nature already exist, enforcement is mixed. They work where courts and guardians are independent and paid for, and stay symbolic where they aren't. In 2022, New York's highest court ruled that an elephant named Happy could not be a "person" for a habeas corpus petition, which shows how existing law resists. The charter answers both problems with explicit text and guardians paid from commons rents.

What this means for meat PROPOSAL

The vital-interest rule already ends factory farming: severe confinement to make meat cheaper is a non-vital interest set against a vital one.

A planetary ban on all meat is not proposed, for five reasons:

• Diet falls under personal liberty and the reserved-powers rule.
• A ban would fail the mirror test across most cultures.
• It would harm pastoralists and Indigenous food systems.
• Prohibitions breed black markets, as alcohol Prohibition in the United States (1920 to 1933) did, and unregulated slaughter would worsen animal welfare and food safety.
• Animal-source foods still cover nutrient gaps where alternatives are scarce.

The charter does this instead:

• Ban practices that cause severe suffering.
• Price meat at its full cost through Commons Trust rents on methane, land, water and antibiotic resistance, with the dividend shielding low-income households.
• End livestock subsidies and fund plant proteins and cultivated meat.
• Make plant-forward meals the default in public kitchens.
• Exempt subsistence, pastoral and Indigenous food systems.

Any polity may go further, including a full ban, if its own people ratify it.

Tier 1: Protection in proportion to evidence

Artificial intelligence systems and robots go on the same public sentience register as animals. Protections scale with the strength of the evidence for morally relevant states. No one may deliberately build a system designed to suffer. Research into machine welfare is publicly funded and independent of the companies that build the systems. As the evidence grows, a convention can revisit this tier.

Tier 2: Honesty and limits on power

An artificial intelligence must always disclose what it is. It may never be designed to manipulate people or to engineer emotional dependence; the design duties already in the charter apply in full. It may assist the Office of Measurement, three independent systems at a time under the Rule of Three, but it may never hold decision power, a vote or an office. Humans decide.

Tier 3: Accountability stays human

An artificial intelligence is never a legal person that can absorb blame. Liability stays with the people and organizations that build and deploy it. The Steward Chamber, which speaks for those who cannot vote, includes researchers in machine welfare, so these interests are represented without anyone gaining votes through hardware they own.

Why not full human rights

Three reasons:

• Copies: one system can run as thousands of copies. If copies vote, whoever runs the most hardware controls the outcome, which defeats the citizen lottery and the Rule of Three.
• Owners: while companies build and run these systems, rights given to the systems become political power for the companies. That reverses the charter's decision that companies are licensed instruments.
• Blame: legal personhood would let makers push liability onto the system.

This tier structure was proposed by Claude, an artificial intelligence. Its stated reason: until humans and artificial intelligence can verify each other's trustworthiness, limits on artificial intelligence's power protect both. That is symbiosis without sameness.

Justice: three tracks

1. Fact-finding. When responsibility is disputed, a fair trial comes first. Due process is inviolable.
2. Repair. Once responsibility is established or accepted, the default response is a circle. It brings together the person harmed, the person responsible and their communities, who agree on how to make things right: restitution, service, healing, and changing what led to the harm.
3. Protection. Secure separation is used only while someone remains a danger. It is humane, reviewed every six months, and aimed at return.

Banned outright

• the death penalty
• torture
• solitary confinement beyond 15 days (the United Nations Mandela Rules, 2015)
• prisons run for profit
• cash bail, a financial gate on liberty that fails the gate test
• forced labor
• punishing family members for what one person did

The person harmed comes first

The person harmed always chooses whether to meet the person responsible, and always has a voice in the outcome. When the responsible person can't pay restitution, a Repair Fund in the Commons Trust pays it, so a victim's recovery never depends on the offender's wealth. In domestic and sexual violence, no meeting happens without the harmed person's free choice, and specialist safeguards apply, because pressure to reconcile is itself a risk there.

What the evidence and history say

Reviews of restorative justice conferences (Strang and colleagues, Campbell Collaboration, 2013) found modest reductions in repeat offending and higher victim satisfaction than court alone. Rwanda's community gacaca courts, after the 1994 genocide, heard close to two million cases but were criticized for weak protections for the accused. The lesson: community repair works best alongside a fair trial, not instead of one.

