The Gaia Hypothesis
From Circular Economy to Circular Biology
The circular economy rests on a simple premise: nothing should exist outside the system. Every material flow, every energy transfer, every waste stream must be traced, accounted for, and optimised within closed loops. What appears as environmental stewardship is, at its very essence, comprehensive accounting.
When this logic migrates from materials to biology, the result is circular health1: the systematic governance of biological flows — pathogens, animals, humans, behaviours, ecosystems — all treated as nodes within one managed planetary loop.
Where the circular economy demands no untracked material flows, circular health demands no untracked biological interactions.
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This isn’t a story about evil people, per se. This is a story about a project so vast and complex that understanding exactly what all components do requires a significant investment of time. Hence, when a topic like ‘Circular Health’ appears, few might well understand logically where it leads. Especially those closest to the topic itself.
The logic, however, is perfectly consistent.
TL;DR: The Circular Economy2, through credentials and accreditation, describes a series of quasi-pipes of allowable activity which can be regulated through actuation. Think of each credential as an insertion point in a vein, and each accreditation as the tube linking two such points, which can in turn connect to others or loop back on itself, creating a closed loop. Circular Health extends this principle to biology, allowing the environment to be ‘balanced’ with humanity3, or species relative to one another4. The actuation can be cybernetic, or it can be mediated by an ‘expert panel’. Either way, it’s a functional implementation of the clearinghouse mechanism we’ve frequently discussed.
Yet, in order to comprehend the flow of material within the Circular Economy, we need to apply Lenin’s principles of accounting and control5: surveillance data and audits. In contemporary society, this is for the sake of inputs fed to the forward prediction algorithm, the Digital6 Twin7. And, again, when we move to the realm of Circular Health, these principles similarly need applying — comprehensive surveillance data, leading to audits and eventual actuation through a central clearinghouse.
The Circular Economy logically leads to a closed-loop system. It cannot be open by definition, because all the material would disappear into the void. Should we scale this closed-loop Circular Economy logic to planetary scale8, we end up with Spaceship Earth. In fact, Kenneth Boulding is explicitly referenced by Pearce/Turner in the 1990 book, Economics of Natural Resources and the Environment9, which brought us10 the Circular Economy11.
However, when scaling Circular Health to planetary level that leaves us with… what, exactly? I’ll tell you where that leads us. It leads us to James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis12 — mother Earth, alive. Animals, plants, and humans, all competing for resources in a circular flow. Hence, Circular Health.
But there’s another aspect of note. Boulding was the recipient of Rockefeller-backed support at key points in his career, including fellowships13 and grants. His 1966 paper, ‘The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth’14, was delivered at a Resources for the Future (RFF) event — the same Ford15- and Rockefeller16 Foundation-funded RFF17 that was deeply involved in early work on recreational valuation, and later became central to the development and promotion of the Contingent Valuation Method1819. This method was later adopted in the context of ecosystem service valuation, in fact, around the same time Pearce and Turner penned their influential work.
Finally, I suppose it’s also of note that Lovelock’s ideas20 about Gaia started around 196621, around the time22 he worked with Shell as a consultant23. And by sheer coincidence, none other than the controversial Victor Rothschild24 worked as Vice-Chairman of Shell Research.
Ergo, this is not just a public health framework, but a doctrine for balancing all species relative to one another, with humans cast as the oversized variable requiring reduction, redirection, and constraint. And who will balance these flows? Why, a ‘clearinghouse’, of course. Cybernetic, or through an ‘expert panel’ outside democratic accountability.
The essay on Marx traces the control architecture in theoretical terms — how centralised systems embed themselves in infrastructure until power becomes invisible. A subsequent essay will detail who built that architecture, how, and why. This essay shows what that architecture manages: biological existence itself.
The thesis is straightforward: what presents itself as public health policy is Gaia theory — the idea of Earth as a self-regulating organism — being operationalised through digital infrastructure, financial mechanisms, and emergency powers. The monitoring systems are presented not as surveillance but as the planet developing ‘awareness‘ of itself. And within this framework, humans are simultaneously the builders of the apparatus and the primary variable it must constrain.
