A Geoethical Manifesto: Earth as Judge — A Reckoning with a Laugh

We built empires on the dream of endless more.
We worshipped speed and scale, crowned growth as virtue, and treated the planet as an infinite ledger to be debited.
We fashioned gods of invention and profit, celebrities of extraction and spectacle, who promised salvation in quarterly returns and flagship rockets.
We cheered them on, made them our altars and taught our children to measure worth by wealth and mobile viral fame.

Now the tenant speaks.

The planet does not sermonise. It replies, with heat, flood, wildfire, collapse and silence where song once was.
Its verdict is not moral but mathematical: limits exist. Systems that ignore limits do not reform; they fail.
And that failure will not be fair. It will be indifferent, ruin distributed without ceremony, falling hardest on those least responsible and least able to escape.

Let us admit two truths plainly.

First: our economic religion, endless extraction, compounded consumption and boundless externalisation, is not natural law. It is a political design that concentrates power.

Second: the heroes of that project, men and machines of spectacle, built fortunes atop the commons, rewrote the rules to favour profit and sold abundance while hollowing ecosystems. They call it leadership. It is merely transaction.

We stand at a fork with only two clear roads.
One leads to deliberate change - radical humility, structural repair, shared stewardship and economies redesigned to fit ecological reality.
The other leads to indiscriminate correction, catastrophe that flattens knowledge, kills indiscriminately and leaves survivors to inherit both ruin and repetition.

If you think that future catastrophe is funny, remember this: humour is fragile.
Jokes at the table are cheap, until the table collapses and everyone is hungry.
If the planet laughs last, its punchline will be harsh and the survivors won’t be architects of renewal but its orphans.

So what does deliberate change demand?

  • Dethrone growth as our supreme metric. GDP cannot be our god. Replace it with measures of wellbeing, ecological health and community resilience.
  • Reclaim the commons - air, water, rock, soil, biodiversity, from those private auctioneers. Make them public trusts under enforceable stewardship.
  • Rewrite incentives: tax pollution, reward restoration, forbid the externalising of costs. End the privilege of privatised profit and socialised damage.
  • Break monopolies - corporate, informational, political that wield scale to resist repair. Power concentrated is power opposed to limits.
  • Re-embed technology in human and planetary values: design for sufficiency, repairability and compatibility with life.
  • Protect and restore massive rewilding, regenerative agriculture, defence of the biologically rich places that sustain the whole.
  • Democratise wealth and voice so that futures are not auctioned to those who profited from the past’s pillage.
  • Invest in culture: foster humility, reverence for limits and narratives that celebrate repair and sufficiency over conquest.

This is not reform. It is reimagination - of institutions, laws, markets and hearts.
It demands courage to make the trade-offs that growth fetishists which refuse to name - shorter supply chains, lower consumption, shared ownership, limits on extraction and policies that favour recycled longevity over immediacy.

To those who still worship the spectacle, the billionaires, the pundits, the rating agencies — hear this gently:
History treats your bravado as a season, not a legacy.
When the tenant evicts the landlord, your receipts will not buy back the forest, the aquifer, or the coral reef.
Your ads will not restore soil or quiet the storm.

We do not desire catastrophe. It is a crude teacher and a cruel curator of the future.
But complacency is its accomplice.
If we refuse to enact the change we know is needed, the indifferent correction will make the decision for us.

So choose.
Choose stewardship over spectacle.
Repair over pillage.
Sufficiency over expansion.
Be tenants who leave a place fit for children, not auctioneers who sold it for a season.

And if we fail - let the planet have its laugh.
But let it be known those who wrote the joke must feel the shame of the punchline.

Mike Buchanan (2025) Karstologist.

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