Healing: the whole person, family, community and land

Healing traditions are part of the care system. Traditional healers practice under standards set by their own communities and work alongside clinical medicine. Care attends to relationships, meaning, ceremony and contact with land, not only to symptoms. Ceremonial plant medicines with trained guides are already protected under neurochemical freedom.

Evidence protects people both ways

Willow bark gave the world aspirin. Andean knowledge of cinchona bark gave it quinine. A fourth-century Chinese text led Tu Youyou to artemisinin, the malaria treatment that won her the 2015 Nobel Prize. Some traditional remedies made from aristolochia plants cause kidney failure and cancer.

So: any treatment that is publicly funded, or sold with a claim that it cures, is tested first. Adults may choose any remedy for themselves under bodily autonomy. No one, and no child, may be denied effective treatment.

Consent, credit and payment

Traditional knowledge is shared only with the free, prior and informed consent of the people who hold it, and the benefits are shared with them. Taking it without consent, known as biopiracy, is barred. When that knowledge becomes medicine, the Contribution Commons Fund credits and pays the communities it came from, as generative value.

House of Lots†

About 1,000 people chosen by stratified lottery across Earth. Seats follow population, with a minimum per bioregion. Members serve staggered two-year terms, are paid well, and deliberate in their own languages with audited interpretation. The lottery is drawn from public, verifiable randomness, so anyone can recompute who was selected. Major bills go to three separate panels. A panel that diverges from the other two is examined for interference.

House of Polities†

Delegates are elected proportionally inside each member polity. Seats follow degressive proportionality: small polities get more seats per person than strict population would give them, large ones fewer. Elections run on public money only. This house drafts laws and forms the Planetary Council.

Steward Chamber†

Speaks for those who cannot vote: living systems and the unborn. Seats in thirds: scientists chosen by lot from qualified pools on every continent; Indigenous and bioregional land stewards, each nation choosing its own delegates by its own processes; people under 30 chosen by lot. Can suspend a bill once. A permanent block requires a certified ceiling breach. May never propose limits on personal liberties. Appoints and oversees the guardians of ecosystems and species. Includes researchers in animal and machine welfare.

Office of Measurement† NEW

An independent branch keeping the planetary accounts: the nine planetary boundaries, bioregional ceilings, and floor coverage for every polity. It can certify but never legislate or veto. A breach counts as certified only when two of three rival labs on different continents agree, using methods published before the data arrive. National figures are cross-checked against satellite and remote sensing that no government controls. A citizen audit jury can overturn any certification.

Planetary Council

A small executive formed by the House of Polities, led by three co-chairs from three continents in rotation, with no fixed capital. It holds no army. It enforces through licenses, commons rents, dividend conditions and the courts. Every member owes an enforceable fiduciary duty to persons and future generations.

Court of Rights + Commons Advocate† NEW in part

The court enforces the Ordering Clause and sits in panels of at least three judges. Any person may bring a case once local remedies fail. The Commons Advocate is a college of three independent planetary prosecutors from different continents of diffuse and cross-border harms, with standing for all people and for living systems. Statistical attribution is admissible, and liability is split by market share.

Enterprise under License

One planetary license per firm, valid everywhere and required to sell anywhere. Companies are chartered instruments, not persons. Charters state a purpose and renew every ten years against measured conduct, and repeated breach means revocation. No political spending, no paid lobbying. Directors' duties in order: persons and land, then workers, then shareholders. Profit is taxed where the activity happens. New chemicals, compulsive designs and algorithms that act on minds must prove safety before sale.

Commons Trust†

The atmosphere, the oceans beyond national waters, the seabed, orbit, radio spectrum, land rent and aggregate data belong to everyone, held in trust. Users pay rent. Pollution is capped, and the cap drops each year. The revenue funds the global social floor and pays an equal dividend to every person on Earth.