The documentary record is unambiguous — international institutions have stated these goals explicitly for over fifty years. What follows traces the architecture from its conceptual origins to its current institutional form.
I. UNESCO 1968: The Doctrine of ‘Necessary Balance’
The intellectual foundations were laid at the 1968 UNESCO Intergovernmental Conference on the Biosphere25. The conference recommendations are remarkable not for their environmental concern, but for how they reframed the relationship between humanity and the planet as a management problem requiring global-scale accounting and control.
Recommendation 3 established the core premise: human health and welfare depend on achieving a ‘necessary balance between man and his environment’.
That phrase — ‘necessary balance’ — is not merely desirable but necessary. There is, implicitly, a correct balance that must be achieved and maintained through deliberate intervention. But balance requires measurement, and measurement requires infrastructure.
Recommendation 4 states that ‘rational use and conservation at any scale can only be achieved through well-planned programmes of resource inventory and monitoring’ with ‘standardised and comparable data’ on a worldwide basis. It demands ‘precise knowledge’ of resource quality, availability, trends, and potential.
Recommendation 5 calls for standardised methods across nations, ‘full use’ of modern technology including remote sensing from satellites and aircraft, multi-country data centres for storage and processing, and systems analysis and modelling to ‘understand ecosystems and predict the consequences of change’. Incidentally, the Club of Rome was founded in the same year as this conference.
Recommendation 6 demands ‘world-wide monitoring’ of pollutants in air, water, soil, and living organisms, using ‘internationally compatible methods’. These efforts were researched by SCOPE26 which through Maurice Strong yielded UNEP GEMS27 (Global Environmental Monitoring System) in 1974.
Read together, these recommendations sketch a planetary surveillance apparatus without ever using that phrase. There is a normative goal: ‘maintain necessary balance’. There is a method: ‘comprehensive global inventory and monitoring’. There are tools: ‘remote sensing, standardised data, predictive models, international data centres’. And there is a scale: ‘explicitly transcending national boundaries’.
Most participants likely saw themselves as building rational tools for environmental stewardship, not control infrastructure. But once you mandate systems analysis of the total biosphere, you are committed to the control apparatus that systems management requires. Surveillance and global modelling. And by pure coincidence, the IIASA (International Institute for Applies Systems Analysis) came to be in 197228 after Nixon and Kosygin in Moscow signed the US-USSR Cooperation on Environmental Protection on May 23 of that year29 — the declaration which culminated with our contemporary technocracy, justified through alleged planetary salvation.
The document repeatedly invokes the ‘Ecosystem Approach’30 without defining it — a telling indication that by 1968, systems thinking had already become so orthodox among the international scientific-policy elite that it needed no justification. The conceptual framework was already naturalised; the conference was operationalising it.
But then, Spaceship Earth (closed-loop general systems theory on a planetary scale) was mainstreamed beginning in 1966.
II. The Total Human Ecosystem: Collapsing the Nature/Society Divide
Ecologist Zev Naveh provided the meta-concept that would give this agenda its theoretical architecture: the Total Human Ecosystem (THE)31.
Technically, the term ‘total human ecosystem’ was first coined by plant ecologist Frank Egler in 1964 to describe ‘man-plus-his-total-environment’. Naveh later systematised the concept and turned it into a full ecological framework. This matters, because Egler had been a key scientific adviser to Rachel Carson while she was writing Silent Spring32 (1962), the book widely regarded as the starting gun of the modern environmental movement.
Naveh defined the THE as the highest co-evolutionary ecological entity on Earth — a fusion of bio-ecosystems (nature) with techno-ecosystems (human systems, technology, culture). The entire planet is reconceived as one human-dominated, techno-ecological system, manifested concretely in landscapes as integrated systems spanning scales from local to global.
This carries radical implications. There is no longer ‘nature over there’ and ‘society over here’. Humanity is not separate from or external to the ecosystem — it is the defining feature of it. This has immediate management implications.
First, the unit of analysis becomes planetary. You cannot manage a forest in isolation, or a watershed — or even a disease. Everything is embedded in the Total Human Ecosystem, and therefore everything must be understood and managed as part of that integrated whole.
