This paper critiques global neo-liberal development approaches towards governing our ocean and space common resources while providing policy recommendations & revolutionary pathways forward for revaluing our common ecological, economic & social resources and channeling them into regenerative cooperative systems.

1. Reversing the enclosure of the commons: Revolutionizing Regenerative Global Ocean & Space Commons
Governance Systems to Reconnect Our Shared Ancestry & Propel Us Forward
Our planet is growing, exponentially. In this great transition, we must revisit what connects us, what we
hold in common, what propels us forward. Adding two billion people to our planet and the next means
we must consider how we share our oceans, our land, our resources, and our innovations. Specifically,
we must consider how our economic, social and political processes regenerate our built, social, and
ecological environment, and build new forms of capital in the process. Our global society is currently
revisiting how we manage our oceans, moon, and other celestial bodies which require establishing some
of the most innovative perspectives the way we envision human ancestry and our common future. I
think most people in Wisconsin agree that our lakes, oceans, and planets are important topics yet our
local democratic and economic systems must be enhanced in order to channel that interest in direct and
meaningful action, from the Fox Cities for example, globally and into space. As we build regenerative
systems, we must consider important treaties and legislation on the oceans and space and how we
connect our regions and each other into our global and interplanetary communities.
The United Nations “Treaty on Principals Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of
Outerspace including the Moon and other Celestial Bodies” sets a tone of the importance of our
common interests and the need for cooperation in space. It creates mechanisms to take into account
environmental considerations in any scientific and economic utilization of resources in space. This is
remarkable in the sense that it provides a legal framework to internalize ecological capital into our
economic, scientific, and governance systems. Moreover, it includes provisions that it promotes equity
in opportunity for technological development and shared benefits from economic activities in space,

2. particularly among countries with variations in levels of economic, social, technological, and scientific
development. The treaty provisions cooperation among government, scientific, civic, and business
sectors in the pursuit of technological innovation. Moreover, it creates principals for transparency and
open data in that it requires any discoveries of organic life to be made public. Moreover, it calls for a
planetary platform for the exchange of information which promotes innovation. In many ways, the
Treaty evokes the importance of our common ancestry and future, global cooperation to strengthen
mutual understanding and peaceful relations. With the next wave of expansion into space calling to us,
it is now the responsibility of nations, states, and cities to revisit this legislation and bridge their
governance and economic activities within this framework.
In 2015, the United States congress took an initial step towards legislating a new era of space
exploration what it passed resolution HR 2262 the “Spurring Private Aerospace and Entrepreneurship
Act”. The limited legislation is based in a neoliberal development approach to space commercialization
and varies significantly from our global emphasis on integrating the commons, environmental, and
equity considerations into our economic systems. It also reduces the role of cooperation among
government, private and civic sectors for technological innovation and social advancement. The bill is
largely written in the language of risk management to ensure the government and space industry are
insured in case of accidents rather than building upon the established Space Treaty to strengthen
comprehensive global governance mechanisms.

3. The legislation establishes a private property regime over space resources which is regulated by the
Office of Space Commerce which is tasked to promotes the conditions for “economic growth”. The bill
does not even mention the environment, nor does it provide any environmental protection mechanisms
such as requiring environmental impact analyses in the procurement and utilization of natural resources
in space. This is a structural externalization of natural capital and is antithetical for how we construct
regenerative political-economic systems. Moreover, HR 2262 relies limitedly on the emerging space
industry to set many of its standards on safety and innovation. This is problematic as very few space
industries exist, and the sector is highly concentrated with high entry costs. The office, which reports
mainly to the Department of Commerce, is tasked with promoting the “advancement of technological
capacity” however the bill establishes only one mechanism for inter-governmental cooperation with
scientific agencies (i.e. the National Oceanic Research Committee) - particularly in the arena of
geospatial technologies which the United States government is highly innovative- and does not establish
cooperation among government and university research centers which is a step back for innovation.
This exclusive reliance upon corporations to promote innovation is ubiquitous in neoliberal economic
thinking and has stagnated innovation, lead to climate change and the onset of mass extinction, and
must be reconsidered in our revolutionary decade. For example, US Senator Ron Johnson from
Wisconsin supports drilling for oil in the Great Lakes with the caveat that “we need to utilize American
ingenuity and American technology to ensure this extraction can be done responsibly” This is a naïve
position when we consider the number of oil leaks around the globe that spew black tar in our oceans
and land under the corporate management of oil sector. Moreover, as we venture deeper into the
oceans, this task only becomes more difficult while corporations have not made the requisite
innovations. The last time there was a major oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico we dumped billions of gallons
of chemicals that are illegal in European countries to make an oil leak disappear. Corporations do not
value nature and this is why our governments and our democratic participation is all the more important
to ensure we stand up for water from Lake Winnebago to Green Bay to Lake Michigan to our oceans.

