La Bourse  /  Volume VII

Volume VII of VII

Planetary and Cosmic

This volume asks what the largest frame is, and the honest answer is that the largest frame is already a financial document.

A glass house with an observatory dome on a mountainside at dusk, its windows lit.
Volume VII11 chapters, each with its whole teaching unit, and 3 extensions: one for the practitioner, one for the corporation, one for the translation between them.

The chapters

A woman wrapped in a cream shawl standing on a balcony above a forested valley, mist lying in the folds of the hills.
Plate VII.01The Statement and the Weather.A balance sheet is a claim about a world. The claim is only as good as the audit, and the audit is out of the window.

Nº VII.01

Planetary Boundaries as a Balance Sheet

This volume asks what the largest frame is, and the honest answer is that the largest frame is already a financial document.

A timber room with a low fire and floor cushions, a wall of glass framing snow-capped mountains.
Plate VII.02The Thermometer on the Balance Sheet.Climate economics is not the study of a catastrophe. It is the study of a quantity that has a physical unit and no price, and of what happens to a balance sheet when somebody finally writes one in.

Nº VII.02

Climate as an Economic System

You have almost certainly been handed a number for a tonne of carbon dioxide, and you have almost certainly been handed a different one by somebody else the same month.

A watercolour of hills in bands of gold, rust and green, wildflowers in the foreground.
Plate VII.03The Strip Through the Middle.The forest at the edge of the farm was worth two hectares of coffee for every hectare of itself. The same trees, cut into strips and put through the middle, could have been worth eight. Nobody moved them, because nobody had computed the multiplier.

Nº VII.03

Biodiversity as Infrastructure

There is a version of this chapter that asks you to care about biodiversity, and it is not this one.

A woman on a veranda holding a cup of tea, a book open beside her, a lotus garden and pavilion beyond.
Plate VII.04The Certificate and the Box.Two great commons, one atmosphere and one ocean, and only one of them has ever been governed successfully. The difference was never the size of the thing. It was whether the rule could be tested on an object that had to pass through somebody's hands.

Nº VII.04

The Ocean and Atmospheric Commons

There are exactly two resources on this planet that belong to everyone and to no one: the air above the weather and the water beyond the two-hundred-mile line.

A watercolour of rolling farmland, the soil shifting from ochre to green across the hills.
Plate VII.05Where the Soil Changes Colour.A bioregion is not an idea about belonging. It is a boundary you can kneel down and touch, and the whole question is whether you can also put it on a balance sheet.

Nº VII.05

Bioregional Economics

Somebody has handed you a map with a line on it that does not match any line in your accounts, and told you that the line is the real one.

A woman seated against a tree by a misted lake, writing in a book, tall pines around her.
Plate VII.06The Gauge at the Narrows.Everything that fell on all of that has to come past her hand, or go up as vapour, or still be in the ground. There is no fourth option. That is the whole reason this is an accounting boundary and a nation is not.

Nº VII.06

Watershed as the Unit of Account

You have probably been handed a sustainability report with a water number in it, and you have probably noticed that you could not check it.

A woman seated on the forest floor writing in a notebook, sun breaking through the trees behind her.
Plate VII.07The Fish Wheel and the Clipboard.An economy is not proved by what it is thought to believe. It is proved by what it counts, who signs the count, and what the count is allowed to decide.

Nº VII.07

Indigenous Economic Wisdom, Sourced

This chapter has one rule and it governs every sentence in it.

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Plate VII.08The Marker Field.These are not headstones. They are a message to somebody ten thousand years from now, written in geometry because no language is expected to survive. Somebody costed them, approved them and signed for them — which means somebody put a number on the year twelve thousand.

Nº VII.08

The Long View and the Discount Rate

Chapter III.05 took the discount rate apart: the three Ramsey terms, which two of them are ethics rather than measurement, and the published declining schedules that three finance ministries already stand behind.

A watercolour of a young woman with an open book, flowers and leaves around her.
Plate VII.09The Weight of the Bottle.The bottle holds one kilogram. On this bench it is worth a tenth of a penny. Four hundred kilometres above her head, the same kilogram is worth three thousand and fifty-nine dollars — and nothing about the water has changed.

Nº VII.09

Space, Materials, and Real Abundance

You have been told, more than once, that space will solve the materials question.

An observatory dome on a lodge at dusk, its windows lit, red cloud over the mountains.
Plate VII.10The Aperture, Facing Up.Nobody took the heat away. The tray simply had an unobstructed view of something very cold and very far off, and that was enough.

Nº VII.10

The Cosmological Frame

This chapter is the largest frame in the edition and it is the one to hold most carefully, because the largest frame is where a book of this kind usually goes soft.

Four people talking together by a tall window, the low sun behind them.
Plate VII.11The Handing Over.An inheritance is not a gift. It is a working stock, handed over mid-job, by somebody who has to let go of the handle before the other person has taken the weight.

Nº VII.11

What We Owe the Next Thing

This is the seventy-seventh chapter and the last one.

The extensions

Three chapters that make the volume usable by practitioners of Luminous Economics and by people inside corporations alike — because they are not different economies, only different vocabularies.

A watercolour of a head in profile filled with trees and flowers, a small figure walking toward a river beside it.
Plate VII.E1The Map With Three Boundaries On It.The largest frame in this edition arrives on one table as three lines on a map, and the whole of the practitioner's work is knowing which line answers which question.

Nº VII.E1 · extension

For the Practitioner of Luminous Economics

You have just read eleven chapters about the planet, and the honest question you are holding is not whether they are true.

A man in a white shirt seated against a tree trunk, reading a blue book, sunlight on the water behind him.
Plate VII.E2The Appendix Nobody Reads.Every number that decided anything today was chosen by somebody, once, and written down in a place the meeting did not reach. She has gone back for it.

Nº VII.E2 · extension

For the Corporation

A board can approve four things at planetary scale: a disclosure, a measurement, a covenant, and a consequence.

An observatory dome above a glass house on a hillside, the sun setting over the ridge.
Plate VII.E3The Last Column.Seven translations, made separately, by people working on different materials. The rows they share are interesting. The three blanks they share are the finding.

Nº VII.E3 · extension

The Translation — One Economy, Two Vocabularies

There are two vocabularies in the room and by now everybody knows it.