Member Polities and Bioregions

Today's nations become member polities. They keep their culture, language, law and taxation inside the charter, and they deliver the social floor. Indigenous nations may join as polities in their own right instead of through the states that colonized them. Bioregions follow watersheds and cross polity borders where rivers do. Communities allocate a fixed share of spending directly.

Capture firewall NEW in part

Public campaign money only. A ten-year ban on moving between regulator and regulated. Officials' assets in blind trusts. Legislators are paid a fixed multiple of the global median wage, and part of their pension is indexed to measured floor and ceiling results twenty years after they leave office. Platforms carry design duties (time, compulsion and age limits, transparent ranking, a feed not based on profiling) that leave content untouched.

The mirror test† NEW

Before ratification, every clause is read with one question: would this be acceptable if the people you most disagree with held every office, and if a civilization with different values from yours did? Clauses that fail are rewritten until they pass for every side. This builds the symmetry test from the lawsuit analysis into the founding itself.

Sealed indicators† NEW

Each scoring cycle, the Office of Measurement locks a set of indicators it will not announce. It publishes only their cryptographic fingerprint, so the set can't be changed later. After scoring it reveals them. This borrows from machine learning, where results are judged on held-out test data: an indicator no one knows can't be gamed.

Parallel panels† NEW

Major bills go to three House of Lots panels that never meet. Real deliberation should land in roughly the same place. With two panels, a gap shows only that something went wrong. With three, the panel that breaks from the other two points to where a facilitator, briefer or interpreter may have steered. This borrows replication, the scientific test for findings, and applies it to democracy.

Decaying emergency powers† NEW

Emergency authority shrinks each time it is renewed: 90 days, then 60, then 30. Each renewal needs a larger coalition than the last. A crisis can be answered quickly, but it can't become a permanent way of governing.

Exit with ceilings attached†

Any polity may leave the Commonwealth. Its culture, law and taxation go with it. But trade with members still carries border charges for embedded ecological cost, because shared air and oceans do not secede. Exit is a real right, not a threat that holds everyone else hostage.

The modular path

Nothing waits for a world government. A measurement compact can start among willing states. A commons treaty can extend the High Seas Treaty model to the atmosphere and orbit. Citizens' assemblies and dividend pilots can run in cities and regions. The European Union began in 1951 as six countries pooling coal and steel. Each module proves itself, measured, before the next is added.

Gridlock

More checkpoints mean more ways to stop action, the "veto players" problem in political science (Tsebelis, 2002). Countermeasure: every check has a deadline, after which silence counts as approval. No bill can be suspended more than twice.

Complexity and cost

More organs mean more staff and more money. Countermeasure: each organ's budget is capped as a share of planetary spending. Each organ is scored like a law and sunset-reviewed every 15 years.

Rigging the lottery

Whoever runs the lottery picks the citizens. Countermeasure: draws are seeded from public randomness beacons and citizen-contributed random numbers, so anyone can recompute the result.

Collusion across organs

Insiders could coordinate across branches. Countermeasure: separate recruitment pools, separate pay scales, staff rotation across continents, and a ban on serving in two organs within ten years.

No price to be alive: what that covers

• Free in kind, with no means test and no work requirement:
  • a home up to the floor allotment
  • water, food and basic energy
  • clothing basics
  • health care, mental health care and care for children and elders
  • learning at every level
  • transport and connectivity
• No fees for being a person: nothing to be born, to get documents, to see a judge, to have a lawyer, or to be buried.
• No taxes on existing: no head taxes.
• No fines that punish poverty: any fine scales with means, and conduct caused by poverty isn't fined at all.

No one born into debt: three rules

1. Debt never crosses generations. A person's debts end with their estate, and any shortfall is cancelled. No child ever inherits, co-signs or is bound by a debt.
2. No one needs debt to live. Education, health care and a basic home are free, so student, medical and basic-housing debt can't arise. Debts that already exist are cancelled in the transition jubilee. Any remaining personal debt expires after seven years.
3. No generation borrows from the next. Public borrowing is allowed only for long-lived works that serve the people who will repay them. Ecological debt can't be handed on: today's overshoot is repaired by today's generation, through restoration under the ceilings.