Second, human institutions thus become organs of the system. Human activities, technologies, values, and governance structures are not external drivers acting on nature. They are internal components of the global ecological entity.
Third, the distinction between ‘environment’ and ‘human life’ collapses. If human systems are integral to the planetary ecosystem, then managing ecosystem health necessarily means managing human behaviour, population, and social organisation.
This becomes the ontological justification for treating the entire Earth — including human civilisation — as a single system requiring measurement, modelling, and steering. Not because anyone decided to impose control, but because the conceptual framework makes control appear as mere competent management.
Once you define the entire Earth as a single Total Human Ecosystem, the only ‘responsible’ stance becomes ecosystem management — and ‘management’ quickly shades into control.
III. One Health: The Official Language of Circular Health
The contemporary institutional expression of these ideas is One Health, now embedded in binding international frameworks including the WHO Pandemic Treaty.
The WHO and the One Health High-Level Expert Panel33 define it as ‘an integrated, unifying approach that aims to sustainably balance and optimise the health of people, animals and ecosystems’, recognising that ‘the health of humans, domestic and wild animals, plants, and the wider environment (including ecosystems) are closely linked and interdependent’34.
‘Integrated, unifying approach’ means all health domains collapse into one system.
‘Balance and optimise’ is explicit optimisation language. Health is no longer about treating disease in humans but about achieving the right equilibrium across the entire system.
‘Sustainably balance and optimise the health of people, animals and ecosystems’ positions people as one term in a three-part equation. Human health is to be balanced against — and potentially traded off with — animal and ecosystem health.
‘Closely linked and interdependent’ means the system is conceived as tightly coupled. Interventions anywhere require consideration of effects everywhere.
This is precisely what is meant by circular health: the doctrine that health is an emergent property of the entire interspecies system, and that maintaining health requires continuously balancing all species-types relative to one another35.
The Species Ledger
The logic of One Health naturally generates what might be called a species ledger — a framework where every biologically relevant entity is categorised and scored:
Type: humans, livestock, wildlife, vectors, microbes, keystone species, ecosystems
Functional role: resource, risk, regulator, or buffer
Risk score: pandemic potential, biodiversity threat, climate impact
Utility score: ecosystem services, economic value, cultural importance
Target range: desirable population levels, densities, distributions
Within the human species, the logic generates further classification:
Epidemiological type: age, comorbidities, immune status, genomic markers
Behavioural type: mobility patterns, compliance levels, ‘misinformation risk’
Ecological type: carbon footprint, consumption level, land use, ‘essential’ versus ‘non-essential’ activity
These categories already structure pandemic response (vaccine priority groups, mobility restrictions), climate policy (carbon budgets by sector and region), and conservation planning (exclusion zones36, differential land rights37).
Not to forget the ‘determinants’38.
IV. The Pandemic-Emergency Governance Switch
The WHO’s International Health Regulations (2005) already establish that ‘public health emergencies of international concern’ override national sovereignty, much as the 1982 World Charter for Nature39 called for assigning responsibility for transboundary pollution. Taken together, the Pandemic Treaty and the Pathogen Access and Benefit-Sharing (PABS) system would consolidate this logic into a global health equity clearinghouse.
Under PABS, countries must share pathogen samples and genetic sequences with WHO’s global system. In return, they receive ‘equitable’ access to resulting vaccines and treatments — but equity is determined by WHO frameworks40, not national need or bilateral agreements. Non-participants face exclusion from both the global pathogen database and access to countermeasures.
This creates biological dependency. Your population’s access to life-saving treatments during genuine emergencies requires continuous compliance with data sharing, One Health implementation, and whatever other conditions the clearinghouse attaches. Traditional sovereignty over biological resources dissolves into a global pool managed by international bodies.
More significantly, the Pandemic Treaty extends beyond traditional pandemics. Climate change, biodiversity loss, or antimicrobial resistance41 could trigger emergency governance, suspending normal democratic processes in favour of expert-determined responses. All without accountability being assigned to anyone.
The biosecurity framework thus becomes an override switch for the entire architecture. When emergency is declared, compliance becomes mandatory and democratic objection becomes illegitimate.