4. In 1982, The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) was established to govern our
ocean ecologies which embodies much of the same principals as the space treaty in terms of the
common heritage of humankind and meeting the resource needs of future generations. This general
framework is being built upon to make it relevant for the current push towards deep sea economic and
scientific endeavors. One initiative being led by the German Institute of Advanced Sustainability Studies
is providing recommendations for a regulatory and governance framework for deep seabed mining. In
2019, they released a report which overviews the entire sector and provides a set of recommendations
to be considered as we create and harmonize local to global commons governance regimes.
The nomenclature of the report expands upon the notion of humankind’s common heritage and the
need for global cooperation in cultivating this new sector and builds upon environmental norms and
values. Important minerals such as Cobalt that is utilized in battery production for electric vehicles and
cell phones exist in higher quantities than land deposits yet the challenges for sustainably procuring
these resources are immense. Meeting these challenges requires new regenerative thinking in terms of
how we value nature, distill this value into new currencies, and how we channel these currencies into
our local and global regenerative economic and political systems in order to democratize them and to
ensure their benefits are equitably allocated among our populations, regions, and ecological commons.
One key initiative is the establishment of environmental standards. These metrics are still being defined
as even the methodologies for environmental impacts analyses are still being created. The IACC
envisions cooperation among government research agencies and the private sector to structurally
promote innovations in mining practices in order to ensure ecological integrity in the procurement and
utilization of mineral resources. The Legal Technical Committee in cooperation with the International

5. Seabed Authority Council is proposed to oversee the licensing, environmental impact analyses,
promoting transparency and participation, and determining the basis for taxing and equitable
allocations of shared revenues. The ISA is now in the process of writing a comprehensive policy for deep
seabed mining which the United Nations is schedule to adopt in 2022.
The United States is still not a signatory of UNCLOS therefore not a party to ISA. This is a legacy of the
neoliberal ideology and a corporate oil interests that despise the United Nations and any regulatory
framework that represents a threat to their pursuit of maximizing profits. In 2018, the Heritage
Foundation, released a statement urging Donald Trump not to ratify UNCLOS. In addition to citing the 33
Republican Senators who in 2012 went on record against UNCLOS, this corporate interest based think
tank used logically misguided arguments denying the mechanisms this agency provides for promoting
global security in order to circumvent regulations and corporate responsibility for the oil industry to pay
taxes and contribute to reducing environmental impacts of ocean resource extraction.
This lack of ratification of the UNCLOS limits the opportunities for American companies, universities, and
civic organizations to benefit from commercial activities, collaboration in promoting environmentally
regenerative economic practices, and reduces our nation’s role in co-determining global policy. We call
upon President Bernie Sanders to ensure the United States join the UNCLOS convention, has
representation on the International Seabed Authority, and contributes to the promulgation of the
rewriting UNCLOS. Moreover, we urge social movements to initiate a process to integrate cities and
regions within the global governance of seabed mining. This can be pursued through direct participation
in the ISA Council and integrating Sustainable Development Goals into regional governance mechanisms
and processes. Combining these initiatives provide robust collaborative global governance mechanisms
to guide our commons interests and cooperative regenerative endeavors in our revolutionary decade.
Our approach to massive cooperative games provides a framework which can enhance this regional
pursuit to strengthen global governance processes. Specifically, the distillation of environmental value
into peer currencies can be adopted into regional budgeting processes to cultivate environmentally
regenerative practices and promote innovation in mining practices for resource utilization within our
oceans and space commons.
As we redefine regional empowered participatory governance there are several frameworks that we can
build from to make this connection. Specifically, the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 14
urges governments to “conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas, and marine resources for
sustainable development” while SDG 12 promotes governments to “ensure sustainable consumption
and production patterns”. Initiating participatory budgeting processes that tax environmentally
degenerative practices in the extraction of oil and procurement of certain mineral resources such as
cobalt that are utilized in batteries for electric vehicles, cell phones, and other electronic devices can
create funds to promote environmentally regenerative projects in cities, scientific research and
innovation, and data sharing platforms to restore local and global ecosystems.
The environmental services framework is important to take into consideration as we work towards
innovating peer currencies that provide new value to nature within our local and global regenerative
political-economic systems. Our regenerative systems must account for the amounts of these minerals
and resources that are utilized and exchanged in our local economies. Moreover, typifying and
quantifying the ecological impacts (e.g. costs and benefits) regarding the way in which these resources
are produced, processed, distributed, accessed, and recycled gets us closer to synergizing political and