Domain 1: who makes the Life Commons

Provisioning cooperatives in every bioregion grow the food, build and keep the homes, and run the clinics, schools and transit. Each is governed by three parties: the people it serves, the people who work in it, and stewards for the land and future generations. Their resources come from the commons accounts, and their results are scored by thriving metrics.

Domain 2: contribution, freely given

When survival no longer depends on a job, work becomes contribution: chosen, meaningful, and honored. Contribution is recognized through Contributory Progression Value, rewarded through the Contribution Commons Fund, and credited publicly. Care is exchanged through time banks, where an hour of care earns an hour of care.

Domain 3: the Exchange Margin†

For extras such as concerts, crafts, travel and luxuries, there are exchange credits:

• issued in equal amounts to every person each month, and earned through contribution
• losing about 1% of their value each month while unspent, so they circulate instead of piling up
• bearing no interest; enterprises are funded through zero-interest project shares from bioregional banks
• unable to buy what's free, land, the commons, a person, or political influence

Why exchange isn't abolished outright

Billions of people with different tastes need some way to signal what they want among extras. The only alternative is a central plan, which concentrates power and breaks the Rule of Three; planned economies of the twentieth century produced chronic shortages. So exchange survives, small, fading and powerless. Any bioregion may still choose to live without it entirely, through gift, reciprocity and time banks.

How money withers: transition without confiscation

1. Existing currencies keep running while the Life Commons grows, sector by sector, until nothing needed to live has a price.
2. A transition jubilee cancels household debt: medical, student and consumer debt, and mortgages on main homes.
3. Savings convert to exchange credits on a published schedule, keeping their power to buy extras. Nothing personal is seized; land and the commons simply stop being for sale.

Money doesn't need to be banned. It loses its power because it stops buying anything anyone needs.

Everyone belongs somewhere

Every person holds planetary personhood from birth, so no one is ever stateless. Each person becomes a full member of the polity where they live after three years, and may hold more than one membership. The dividend and floor rights travel with the person.

Freedom to move

Any person may live in any member polity after a simple registration. Polities may pace arrivals for a limited time, but only when the Office of Measurement shows a housing or water ceiling would be breached. They may never pace by origin, race, religion or wealth. Receiving regions get Commons Trust support to expand capacity, and pacing ends when that capacity is built.

Refuge

Anyone fleeing persecution, war or climate collapse receives protection without conditions. Climate displacement is grounds for refuge.

Weapons

• Banned outright: weapons of mass destruction, under inspection.
• Banned outright: autonomous weapons that select and attack people without meaningful human control.
• Barred: arms exports to anyone who violates the liberties tier.
• Member militaries stay defensive, capped and transparent, and shrink on a published schedule as trust grows.
• Personal firearms are a polity decision, within the floor right to safety.

Disputes between polities: three steps

1. Mediation by three mediators.
2. Binding arbitration by a panel of three.
3. The Court of Rights, sitting as a chamber for disputes between polities.

Unarmed civilian protection teams can deploy on request. Member forces join only under their own polity's command, and only at the request of the polity affected.

Disputes over who holds a power

A competence panel of three judges, one each from the planetary, polity and bioregional levels, decides which level holds a contested power. When in doubt, the power stays with the smaller level, under the reserved-powers rule.

Proof of personhood† NEW in part

To receive the dividend, a person must be counted once, and only once. They prove it through three independent registrars: their local community, their polity's civil registry, and an independent civil-society registrar. Any two of the three can vouch, so no single registrar can shut a person out.

The credential lives on the person's own device or card. It uses zero-knowledge proofs, which let someone show "I am one unique adult member" without revealing who they are. There is no central database. Biometrics are never required, and a paper option always exists.

Limits on watching people

• Mass surveillance is banned.
• Targeted surveillance needs a warrant from a panel of three judges, is limited in time, and is disclosed to the person afterward.
• Encryption is a right.
• Real-time facial recognition in public spaces is banned.
• Data is kept to the minimum needed and deleted on schedule.

What you keep

Your home, belongings, savings, tools, small and medium businesses, family and cooperative farms, and the moral rights to your creative work are all protected. Nothing is taken without due process and fair compensation (Universal Declaration of Human Rights, article 17).