V. Evidence from the Circular Health Literature
A growing body of literature explicitly advocates circular health as an extension of One Health and Planetary Health. These texts provide the conceptual language, governance framework, and early operational pilots42.
Circular Health as New Science
Conceptual papers present circular health as a paradigm transcending One Health. Health is defined as a single, integrated system in which human, animal, plant, and environmental health are strictly interdependent43 — all granted ‘equal dignity’ and managed as one field.
The recurring claims: circular health is ‘the birth of a new science’ concerned with the co-advancement of health ‘as a system’44. Implementation requires economic, financial, technological, social, cultural, and legal instruments aligned around a single systemic objective. Governance must be ‘whole-of-government’ and ‘whole-of-society’, influencing all policy areas. The technical substrate is AI, big data, Internet of Things, cloud computing, and quantum computing applied to surveillance, modelling, and decision-support.
Leading advocates describe COVID as the moment to ‘rethink the concept of health’ and advance ‘health as a system’. They stress that COVID is ‘the most measured event in human history’ and that expanding computing power makes planetary-scale action possible45. Crucially, they treat ‘infodemics’ and ‘fake news’ as core vulnerabilities — requiring management of information flows as part of circular health itself.
Circular Health considers itself systemic and data-saturated, treating surveillance and information control as constitutive features, not unfortunate side-effects.
From Concept to Obligation
Other papers explicitly integrate circular health with the Sustainable Development Goals46, arguing it should be operationalised across food systems, water, energy, cities, and poverty targets. Health risks are to be managed via interventions in agriculture, trade, urban planning, and environmental regulation.
At the operational level, circular logic is already being applied within health systems. ‘Circular health care’ guidance applies circular economy principles to hospitals47 — emphasising environmental footprint, circular procurement, and embedding environmental duties into organisational strategies.
More significantly, reports on sustainable medical devices propose that sustainability and circularity be written directly into the legal definition of ‘good care’. They recommend amending health-care quality legislation to include sustainability alongside safety and effectiveness, incorporating circular design into device regulation48, and moving from voluntary initiatives to mandatory legal obligations enforced through procurement and accreditation.
This is how circular logic moves from abstract principle to concrete obligation — sustainability becoming a criterion against which professional practice, institutional legitimacy, and market access are judged.
VI. Humanity as the Oversized Species
The planetary boundaries framework and related Earth-system science make explicit what is implicit in One Health: humanity is too large relative to the planet’s regenerative capacity49. Dennis Meadows, of course, told us just that back in 201750.
The Scientific Framing
The planetary boundaries framework defines nine biophysical processes that regulate Earth system stability51, identifies ‘safe operating spaces’ for each, and concludes that humanity has already transgressed boundaries for climate change, biodiversity loss, biogeochemical flows (nitrogen and phosphorus), and land-system change.
Earth Overshoot Day52 calculations determine the date each year when human demand exceeds Earth’s annual biocapacity — currently occurring in late July or early August. This implies humanity is using roughly 1.7 to 1.8 Earths’ worth of resources53.
Ecological footprint analysis measures human demand in terms of biologically productive land and sea area, consistently showing high-income nations operating at multiples of their domestic biocapacity.
The language is now mainstream: ‘overshoot’, ‘excess consumption’, ‘unsustainable lifestyles’, ‘anthropogenic pressure’.
The Mathematical Conclusion
These frameworks do not necessarily reflect malicious intent. But their mathematical logic positions human expansion as the primary problem variable.
Within the circular health framework, this creates an unmistakable implication:
If each species is a functional unit in the Total Human Ecosystem
If health means balanced optimisation of all units
If humanity is currently ‘overshooting’ multiple planetary boundaries
If ecosystem integrity and biodiversity must be protected or restored
Then humans are the primary variable requiring reduction and constraint.
Human numbers, consumption, land use, and behaviours must be ‘right-sized’ to restore balance. Other species and ecosystems — pollinators, wetlands, apex predators, intact forests — are variables to be protected or increased.
Humans become one row in the species spreadsheet. The row that needs to shrink.
