Reciprocity makes every one of us a winner, everyone a builder, everyone a giver. It is a simple framework that allows us to understand another way of being, how to support, individually and collectively, a shift from our present way that is making us all losers, all destroyers, and all takers until we have nothing left. Is that really what we want for the land, for the ocean, for ourselves and our future?

By Molly Colin. This article originally appeared in San Francisco Classical Voice. December 8, 2020.

Late one night in 2017 New York Times journalist Ian Urbina found himself seated on the overheated bridge of an Indonesian patrol boat on the South China Sea. Sisyphean waves repeatedly jolted the boat, smashing against its sides, sounding like a car crash. Earlier that day there had been another kind of violent clash involving the boat when tense negotiations with a Vietnamese Coast Guard vessel over disputed fishing rights led the Indonesians to flee, leaving an officer behind with the Vietnamese.

The mood on the bridge was of uncertainty and foreboding as the Vietnamese gave chase — an awkward silence replacing the usual Malay pop-music-infused playful atmosphere. As the boat pitched, an exhausted Urbina wrote up his notes from the day, listening to his playlist of ambient music, including Time from Hans Zimmer’s score for the 2010 film Inception. …

Part eighteen of the multi-part BLUEprint Series: How the Ocean Will Save Civilization

Through a new “Blue Bond” program, the Nature Conservancy estimates that some 85 nations could benefit from this massive re-distribution of protected ocean resources, with added value to follow through fisheries management, ongoing eco-tourism, mitigation of climate factors, fair equity and social justice. If it works for one country, it is a success.

A bond is a fixed income instrument used by corporations, municipalities, states and governments to finance capital expenditures and operations that enroll multiple investors as lenders, rather than shareholders, and to guarantee return through predictable interest payments, and a maturity date for repayment of principal in full. Bonds can be traded, their market price can fluctuate, but they are considered more conservative as invulnerable to volatile interest rates and expectation of full and safe principal return. …

Part seventeen of the multi-part BLUEprint Series: How the Ocean Will Save Civilization

Is it possible to conceive insurance another way? Instead of event restoration, could insurance be designed around risk prevention, where premiums are invested in systems that anticipate certain conditions in advance and finance protections that obviate the predictable damage, reduce disruption, and aggregate to larger strategies that reduce the overall cost of serial events?

If investment is risk, then insurance is a means by which to diminish the damage from unforeseen events, liability, and damage to come. And then there is re-insurance, the insuring of the insurers so that they, too, have coverage to mitigate further the consequence of claims to be paid. …

Part sixteen of the multi-part BLUEprint Series: How the Ocean Will Save Civilization

The Blue Economy, with all that it signifies for our future, cannot succeed if we do not re-direct our investments to best practitioners rewarded for their adherence to social responsibility, environmental sustainability, regulatory control, and social equity.

Banks are at the functional center of the global economy — central banks, banking consortium, investment banks, and local banks — that supply the financial wherewithal to start, operate, expand, and innovate. They are, of course, conservative, risk adverse, and guided by consensus, regulatory concerns, and profit. As such, they have ceded much innovation finance to venture capital, and, by so doing, have perpetuated past behaviors, demonstrated returns, and careful investment that is valued only in the balance sheet, shareholder distribution, and short-term prospect. …

Part fifteen of the multi-part BLUEprint Series: How the Ocean Will Save Civilization

Why does any central bank enable investment that is proven so destructive to the inherent value of Nature, every nation’s most precious asset?

Central banks play a key role in all finance policies and transactions in an integrated world economy. They stand apart from private capitalism and serve as stimulus and control for the implementation of policy and legislation nationally, thus internationally, in shifting forces of finance. In the United States, the Federal Reserve System was created in 1935 to “perform five general functions to promote the effective operation of the national economy, and, more generally, the public interest.”

In concept, the Federal Reserve is independent, although its managers are appointed by the Executive and confirmed by Congress. It has twelve regional Reserve Banks that are quasi-independent with local oversight aware of and sensitive to particular financial conditions and needs. It is not financed by legislative appropriation, but by interest on securities it acquires through open market operations and by depository functions such as check clearing, funds transfers, and automated clearing house operations that cover costs and thereafter transferred as surplus to the U.S. Treasury. The amounts are staggering. In 2015, net earnings paid by the system into the national treasury surpassed $97.8 billion, augmented by another $19.3 billion specifically to fund the “Fixing America’s Surface Transportation Act,” one assumes to repair and build new the deteriorating transportation infrastructure. …

Part One of the multi-part BLUEprint Series: How the Ocean Will Save Civilization

The multi-part BLUEprint series will serve to outline a new and sustainable way forward for civilization, with the ocean leading the way. Learn more at worldoceanobservatory.org/world-ocean-radio

Refugees seeking escape from injustice, tyranny, and life-threatening circumstance look to the ocean as a means toward security and peace. We see it throughout history; political upset or religious bias or natural disaster or pandemic, from which we all seek refuge and solace, physically and spiritually, frequently across the ocean.

The great oceanic reserve that covers 71% of Earth is by nature a diverse place where myriad species coexist in circles and cycles of nurturing and predation. On the surface, some days, the ocean may seem benign, and even on its days of tumult and upheaval, there remains a sense that out there, down there, things operate on principles of synergy and symbiosis different from that on land. There is an order to things, up and down the water column, in and about, feeding, spawning, and survival, that might appear a tranquil, however transitory, state of being when compared to the cruelty and chaos alongshore. Afraid, hopeful, we climb into our boats, with few possessions beyond our hopes and dreams, and risk passage toward opportunity, toward security, toward peace that eludes us. …

Part fourteen of the multi-part BLUEprint Series: How the Ocean Will Save Civilization

What if we begin to understand progress as a circle instead of a line, expanding outward, growing but including everything and everyone within?

If we are to move toward transformational change, and if we have determined that the conventional institutions have failed us, then we must close our minds to the past ways and open our eyes to new ones. How can we imagine a new economy that works, measured differently by increased quality of living, equitable distribution, social and political return, security and justice?

We must learn to live better with less. Growth for growth’s sake, measured by gross domestic product, increasing consumption, and short-term investment return is no longer tenable. It certainly did not serve us during the pandemic crisis. Return to the old way of doing business is delusion. We visualize our economy as linear, lines on a graph, and the fluctuations demonstrate volatility over time of corporate and investor speculation based on profits accounted for by self-affirming return. We question only the results, never the premises, and if our strategies and hunches fail us, we turn to banks or central government to perpetuate the system through debt, inflation, bail-outs and forgiveness, and other financial tricks that excuse and redeem and sustain the false premises. What goes up might come down; what goes down will always go up; and our entire economic well-being is balanced on that tight linear that will never break. …