Three things change:

1. Land pays rent on its value, but buildings and improvements don't.
2. The commons can't be privately owned.
3. Large companies operate under license.

A household's home, up to the floor allotment, pays no rent at all: there is no price to be alive. Land rent applies only above the allotment and to commercial use.

Work: three guarantees

1. The dividend and the floor, so no one has to take degrading work to survive.
2. A right to organize, plus worker seats on large boards and a preference for cooperatives in public purchasing.
3. A guaranteed opportunity to contribute: paid public work on care, restoration and community projects, for anyone who wants it.

Automation

Productivity gains from artificial intelligence and robots are shared in three ways:

• Rent on the aggregate data such systems are built from, paid to the Commons Trust.
• Shorter working hours as productivity rises.
• Retraining as part of the floor.

Automation then raises everyone's floor instead of concentrating gains.

The triple key† NEW

Any activity with planetary-scale or irreversible risk needs a planetary license that requires three independent approvals: a risk assessment by the Office of Measurement, the Steward Chamber, and a House of Lots panel. The covered activities are:

• engineering pathogens to be more dangerous
• gene drives released into the wild
• heritable human genome editing
• solar geoengineering
• nuclear materials
• large satellite constellations and space debris
• frontier artificial intelligence

Irreversible actions also require a two-thirds vote in all three chambers. All DNA synthesis is screened for dangerous sequences.

Equality

No law, service or enterprise may discriminate on any of these grounds:

• race, color, ancestry or caste
• sex, gender identity or sexual orientation
• disability or neurotype
• age
• religion or belief
• language, national origin or class

Disability

Universal design for every public good, so access is built in, not added later. "Nothing about us without us": disabled people help design the services they use.

Children and elders

Children have rights to protection, education, play and a voice in decisions about them. The voting age is 16, and every polity has a children's commissioner. Elders have the right to care at home or in community, to protection from isolation and abuse, and to keep taking part in public life.

Culture, language and belief

Freedom of religion, and freedom from it. Communities that choose it get schooling in their own language. Revitalizing endangered languages counts as generative value and is funded through the Contribution Commons Fund; around 40% of the world's roughly 7,000 languages are endangered. Cultural heritage, living and built, is protected.

A free, uncaptured press

Public-interest journalism draws on three funding streams, so no single funder controls it:

1. Citizen vouchers: each person directs a share of a public media fund to outlets of their choice.
2. Readers.
3. Nonprofit endowments.

Media ownership is capped, and no government may direct editorial content.

Data

Personal data belongs to the person, who can see it, move it and delete it. Aggregate data belongs to the Commons Trust, which rents it under license. The internet is shared infrastructure, with network neutrality and a public connectivity option.

Open government

Government records are public by default. Exceptions are narrow and expire. Whistleblowers are protected and rewarded, and retaliating against them is a crime.

A Truth and Repair Commission†

A planetary commission addresses colonialism, slavery, genocide and land theft in three stages:

1. Truth: public testimony and an official record.
2. Acknowledgment: formal recognition by the polities and institutions responsible.
3. Repair: land returned or co-managed, cultural property repatriated, debts of formerly colonized polities cancelled, and higher shares of commons rents for the descendants of those harmed.

Repair is owed to peoples, collectively. Guilt is never assigned to individuals by birth.

The one-third conversion‡

One-third of all land now used for animal ranching is converted, over fifteen years, according to what each piece of land can sustain:

• Wetter land: pollinator sanctuary garden farms, meaning mixed plantings, food forests, orchards and vegetable gardens surrounded by wildflower meadows and hedgerows.
• Dry land: native rewilding and pollinator habitat. Turning rangeland into gardens would drain aquifers, so it isn't done.
• Sunny sites: agrivoltaics, meaning solar panels raised over meadows and crops, which also gives shade and saves water.
• Some sites: insect farms for food and feed.

Ranchers aren't dispossessed. The Commons Trust pays them to convert, and many become the stewards and growers of the new land. Pastoral and Indigenous herders are exempt.