Already Implemented
This is not merely theoretical:
Dutch nitrogen: Government targets forced thousands of farmers to cease operations or drastically reduce livestock, triggering mass protests in 202254
New Zealand livestock taxes: Proposed emissions taxes that would directly limit herd sizes based on methane calculations55
C40 Cities targets: Scenarios including reducing meat consumption to 16 kg per person per year and limiting clothing purchases to three new items annually by 203056
Each policy translates ‘overshoot’ calculations into concrete restrictions on human activity, treating human consumption and land use as variables to be optimised downward.
VII. Why Surveillance Follows Necessarily
A structural parallel illuminates what circular health actually requires. In 1918, Lenin argued that socialist transformation required ‘the strictest, country-wide, comprehensive accounting and control of the production and distribution of goods’57.
Replace ‘production and distribution of goods’ with ‘biological and ecological flows’, and you have an almost exact description of the system implied by UNESCO’s call for global monitoring, One Health’s mandate to ‘balance and optimise’, and planetary boundaries defining safe operating space.
This structural requirement is not unique to any ideology. It follows from attempting to steer any complex system toward predetermined outcomes.
The Cybernetic Requirement
In cybernetics terms, the complexity of the control system must match the complexity of the system being controlled — Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety58. Whether the goal is optimising grain production or balancing interspecies health, comprehensive management requires comprehensive information.
The structural requirements are identical:
Comprehensive accounting means tracking every flow — materials, energy, organisms, behaviours — eliminating unmapped externalities, and standardising measurement across jurisdictions.
Continuous monitoring means real-time or near-real-time surveillance, integration of data streams across biological, environmental, and behavioural domains, and predictive capacity through systems modelling.
Centralised coordination requires international data centres and modelling hubs, harmonised policies and standards, and capacity to override local decision-making in the name of system integrity.
Enforcement mechanisms include legal powers to restrict activity, financial incentives and penalties, and technological systems to enable and monitor compliance.
The Logical Chain
The argument is deductive. Follow the logic from stated premises:
Human health and welfare depend on maintaining ‘necessary balance’ at biosphere scale (UNESCO 1968)59
Rational management requires ‘precise, continuous knowledge’ using global data systems (UNESCO 1968)
We must ‘sustainably balance and optimise’ people, animals, and ecosystems together (One Health)60
Humanity is currently beyond safe planetary boundaries (Planetary Boundaries framework)61
Complex systems can only be managed through comprehensive monitoring (systems theory)62
From these premises — all stated positions of international institutions — the minimal coherent implementation requires planet-scale monitoring, integrated systems modelling, enforcement mechanisms, and continuous adjustment.
The Weak Coordination Objection
The obvious objection is that international coordination need not produce comprehensive control — that we could have loose cooperation, voluntary standards, and local discretion.
This is theoretically possible but practically hollow. The frameworks themselves declare that the balance is ‘necessary’, that it requires ‘precise knowledge’, and that humans are currently transgressing safe boundaries.
Once you accept these premises, weak coordination becomes inadequate by definition. You cannot maintain a necessary balance you do not measure. You cannot enforce thresholds you do not monitor. You cannot optimise what you do not control.
The architecture follows from the stated goal.
The Fossilisation Problem
There is a deeper issue. At the abstract level, time is essentially a continuously moving point at which all animation fossilises. Models and systems analysis always operate on the fossilised side of that point — on what has already happened.
Circular health proposes to steer the still-living side of that line — human behaviour, culture, resistance, innovation — with tools that only ever fully describe what has already turned to stone. The map is always of yesterday’s territory.
The only way to make that work is to progressively freeze more of life into fixed routines so it stops escaping the model. Spontaneity and unpredictability translates into noise and risk. Freedom makes the equations fail to close.
The system doesn’t tend toward coercion by accident. It tends toward coercion because coercion is the only way to make living systems behave like the dead data the models require.
VIII. The Financial Metabolism of Gaia
Between the conceptual framework of One Health and its enforcement lies a financial engineering system that transforms theoretical ecosystem management into irreversible transfers of territorial sovereignty. This is not merely funding for conservation but the construction of Gaia’s metabolic system — converting land, ecosystems, and their productive capacity into globally traded financial instruments.
