The Man-Made Pillars for our Relation with the Earth
[This Essay Won the 2021 Canadian International Writing Contest]
History teaches us humans haven’t worked in cohesion together, but for differing reasons. It may be our hyphenated evolutionary traits or the arbitrary social lines we draw, but at the end of the day, economic incentives, rather than the magnanimity we share aligns us together. Humans evolved around different sociological principles, that of community and that of individualistic survival, both of which are critical to consider when solving a tough problem. This essay will delve deeper into the three pillars when developing a sustainable and scalable relationship with our earth that encompasses finance and markets, science and technology and governments and public policy.
The greatest problems such as we have to solve here on earth as a humanity rather than as a nation cannot be done without a common language and medium; both of which are offered by Capitalism. It reached every soul on this earth regardless of race, religion and nationality — everyone worships capital, in the convertible currency of their geography and everyone exchanges through a medium such as an employer or market. For problems such as Climate Change, we need to use different financial instruments and mechanisms such as venture capital, private equity, derivatives and the forbiddable stock market to fund and incentivize an onslaught of human capital to work on solving these tough global problems. Then, we’ll need the use of science and technology, not only in its research and development but in its application, something which today’s institutions struggle to successfully endow upon the future. Afterwards, we’ll need government and public policy to shift, a phenomenon which is only casual to science and markets making the first move. A fundamental shift, in markets, science and policy would not only create a culture of caring for this world, but an imperative to act on our earth’s problems.
Traditional Finance is perhaps the most impactful aspect of our economy, which can help keep our earth healthy. Financial instruments and incentives fuel optimism with consumers, entrepreneurs, investors and more. However, there needs to be a differentiation between real stakeholder capitalism and the capitalism of the 1980s of short-term profits and short-term stock gains. The Incentives of market players such as investors trickle down to have a unit impact on nearly everyone in our economy. The Stock Market, the most well-known financial instrument, works as a discounting machine, the higher potential growth investors see in a company 10 years from now, gets expressed in the valuation of these assets today. This discounting machine itself should be a wide awakening for the caregivers of this earth. In essence, a firm working on solving the potential scarcity problem our planet may face ten years from now, via this discounting machine could get a large impetus of financial and human resources to care for the Earth. Or if not, the stock market, we could use instruments such as insurance for people in areas at risk of climate change. Bringing consumer insurance not only gets insurers to become the stewards the earth desperately needs, but it also develops culture and psychology within the consumer’s mind. Although this offers a contrarian thought, if we want to heal our earth, we just as desperately need to heal financial markets and engineering. It not only needs the development of moral codes but also needs the creation of products connected and intertwined with the tangible work in climate change.
Finance can only work if the real economy has something that is brewing; this is where science and technology come to play. Despite what common wisdom says, we live in an age of abundance, the technology needed to heal our Earth is in desperate need of technological and scientific application. We need to empower entrepreneurial thinking with the research being
done at the research institutes and laboratories. History tells us that the internet was a technological invention, and as profound as it may have been, the real innovations the real world saw, was with the applications on the internet 10–20 years from now. The same applies to Climate Change, technologies such as space technologies are being developed right now, but endless applications such as asteroid mining to improving solar storage and distribution for us on Earth. All of us, not only a handful of people at the top or people at the bottom, are the only cause or effect of the problems on this earth. Our culture hasn’t been very nice to engineers and scientists, if you’d study a subject such as Chemical Engineering or Nuclear Engineering, it would’ve been the equivalent of putting your job prospects at the guillotine. We need to change this phenomenon. Large companies today with large sums of capital in cash reserves need to be invested into high potential technologies. However, this innovation shouldn’t be reserved purely for people with large sums of money, the trend towards democratization will only continue as new products such as Robinhood and Shopify grow. One of the reasons, the only scalable innovation with climate tech is only seen through clever software is because of the liberal regulation in the field and because of the low barriers to entry. Our relationship with the environment will only get better sustainably with technology and that’s found in deep hardware tech. That’s only possible by removing the barriers of entry to innovate with hardware tech.
Governments and Public Policy have a larger impact than we like to think, in most developed countries they are not only the provider of a net baseline in society but are also a validator for moral acts and decisions we take. Laws, Regulations and Taxes aren’t inputs, but instead outputs of the financial and cultural interests of the public. I hold a conviction that protests and walk-outs simply don’t help with repairing the Earth, we’ve for long taken for granted. Humans, just like any other specimen on this earth, become a function of our environment as an evolutionary instinct. But our environment is a function of the inputs of the media, economic and cultural impacts around us. All of which stems from the financial, and scientific inputs that we’re fed. Our government institutions such as Health Canada, the Ministry of Innovation and the Bank of Canada have a much greater impact on the validation and growth of the moonshot ideas than many of us like to think. We need to develop a long-term mutual connection with the Earth. The Enablers of the solution to these tough problems are these third-party public institutions.
The implications of keeping the world healthy, safe and sustainable are laid out, it’s now a matter of if we as humanity, not as an individual can solve these problems. We have to solve these problems from the position of the institutions and structures we already have in place. Just as much of the world transitioned from the agriculture age to the industrial age, I believe humans are in the transition into another age — the age of scalable sustainability. An era in which health, and safety will be done in a scalable and sustainable way for the people on Earth. Contrary to most beliefs, we need to create a mindset change within all of society that they can continue to consume and live their life as it is, but in a healthier and more sustainable way.
P.S: This essay won me 1st place in the 2021 Canadian International Writing Contest -> http://youth-speak.com/writing-contest/
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