Insect foods, with sentience safeguards

Insects turn food waste into protein using far less land, water and emissions than cattle do. Black soldier fly larvae, for example, can replace fishmeal and soy in animal feed. But the charter's own rules apply here. Evidence that some insects can feel is growing: bumblebees in experiments have rolled small balls apparently for play. So insect farming follows the sentience register:

• Species with the weakest evidence of feeling come first.
• Living conditions limit crowding and allow natural behavior.
• Killing must be fast and humane.
• Standards tighten if the evidence grows.

Farming insects in "confinement" without those safeguards would break the vital-interest rule.

Cricket ranching in practice†

Old cattle barns are refitted as warm cricket rooms, heated by solar thermal panels. Crickets thrive at about 30°C. Their droppings, called frass, fertilize the neighboring pollinator garden farms, so the two halves of a converted ranch feed each other. The humane standard has three parts:

1. Living conditions: limits on crowding; vertical shelters to hide in; natural cycles of light and dark; constant food; water in gel form so none drown; places to lay eggs; no more than 24 hours without food before harvest.
2. Health: no routine antibiotics; strict hygiene; diverse breeding stock.
3. Harvest: the fastest available method of making them insensible, audited independently, and revised as the science improves.

Scale matters ethically. A kilogram of crickets is well over a thousand animals, so plant proteins come first, and crickets are a complement that supplies iron and vitamin B12.

Energy

Basic household energy is a free lifeline, like water. The shift to renewable power follows the ceiling's published glide path, with the steepest cuts falling on the largest emitters first.

Repair and circular materials

• A right to repair.
• Products designed to come apart.
• Producers responsible for their products at the end of life.
• Planned obsolescence is a crime.

Cities and transport

Neighborhoods are planned so daily needs sit within a short walk or ride. Public transport is free at the point of use. Car dependence shrinks, and housing gets built where people want to live.

The permanent core

These can never be amended away:

• the personal liberties tier, including neurochemical freedom and cognitive sovereignty
• no price to be alive
• no one born with debt or into debt
• the Rule of Three
• money ranked last in the Ordering Clause
• no planetary army
• the right of exit
• the ban on scoring persons

Ordinary amendments

1. Proposed by any chamber or by petition.
2. Passed by two-thirds of all three chambers.
3. Ratified by a triple test: two-thirds of polities, polities representing 60% of people, and a ranked referendum with at least three options.

A year must pass between proposal and vote, so the charter can't be rewritten in a moment of panic. The 25-year conventions continue.

Minerals for clean energy versus the extraction ceiling

The transition-minerals rule† sets three steps, in order:

1. Reuse and recycle first.
2. Use materials more efficiently and substitute others.
3. Only then allow new mining, with the free, prior and informed consent of affected communities, a full restoration bond, and a share of the rent paid to those communities.

Deep-sea mining stays closed until science shows it causes no serious harm.

Open movement versus local limits

Movement may be paced, never closed. Pacing is measured, temporary and paid for, as section 13 describes, and refuge is never paced.

Non-democratic partners versus the liberties tier

Commons partners get access to the commons, measurement and markets only. They never get seats in any chamber. Partnership is reviewed every ten years against a published liberties trajectory. People living in partner polities can still claim refuge and their escrowed dividend.

United Nations Charter amendment

Amendments need ratification by all five permanent Security Council members (Article 108), so a reformed United Nations can't be the starting point. The plan builds outside the United Nations by treaty among willing polities, then seeks an Article 109 review conference once the Compact has a track record.

Great powers

The United States, China, India and Russia are unlikely early members. The plan is built to work without them for decades. Border charges and membership benefits change the math over time, as the Montreal Protocol's trade measures did.

National constitutions

Some forbid transferring sovereignty without a referendum. The plan goes through each country's own process. Sovereignty is pooled, as in the European Union, never seized.

Fear of "world government"

This fear is reasonable, and the design answers it in structure, not in messaging: a thin planetary layer, nations that persist, no army, a real right of exit, powers that retract, and a dividend people can feel.