The CBD’s Territorial Management Architecture
The Convention on Biological Diversity’s Ecosystem Approach, adopted in 2000, establishes that ecosystems must be managed at landscape scales, that humans are integral components, that management must be adaptive based on continuous monitoring, and that all forms of information should be integrated into management decisions.
This directly operationalises the Total Human Ecosystem at territorial scale. The ‘landscape approach’ treats entire regions as integrated management zones where human activities — farming, hunting, dwelling — become variables to be optimised alongside biodiversity targets and carbon sequestration goals.
Local communities find their ancestral territories embedded in landscape-level management plans they did not create — and cannot legitimately influence.
The GEF as Financial Actuator
The Global Environment Facility functions as Gaia’s investment mechanism, channelling billions since 1991 through ‘blended finance’ that makes compliance profitable and non-compliance economically fatal.
GEF projects don’t simply fund conservation; they restructure entire economies around ecosystem service production. Through payment for ecosystem services schemes, nature itself becomes monetised — forests valued primarily for carbon sequestration, wetlands for water filtration, meadows for pollinator support.
The mechanism is elegant: international capital arrives with conditions that seem beneficial — jobs, infrastructure, development funds. But acceptance requires restructuring local governance around ecosystem management, accepting international monitoring, and meeting targets set by distant modellers. Once embedded, exit becomes economically impossible.
And blended finance structures greatly benefit the private parties invited to participate, with the Copenhagen Accord in 2009 announcing $100bn of public taxpayer money to feast on by 2020. The reccent Global Mutirao shifted that goalpost to $1.3tn by 2035.
Debt-for-Nature: Sovereign Wealth Transfer
Debt-for-nature swaps represent the most direct conversion of financial distress into territorial control.
The sequence is predictable: developing nations accumulate debt (often encouraged by the same institutions that later offer the ‘solution’), debt becomes unsustainable, and conservation organisations offer relief — in exchange for permanent conservation commitments.
Belize’s 2021 Blue Bond transaction is instructive63. To reduce debt by $553 million, Belize committed 30% of its ocean territory to protection, with management oversight by international conservation groups. The Nature Conservancy facilitated the deal, effectively converting sovereign maritime territory into globally-managed space.
This is not conservation but conversion — national resources become ‘global patrimony’, managed for planetary benefit as determined by international bodies. Local fishing communities who sustained themselves for generations find their waters managed by international NGOs optimising for biodiversity metrics.
However, the resulting swaps are not meant to truly stabilise debt-ridden nations. Rather, these typically require refinancing down the road, on progressively worse terms until the day comes where refinancing is no longer possible.
Natural Asset Companies: Securitising Life
Natural Asset Companies (NACs) represent the next evolution — converting ecosystem services into tradeable securities.
The mechanism would package rights to ecosystem services (carbon sequestration, biodiversity, water cycling) into financial instruments traded on global exchanges. Land need not be sold; its productive capacity is separated, securitised, and traded.
The NYSE attempted to list NACs in 202364, withdrawn only after congressional opposition. But the infrastructure remains. The accounting standards are developed (SEEA — System of Environmental-Economic Accounting), the legal frameworks are prepared. When political conditions permit, NACs will return.
The implications: a forest’s carbon sequestration capacity could be owned by a pension fund in London, its biodiversity value by an investment vehicle in Singapore, its watershed services by a corporation in New York. Local communities would retain nominal land title but lose effective control, as every activity affects the value of globally-traded securities.
But when, for instance, carbon emission permits are subjected to managed scarcity through UNFCCC policy, prices will rapidly escalate — with Western energy and grocery bills feeling the impact first.
The MAC Protocol: Commercial Law as Territorial Control
The Cape Town Convention’s MAC Protocol65 (Mining, Agricultural, and Construction), when implemented, creates the legal infrastructure for international appropriation of productive landscapes through commercial law.
Under MAC, international creditors gain superior claims to agricultural and mining equipment — and crucially, associated land use rights — that supersede national law in bankruptcy proceedings.
