Chapter Four
“Harmonious Biodiversity” — the Jurisprudence for Life, proven by 3.7 Billion Years of Life Thriving on Earth
(This chapter was first published on Medium on 6/29/26 at https://medium.com/@t.higginson/harmonious-biodiversity-a-jurisprudence-for-life-757f15c94325)
I. The Need for a New Jurisprudence
All jurisprudence used by human societies have failed in their core purpose: to provide justice and fairness across all peoples in human societies. Worse, the jurisprudence has played a pivotal role in the acceleration of climate change, endangering much of the life on earth, including the systems that support human civilization.
The scientific data points to global catastrophic failure as the earth itself becomes incapable of supporting life for literally billions of humans, other animals and vegetation, on land and in the water. According to the overwhelming consensus of scientists worldwide based on decades of rigorous application of the scientific method, climate change has passed the tipping point on the majority of the most critical measures and will pass the others shortly, putting earth on a trajectory that is projected to lead to the wholesale dismantling of civilization as we know it in the next 20–50 years.
The dire warnings have moved from the scientific community into the actuarial community: https://actuaries.org.uk/media-release/current-climate-policies-risk-catastrophic-societal-and-economic-impacts/
A new jurisprudence is urgently to help change the equation, to provide the legal bedrock required if life on earth is to survive and human civilizations to exist, let alone flourish.
II. The New Jurisprudence is Staring Us in the Face
This new jurisprudence, that is staring us in the face, has proven itself immeasurably successful over literally billions of years of evolution of life on earth.
The means to translate billions of years of evolution into a robust jurisprudence relies on the concept of “inalienable obligations.” These obligations underly evolution. They are the basis on which life has evolved on earth, and are inherent in everything on earth, animate and inanimate. Earlier chapters describe these inalienable obligations.
The new jurisprudence, designed from these “inalienable obligations” scientific first principles, is called “harmonious biodiversity” for reasons explained below and in the earlier chapters.
In other words, jurisprudence does not have to be the jurisprudence that has helped put us in this catastrophic scenario: human-centric, non-scientific, amorphous, slippery and manipulable by those who control the levers of society. There is a clear, focused and immediately applicable, proven (science-based) jurisprudence at our fingertips.
The choice is ours to adopt this new jurisprudence of harmonious biodiversity, to take the fork in the road towards a healthy, flourishing planet earth, instead of the fork we are on that leads directly to the collapse of the earth’s biosphere from which and on which human civilizations arose and depend for their very existence.
We have very little time to make this choice.
III. What is Jurisprudence?
A standard definition of jurisprudence can be summed up in the following excerpt:
“The word jurisprudence derives from the Latin term juris prudentia, which means “the study, knowledge, or science of law.” In the United States, jurisprudence commonly means the philosophy of law…”[1] For more context on the scope and meaning of jurisprudence, see the links in this footnote.[2]
Traditionally a jurisprudence would be designed to provide judges an analysis framework for adjudicating any type of case to arrive at outcomes that build a just and fair human society (at least you would think those would be two baseline criteria). The underlying jurisprudence and its principles would also guide legislators and regulators, essentially any and all parts of government, including politicians, in the crafting of the laws and regulations governing society. Laws and regulations would be drafted, approved, updated and repealed taking into account the underlying jurisprudence. Altogether, a jurisprudence should give the general public trust that the system works for them.
Achieving “justice” and “fairness” are root criteria, but have not necessarily been the sole or even determining criteria for what a jurisprudence is designed to achieve, even if they are background concepts. Other criteria may include economic and property ownership preferences. These may, for instance, drive the drafting and enforcement of corporate and personal tax codes, environmental protections and antitrust laws, among other contexts, that have direct impact on the “fairness” of the system in real terms. In fact, concepts of property ownership may be the driving force for a set of rights that form the core of the jurisprudence.
In terms of the symbol of the scales of justice, those baselines for a jurisprudence could mean that judicial decisions create, promote and sustain a system, that while from time-time-time may meet selected ideals, actually operates primarily as a means to (a) permit harmful bias towards a class of people or a minority of voters (even choosing who gets a vote and how effective the exercise of a right to vote is in practice), (b) favor one industry and a one or more religions over individuals or groups, whether political, caste, race, gender, ethnicity and/or other characteristics, (c) favor certain ideologies and non-scientific theories over others, (d) reflect the worst of the historical circumstances of the polity, and (e) only peripherally take into account the health of the earth, including its biospheres.
As should be evident from that partial list, what a jurisprudence protects and on what basis is fraught with deep divisions and disagreements, and generally reflects the priorities and perceptions of the powerful, frequently with the powerful of decades or centuries ago (which, among other problems, means a near total lack of robust science underlying the jurisprudence) determining most of the structure of the jurisprudence.
