Earth Belongs to Everyone

Summary: For many people, Newsweek International editor Fareed Zakaria’s The Post-American World goes as far as a “responsible” commentator can go in imagining a better world.  But for economist and grassroots global activist Alanna Hartzok, writing from her eco-homestead in south-central Pennsylvania, Zakaria doesn’t go nearly far enough; and in her book The Earth Belongs to Everyone, she outlines the positive, “highest values of right and left” agenda that the global justice movement has long needed.

in her first book, The Earth Belongs to Everyone (Institute for Economic Democracy Press, 2008) – goes a lot deeper than coaxing the great powers to get along.  Ultimately it involves discovering how we can heal our enormous “person / planet pain.”

Politically, it involves forging permanent global institutions that would represent the poor majority (Rothkopf-like counter-institutions instead of – or alongside of – Zakaria’s ad hoc arrangements).  Economically, it involves implementing “solutions to the needless material deprivation that so many suffer in a world that has plenty for all.”

For the world does have plenty for all.  Now.  And who are the Fareed Zakarias of the world to divert our comfortable selves from that uncomfortable fact?

Like Zakaria, Hartzok has been on a lifelong mission – a “25-year vision quest,” she calls it.  It is not so different from Zakaria’s mission as either of them might think, but it took them down different byways.

Hartzok is a graduate of West Georgia College (though her schooling continued at the Institute of Psychosynthesis in Montreal, the Institute of European Studies in Vienna, and the Henry George School of Social Science in San Francisco, not to mention a school in Lebanon where she taught Palestinian refugees).  Around the time Zakaria landed on these shores, Hartzok “bore two children in San Francisco, and then endured a period of personal poverty and homelessness” there.

A bit before Zakaria began running Foreign Affairs magazine in New York City, Hartzok began representing nonprofits at a dazzling variety of conferences around the world.  About when Zakaria was establishing himself at Newsweek International and CNN, Hartzok was co-founding the Earth Rights Institute in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania (where she grew up) and creating “Aradhana,” a small eco-homestead there.

What have Hartzok’s experiences taught her?  First and foremost, that we need something she calls Earth Rights Democracy – a new form of political economy “based on equal rights to the land and resources of the earth.”  For as the title of her book proclaims, “The earth belongs to everyone.”  It is our birthright.  And we should all benefit equally when others use it for private gain.

And if we all benefit equally, then we’ll all be able to at least make a go of it financially.  No more Council on Foreign Relations board members reassuring the wretched of the Earth that – so long as they’re not in the 50 “basket case” nations (knock on wood) – they’ll have only a couple of decades or generations to wait.

If you detect a little Henry George in Hartzok’s analysis, you wouldn’t be wrong, but it’s Henry George radically updated for the 21st century.

Like George, Hartzok believes that the principal role of government – at all levels, municipal to global – is to capture “rent” for public benefit.  But by “rent,” Hartzok doesn’t just mean collecting the (unearned) increases in land values that landlords now receive simply by virtue of owning land in prosperous neighborhoods.  She also means collecting monies whenever private entities

• fell trees on public lands,
• discharge pollutants into the air,
• mine oil and other minerals,
• access the electromagnetic spectrum,

• or do any of the other significant things that are done to this Earth, our home.

Bits and pieces of this have been proposed by reputable economists over the years.  (It appears that the indefatigable Hartzok may have met them all, too!)  Hartzok’s genius has been to tie it all together into one shining “Earth Rights” package, and to draw out some of the exciting implications.

Among them: in the developing world, no more abject poverty (so long as there’s a competent authority to collect and distribute the “rent” monies).  In the U.S., the rent monies could substitute for most or all taxes on wages, investment income, and homes (and other buildings).  Or the monies could go to individuals in the form of an annual “citizen’s dividend.”

The most moving parts of this book are where Hartzok guilelessly describes her attempts to take the Earth Rights message to the far corners of the earth – from a meeting of the Millennium People’s Assembly Network in Bangkok, Thailand, to a Christianity and Human Rights Conference in Birmingham, Alabama; from the United Nations Habitat II Conference in Istanbul to the corridors of the Pennsylvania legislature (where she successfully lobbied to implement a tiny piece of her vision, authorization for municipalities to establish a “split-rate tax” on land and buildings).

Remarkably, the principal themes of ALL the texts discussed in our year 2009 articles are reflected in Hartzok’s book and life:

- Revesz and Livermore’s favorite cost-benefit analysts would swoon over Hartzok’s sophisticated, numbers-laden chapters on the advantages of the split-rate tax for Pennsylvanians (and would be pleased to know she used those numbers in her lobbying of the PA legislature);

- Hamilton’s sense of connectedness is beautifully captured in Hartzok’s chapter “A Friend of Mine Bombed a Friend of Mine” (Hartzok’s sponsor at an event at the U.S. Army War College turned out to have bombed the home town of an Iraqi friend she’d met at a U.N. conference);

- Rothkopf’s “superclass” is never far from Hartzok’s awareness, or ire;

- Shirky’s Web-based populism of the future is being acted out now by Hartzok’s Earth Rights Institute, a grassroots global networking organization run from her small homestead in south-central PA;

- AmericaSpeaks’s “wise democracy” is the very point of the U.N. “Second Assembly” that Hartzok supports . . . an advisory body (maybe more) that would consist of 500 reps from around the world who are all well versed in the “reason(s) for the person / planet pain” in their regions, as well as in possible solutions;

- Chickering and Turner’s “organic democracy” is well illustrated by Hartzok’s persistent attempts to involve herself in her community – from serving as co-chair of the Housing Task Force of the Greater Chambersburg 2000 Partnership, to writing op-eds for the local newspaper, to speaking at local churches and colleges;

- Kleiner’s business “heretics” would be the principal audience for several of the more dollars-and-cents oriented chapters in Hartzok’s book;

- Yamada’s “dignitarian” perpective is beautifully reflected in Hartzok’s chapter “Who Owns the Earth?” (her short answer: We all do!).