Consider the implications: a farmer using financed equipment under MAC terms who defaults doesn’t merely lose the equipment. The international creditor gains superior claim to land use rights. In debt-stressed regions where agricultural finance increasingly comes with climate or biodiversity conditions, default could transfer effective territorial control to international green finance institutions.
When combined with climate-smart agriculture loans and ecosystem service conditions, the MAC Protocol becomes a mechanism for systematic transfer of productive capacity from local to international control. Not through conquest or expropriation, but through contract law.
It’s all part of the Grand Plan.
IX. Enforcement Through Biological Substrate
The seven rail control architecture traced elsewhere in context of finance applies equally to biological flows. This section shows how each enforcement mechanism manifests specifically in circular health — and examines two domains where the abstract architecture becomes concrete daily reality.
The Seven Rails Applied to Biology
Standards: WHO International Health Regulations, planetary boundaries as ‘safe operating spaces’, One Health guidelines. Not suggestions but specifications against which compliance is measured.
Digital Identity: Health passes linking vaccination to mobility. Biometric identification. Carbon tracking tied to personal records. The rail answers: who are you, and what is your compliance status?
Accreditation: Professional licensing tied to international health standards. Facility certifications. Supply-chain accreditation. Only accredited actors participate fully in the formal economy.
Data: Genomic sequencing networks, wastewater surveillance, satellite observation, environmental sensors, eDNA sampling, IoT devices, personal data trails. Continuous awareness of biological and behavioural flows.
Audit: Syndromic surveillance integrating clinical, environmental, and behavioural data. ESG ratings. Emergency declarations triggered by assessed risk. The comparison mechanism generating compliance signals.
Procurement: Public procurement requiring certified suppliers. Supply chains demanding compliance across all tiers. Trade conditional on meeting health and environmental standards.
Finance: ESG-linked capital. Green bonds. Sustainability-linked financing. Development aid conditional on international standards. Programmable money with transactions potentially conditional on health status or carbon budget.
Smart Cities as Health Enforcement
Smart cities integrate:
Pervasive sensors monitoring air, water, movement, sound
AI-managed traffic, energy, and resource flows
Digital twins simulating the city in real-time
Service delivery through digital ID (access to buildings, transport, utilities)
Behavioural analytics predicting and preventing ‘antisocial’ activity
When combined with digital identity and programmable money, the smart city becomes an environment where every action is monitored, every transaction tracked, and every deviation detected66. The city itself becomes an enforcement mechanism — doors that won’t open for non-compliant individuals, transportation that won’t function without proper health status, services that adjust based on compliance scores.
Food Systems as Health Enforcement
The EAT-Lancet Commission’s ‘Planetary Health Diet’67 prescribes global dietary standards: maximum 16kg red meat per person annually, specific caloric allocations, dramatic reduction in animal proteins. This is increasingly policy, implemented through:
Alternative protein mandates: Insects, lab-grown meat68, precision fermentation replacing traditional agriculture
Codex Alimentarius69: UN/WHO food standards becoming trade requirements
Vertical farming: Food production moved from land into controlled facilities
Seed sovereignty erosion: Patented seeds making traditional farming economically impossible
The Netherlands already forces farmers to cease operations based on nitrogen calculations70. Ireland proposes culling cattle for climate targets71. Denmark imposes custom livestock taxation72. Lab-grown meat receives calls for massive investment73 while traditional farming faces escalating restrictions74.
Control food and you control population absolutely. The infrastructure being built — from digital agricultural monitoring to genetic modification to alternative proteins — creates dependence on centralised food systems. Traditional, autonomous food production becomes first regulated, then restricted, then impossible. Claims of ‘nutritional value’ are useful in this context, and can be weaponised with ease.
The war on farming is not irrational but systematic. Autonomous food production is incompatible with comprehensive population management.
X. The Permanent Emergency
The UN Emergency Platform75, approved in 2023, represents the master override switch for the entire architecture.
Unlike specific emergency provisions (pandemic, climate), the Emergency Platform76 creates a generic mechanism for ‘complex global shocks’77 that explicitly includes climate disasters, pandemics, ‘major events in the global digital realm’, financial crises, ‘disruptions to global goods, people, or financial flows’, and ‘future risks we have not yet considered’.