Regardless of the background, justification and other details of any current jurisprudence and whether or not they are currently perceived by the general public as working, all major jurisprudential systems are fatally flawed. The fundamental reason is that all of them, at their core, take not just a human-first approach to the design of the jurisprudence, but actually derive from and prioritize a human-only approach. In doing so, all these methodologies, and the resulting jurisprudences have failed in both principle and practice to achieve a long-term healthy earth.
IV. What is the Absolute Minimum a Jurisprudence Must Achieve?
Since a long-term healthy earth is a pre-requisite for the existence of human societies, the current set of what is used as jurisprudence have utterly failed to meet this baseline metric. There is essentially nothing to point to that suggests fine-tuning them to the needs and preferences of individual human societies and polities will do anything except continue us on the current climate trajectory.
In the past, human-centric design as the basis for jurisprudence could overlooked (and the argument about the long arc of justice[3] could be a basis for hope rather than the Orwellian phrase that seems a more accurate description[4]) because humans were not capable of destroying the planet as a life-supporting biosphere. That stopped being the case years ago. Humans are destroying the earth as a life-supporting system.
However, even if climate change was not on a course to end human civilization as we know it, current jurisprudence has failed to provide even basic justice and fairness for most humans around the globe, as described in other chapters.
V. The End of Human-Centric Jurisprudence, and the Opportunity to Choose a Science-based (3.7 Billion Years of Validation) Jurisprudence
There’s not much point to a human-centric jurisprudence if human civilizations are reduced to ashes, famine and widespread (billions) of deaths. Based on the overwhelming consensus of scientists, our worldwide life-supporting biosphere is at or has passed a tipping point, and its ability to support life will catastrophically decline going forward, with 2030 to 2100 an era of human and non-human massive die-offs.[5] The non-human die-offs are already well along, as evidenced by the silence descending in the oceans, lands and air of the earth.
From a jurisprudential design and priority perspective, any jurisprudence that favors humans over other creatures, of any kind, and whether animate or inanimate, individually or as a group (and whatever scientific category they may be assigned to by prior and current science), is not capable of meeting the most basic needs of a jurisprudence going forward because maintaining biodiversity and a globally healthy ecosystem are imperative to maintaining human civilization.
Examples of human-based, non-scientific legal standards/jurisprudence include: so-called “rights”-based systems, law and economics (and its closely affiliated standard of cost benefit analysis), and original intent. None of these are remotely capable of maintaining a healthy earth for future generations of humans, as evidenced by the state of the earth today and the scientific consensus (99% of peer reviewed articles[6]) derived from the rigorous application of the scientific method based on many decades of collected data sets.
VI. How Harmonious Biodiversity Achieves the Goals of a Jurisprudence for Future Generations
The only way survival (and the higher goals for a jurisprudence) have a chance is under a jurisprudence whose core foundational principle is the health of the entire biosphere, including each and every local ecosystem.
In other words, a jurisprudence must take an animist approach. It must not be human-centric or designed around a human-first metric. It must be science-based (which excludes, for instance, economics, whether capitalist, communist or otherwise, except perhaps in specific contexts and at all times subject to science-based first principles).
A jurisprudence of “Harmonious Biodiversity” offers a jurisprudence (and, consequently, a legal standard) that meets the criteria described above, and avoids the failed principles and methodologies used in prior jurisprudence.
A jurisprudence of harmonious biodiversity:
(1) is not human-centric
(2) is science based
(3) has been successfully vetted over the roughly 3.7 billion years of life on earth, and
(4) provides a robust, clear and predictable analytic framework for judges, policymakers, legislation, regulation, businesses, human rights and more.
(1) Not Human Centric
Harmonious biodiversity prioritizes the health of the entire earth, from the macro all the way to hyper-local ecosystems on land, below land, at sea, on the sea floor, in and around waterways, etc.
Natural biodiversity is the linchpin to a healthy earth for humans. In contrast, a lack of interwoven biodiversity runs counter to any healthy ecosystem, whether it is inbreeding of a population of creatures (including humans) all the way to the degradation and eventual loss of entire species.
Biodiversity is achieved naturally by everything (animate and inanimate) in a system dynamically working in harmony. Harmony does not mean there are no conflicts, but that the conflicts are contained and limited to what achieves on-going biodiversity across all parts of the system. Harmonious biodiversity is the natural order of life on earth. (Hobbes’ theories are based on absolutely zero science, and the same is true for essentially all underlying philosophies on which at least all Western legal systems are based.)
