The Meaning of Social-Environmental Sustainability - Economics and Ecology: United for a Sustainable World - page 122

• We entrusted the care of public lands (those owned by all of us),
whether forest, grassland, ocean, or otherwise, to officials and pro-
fessionals with a variety of expertise, all of whom are sworn to
accept and uphold their responsibilities and to act as professional
trustees in our behalf.
• Our public lands—and all that they contain, present and future—
are “the asset” of the biological living trust.
• The American people have entrusted officials and professionals with
our public lands as “present transfers” in the legal sense, meaning
that we have the right to revoke or amend the trust (the empower-
ment) if the trustees do not fulfill their mandate: Public lands are to
remain healthy and capable of benefiting all generations.
• Revoking or amending this empowerment if trustees do not fulfill
their mandates is both our legal right and our moral obligation as
hereditary trustees of the Earth, a trusteeship from which we cannot
divorce ourselves.
• As U.S. citizens, we have additional responsibilities to critique the
professional trusteeship (which includes economic oversight) of our
public lands, because we are taxed to support the delegated trustees
and also to provide public services from those lands. Elected offi-
cials make the dollar allocations on our behalf, and their decisions
about where and how to spend “our” money are reflected in both the
present and future condition of our public lands.
In other words, the process is necessarily ongoing as we speak. How might
this work if we are to serve both as beneficiaries of the past and trustees for
the future? To answer this question, we must first assume that the admin-
istering agency is functional, responsible, and governed by the concepts
of social-environmental sustainability, of which economic integrity and
social justice are integral parts. The ultimate mandate for the trustees, be
they employees of an agency or otherwise, would then be to pass forward as
many of the existing options (the capital of the trust) as possible.
These options would be forwarded to the next planning and implementa-
tion team (in which each individual is a beneficiary who becomes a trustee)
to similarly protect and pass forward in turn to the next planning and imple-
mentation team (the beneficiaries that also become the trustees). In this man-
ner, the maximum array of biologically and culturally sustainable options
could be passed forward in perpetuity, all under the jurisdiction of consis-
tent and informed public critique and the legal system. 2
People with the necessary courage to unconditionally accept such a chal-
lenge and the change that it represents are rare, but I (CM) remember meet-
ing one in 1992 in Slovakia. I had been asked to examine a forest in eastern
Slovakia and give the people my counsel on how to restore its ecological
integrity after years of abusive exploitation by the Communists. During the