6. economic approaches to governing our commons within a regenerative paradigm. This unprecedented
level of sophistication of our accounting systems and requisite hyper-coordination among government,
economic, and civic actors requires new software systems and exchange standards in addition to a
deeper integration of our economic and political systems. Recalibrating the goals and metrics cities
utilize in comprehensive planning and budgeting processes and harmonizing these indicators across
regions creates devolved trade standards and provides the fundamental base architecture of innovating
global governance systems for the regenerative stewardship of our resource and creative commons.
Targeting oil, gas, and cobalt is strategic for many reasons. First, we are attempting to transition from a
fossil fuel to a renewable energy economy and from a terrestrial based to interplanetary economy.
Considering the immense revenues that oil and gas sales generate even small regressive taxes add up to
very significant revenues regionally and globally. Moreover, the demand for cobalt based products
increases mostly due to population growth and less irrespective of pricing. While there are equity
concerns in terms of guaranteeing access to renewable energy and internet communication devices,
regressive taxes can be targeted towards luxury items such as high value mobile phones and electric
vehicles. The revenues generated could be channeled into a global fund to promote scientific research
and technological development via universities and research agencies. This global fund would create
incentives for more cities to join. Third, the vast quantities and scale of economic rewards in accessing
rare earth minerals and gems from our subterranean, ocean, and space ecologies combined with the
unprecedented logistical and environmental challenges demand new levels of technical sophistication
and social cooperation to ensure human and ecological safety in their utilization. Fourth, our oceans and
space commons governance approaches place significant value on the need to preserve resources for
future generations. This could provide the basis for a strategy to create a structural investment in space
exploration based upon setting limits on finite ocean-based resource extraction and requiring increasing
levels of space-based sourcing. One way to do this would be to create global cooperative regenerative
enterprises that have mandates to sequentially access an increasing amount of certain resources from
space within certain timeframes. The potential benefits of shared value equitably allocated among
humankind could provide the inspirational spark and pragmatic logic to initiate such enterprises and
massive cooperative games to propel us into the solar system at accelerated rates.
These immense opportunities and strategic importance for the future of humankind regarding getting
our regenerative political-economic systems within a global governance of the commons paradigm right,
requires new thinking that makes the neoliberal liberal approach to economic and political systems
obsolete. This implications of creating a true regenerative political-economy will have fundamental
impacts upon the current economic supply chains. That is, displacing the prominence of corporations in
innovation, creative, and ecological commons stewardship roles from above while transitioning and
redirecting many of the independent contractors that have proliferated within the neoliberal
globalization model demands the succession of the political, economic, and civic enterprise ecology.

7. One particular sector that could be dramatically enhanced in a transition to a regenerative political
economic development model is the artisan mining of gemstones. The regional and global funds derived
from taxing degenerative extractive mining practices could be channeled into development programs
and regenerative enterprises within this sector. For example, corporations like De Beers are beginning
venture into the oceans to conduct extractive mining of precious stones such as diamonds. This calls into
question of what we culturally value and the importance we place on uplifting social exchanges and
environmental sustainability within our regenerative economic systems. The notion that profit
maximizing corporations ruthlessly scour the ocean floor with disregard for marine ecology is
unacceptable to us in a new regenerative era. Regional trade standards and taxes that target specific
corporations and countries that promote extractive practices.
These region to region trade standards requires the extension and harmonization of peer currency
accounting systems to match source with destination. Digital ledger technologies dramatically
enhancing the efficacy of “fair trade” type best practice in distilling environmental and social capital
value. Implementing peer currencies has the potential to revolutionize social and economic exchange
and forms the basis for more integral and meaningful regenerative global political-economy to emerge.
In 2018, The International Institute for Sustainable Development released a report that systematically
inventoried many cooperative artisan mining enterprises across the African continent to identify many
of the fundamental challenges that constrain empowerment for entrepreneurs in the sector. The lack of
access to finance, capacity for sophisticated geographic modeling, and access to markets that value
environmental and socially justice have challenged regenerative practices to emerge.

8. Redesigning our global commons governance approaches to land, ocean, and space mineral resource
exchanges provides the basis for recreating our regenerative political-economy from the ground up.
Building upon innovative global governance compacts and treatise on space and our oceans provides a
legislative connective tissue and petri dish to grow our regenerative culture for the benefit of all
humankind. Doing so, speaks to our common ancestral lineages that trace back to the birthplace of
humanity and flash forward to our common inter-planetary future. This hypermodern regenerative
political economic paradigm represents an evolutionary step forward to ensure the survival of our
species and continued evolution of life as we know it and what we co-create in our stellar journey.
Our revolution is speeding up. A virtuous circle that rounds the edges; polishing perfect stones. Let us be
crystal clear. We are not only redefining the political landscape we are redefining what we culturally
value within our global community. Rediscovering what is precious and beautiful about our planet and
about each other. Together we are reshaping our path forward. The fusion of certain rocks creates
chromatic qualities that imprint regenerative patterns upon the electromagnetic spectrum causing us to
see light in new ways. From the Congolese forest canopy, to the depths of the Pacific Ocean, to the
peaks of Olympus mounds our planetary family ventures further and further, faster and faster.