(2) and (3) Science-based/tested over 3–4 billion years of thriving earth
Harmonious biodiversity has been tested and proven from the first signs of life on earth around 3.7 billion years ago through to the present. Human societies initially lived within that overall framework, even if inside small human groupings their own human-centric religious and legal frameworks arose.
Starting with the industrial revolution, and accelerating ever since, human-centric legal systems have become the ruling paradigm across everything on earth, to the point where they have overwhelmed and are systematically destroying biodiversity everywhere on an accelerating basis, and will destroy all human civilization in the next 50 to 100 years, with a reasonable likelihood of the loss in the next 2 decades of millions if not billions of lives, and the certainty of the loss of the majority of ecosystems that support human life.
There are of course some movements and a bit of progress under human-centric jurisprudence to contain the local and global damage (and provide some minimal set of “human” rights to some non-human actors on earth), but the achievements of these efforts represent a drop in the bucket compared to the speed and size of the tsunami of destructiveness enabled by human-centric jurisprudence.
(4) Robust and predictable analytic framework
Harmonious biodiversity provides a rigorous, secular and clear north star for all of the following, which, together, arguably are the core of what is needed in a jurisprudence:
(a) Legislation, regulation and policy: analyze and draft according to the scientific principles underlying harmonious biodiversity
(b) Business: draft commercial laws and regulations to prioritize harmonious biodiversity, which has created a fair and competitive playing field for a few billion years
(c) Fairness and Justice: protect the aspects of humans and all creatures that vest them with the benefits of a full and flourishing existence
(d) A robust and predictable science-based analytic framework
The touchstone litmus test that the jurisprudence of harmonious biodiversity provides as guidance to the judicial, legislative and executive branches of government, the adminstrative agencies and the general public is whether a court decision, a policy, a law/code/regulation creates a playing field that optimizes for evolutionary biodiversity at all levels (local to global) and all timeframes (short, medium and long). This creates a science-based analysis that takes precedence over other considerations.
VII. Relation of Harmonious Biodiversity to Inalienable Obligations
Jurisprudence has deep roots in the underlying organizational and aspirational principles of polities, frequently determined by those in power at the time of the founding and/or key disruptive moments of a polity.
The jurisprudence of harmonious biodiversity distinguishes itself from these on a fundamental basis because its roots do not derive from moments of conflict among humans and the aftermath controlled by the winning group of humans, and their ideologies, religions and pseudo/partial-sciences, such as economics.
In particular, the jurisprudence of harmonious biodiversity is not based on the Orwellian concept of “human rights.”
Instead, the jurisprudence of harmonious biodiversity derives from the framework that has created and maintained healthy, evolving life on earth for billions of years: inalienable obligations.
For more context and a deeper explication and analysis of inalienable obligations (and the reason for calling “human rights” and “inalienable rights” Orwellian), see Chapters 1, 2 and 3.
VIII. Relation of Harmonious Biodiversity to a Theory of Time
A new theory of time posits that everything (all creatures, animate and inanimate) are literally made of time. Based on that, they all have “inalienable obligations” to time, and, hence, to each other. In other words, the origin and development of “inalienable obligations” (and harmonious biodiversity as the solution to the utter failure of human-centric jurisprudence) started from the concept of a common, shared core of time.
For more on this new theory of how time works, see Chapter 6.
However, inalienable obligations and harmonious biodiversity are not reliant on a scientific proof of this new theory of time. They stand independently; their roots in my preceding thought experiments on time and other matters are provided only for the curious who are interesting in tracing the line of thinking back to some of its roots.
Notes
[1] This link includes a longer description and links to various forms/legal theories of jurisprudence: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/jurisprudence
[2] Here is a link to Wikipedia on Jurisprudence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jurisprudence. Here is a link to Posner’s book on Jurisprudence: https://www.blinkist.com/en/books/problems-of-jurisprudence-en. Here is an interesting essay on the 75 year trajectory (through 2013) of the first year mandatory course Elements of Law at the University of Chicago Law School; https://www.law.uchicago.edu/news/elements-75. You’ll see in any of these that there is very little to no acknowledgement of any responsibility to consider a healthy planet except perhaps indirectly, let alone to make that the cornerstone, the bedrock design principle, of jurisprudence, and, yet, without a healthy planet it is essentially a certainty that other principles (justice, fairness, allocation of responsibility, etc) will fail.
[3] https://legalclarity.org/the-arc-of-justice-is-long-who-said-it-and-what-it-means/
[5] Here is a NASA link https://science.nasa.gov/climate-change/effects/
[6] https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2021/10/more-999-studies-agree-humans-caused-climate-change