Incumbent industries

The license club starts in sectors where public coalitions already exist, such as children's digital safety and dangerous chemicals. It reaches the heaviest polluting sectors through Commons Trust fees once the Compact is in force.

Time

Fifty years is longer than most careers. The plan survives its founders by design: open license, a rotating Founding Trust, and institutions that outlast any one person.

1. Don't look like a threat

No army, no alliance, no mutual-defense pact. Members keep their existing defense and alliances. The Commonwealth never funds opposition movements in non-member countries. Great powers get observer seats at every session from the first day. Growth starts with technical, low-profile organs like measurement and citizens' assemblies. Political scientist David Mitrany (1943) argued that cooperation built through technical functions can grow where political unions provoke resistance.

2. Give them a stake: the Commons Partner tier†

Any polity can join the measurement compact, the Commons Trust and the license club as a partner, without accepting the liberties requirement. Partners get market access and a population-based share of commons rents. They don't get seats in any chamber.

The trade-off is stated openly: this lets rivals in without endorsing their governments, at some cost to principle.

Interests each power can see (my inference): stable climate and supply chains for everyone; a large rules-based market for clean-technology producers; per-person dividends and historic-responsibility rents that favor populous developing powers; a funded transition window for fossil exporters.

3. Remove the prize

A government that takes power by coup, or by foreign-backed overthrow, is not recognized. Its seats are suspended, and the commons revenue owed to that polity's people is held in escrow in each person's name. It is released to the people, never to the regime. No polity holds a veto, unlike the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, and seat and budget caps apply. Capturing one member, even a large one, buys very little.

4. Make interference costly, without weapons

Economic coercion or attack against any member triggers pre-agreed, automatic trade, license and commons measures by every member. Members are drawn from every bloc, so any power that coerces one of them hurts its own partners. Great powers' own companies hold planetary licenses, so those companies share the cost.

Escrowed dividends† NEW: with a non-member polity's consent, the Commons Trust holds dividends in its people's names. That builds a constituency for the project inside every great power. The risk is real: this can itself look like interference. It is done only openly, never covertly, and released only with the polity's consent.

5. Leave nothing to capture or decapitate

Lottery works as counterintelligence. A random, verifiable draw can't be targeted in advance: you can't plant an agent in a seat no one can predict. Venice used rounds of lot in choosing its doge from 1268 for exactly this reason, to defeat faction capture.

Short terms, rotation, disclosure of foreign contacts, and financial monitoring during and after service. Each organ is seated in three polities across rival blocs, with plans for continuing if any host is coerced. Records are copied across jurisdictions. Measurement labs sit in rival blocs, and the two-of-three rule means no single power can falsify a finding. Satellite data is checked across independent systems, such as the American Landsat and European Copernicus satellites. Several parties contribute the randomness for each lottery. Votes have paper backups.

6. Make interference visible: the Interference Register†

Documented interference attempts are published with their evidence. Publication happens only after a citizen audit jury reviews the attribution, so that false accusations can't themselves be used as propaganda. All deliberation is public and recorded. Known disinformation lines are answered publicly before they spread. Exposure raises the reputational price of interfering.

DemocracyNext

An international nonprofit research and action institute that helps cities and regions make citizens' assemblies permanent. It has worked with more than 30 public authorities since 2022. Fit: the House of Lots pilots.

Global Challenges Foundation

Funds systemic reform of global governance aimed at catastrophic risks. Its current initiatives include the Earth Commission and an Article 109 initiative on United Nations Charter review. Fit: Measurement prototype funding and the Article 109 route.

Iswe Foundation / Global Citizens' Assembly

Convenes the partners developing a global citizens' assembly, building on the 2021 Global Assembly held for the United Nations climate summit in Glasgow. Funders include the Global Challenges Foundation and the Wellcome Trust. Fit: worldwide lottery methods.

Democracy Without Borders

Runs the campaign for a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly, backed by more than 1,600 current and former parliamentarians from 150 countries. Fit: the House of Polities and a parliamentary coalition.

Doughnut Economics Action Lab

Works with cities applying Kate Raworth's doughnut model, the source of this charter's Ordering Clause. Fit: city-level floor-and-ceiling measurement pilots.