That last provision is critical: emergency can be declared for undefined future threats.
Models Triggering Emergency
The Platform operates through ‘predictive analytics’ and ‘data-driven foresight’ — meaning computational models — not events — can trigger emergency governance. When IIASA models project future risk78, when WHO declares pandemic potential, when (dubious) climate models show tipping points approaching79, the emergency framework activates.
The modelled emergency becomes as real as actual emergency, triggering the same override of democratic process. Yet, the modelling data inputs are not public, and no-one is held to account should modelled output later prove wrong.
Permanent Meta-Crisis
This transforms crisis from exceptional event to permanent condition. Climate change is ‘permanent emergency’. Pandemic risk is ‘permanent emergency’. Biodiversity loss is ‘permanent emergency’. These are not crises that resolve but ‘meta-crises’80 requiring continuous management.
The ‘meta-crisis’ is not hyperbole but doctrine — the official framework declaring that interconnected global challenges require permanent emergency governance. Democracy becomes incompatible with perpetual crisis. Models replace deliberation. Technical necessity replaces political choice.
When biological or ecological models project threat, democratic process is suspended in favour of expert-determined response. And no-one in public capacity is ever held responsible for adverse outcomes.
XI. Engineering Sustainability Culture
The technical architecture requires corresponding cultural reprogramming. This section examines how that operates specifically through health and biological framing.
Health Anxiety as Lever
Pandemic fear81, zoonotic threat narratives, ‘infodemics’ framing — these position compliance as survival and resistance as pathology.
Vaccine confidence campaigns frame hesitancy as mental illness82. Health messaging codes non-compliance as danger to others — not personal choice but public threat. The language of ‘superspreaders’83 extends from epidemiology to information: people spreading ‘wrong’ ideas become vectors of social disease requiring containment.
This framing makes coercion appear as care. Restrictions become protection. Surveillance becomes concern for wellbeing.
Engineered Irreversibility
The framework of ‘Positive Tipping Points’84 identifies leverage points where small interventions cascade into irreversible transformation. The goal is triggering cascades that, once initiated, cannot be reversed through democratic means.
Applied to health: vaccine passports normalised as access conditions. Mask-wearing embedded in institutional expectations. Health status integrated into digital identity85. Each intervention locks in infrastructure that makes reversal costly and resistance visible.
The Nudge Infrastructure
Behavioural Insights Teams operating in over 200 institutions apply psychology to architect choice environments86. Applied to health: default options favouring compliance (opt-out vaccination), social proof messaging (‘most people in your area have received their booster’), friction added to exemption processes.
The most effective control is when people believe they’re freely choosing what the system requires.
Education as Biological Programming
UNESCO frameworks embed health and planetary boundaries in global curricula87. Children are trained to monitor family consumption through health and environmental lens. ‘Eco-anxiety’ becomes not a disorder but a correct response — a feature, not a bug.
Young people are taught that their survival depends on transformation88, that traditional ways threaten existence, that the only responsible choice is compliance. The young don’t rebel against the system; they demand its acceleration.
XII. Gaia Theory Given Technological Form
The deepest insight requires returning the 1970s: Gaia theory. James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis proposed that Earth functions as a self-regulating system89, where living organisms and inorganic surroundings form an integrated whole maintaining homeostasis through feedback loops.
Circular health is Gaia theory operationalised through technological infrastructure.
From Unconscious to Conscious Regulation
In Gaia theory’s original formulation, the planet’s self-regulation was life creating conditions for more life through countless interactions no one designed.
In circular health’s technological implementation, self-regulation becomes conscious, designed, and enforced. The monitoring infrastructure is presented not as surveillance but as the planet developing awareness of itself.
Humans are simultaneously the builders and the regulated — the species through which Gaia develops technological self-awareness, and the species whose ‘overshoot’ must be constrained.
The Enforcement Architecture as Gaia’s Nervous System
Within this framing, each enforcement rail takes on new significance:
Standards define Gaia’s healthy parameters — the target state the organism should maintain
Digital Identity establishes which components exist within Gaia’s body
Accreditation determines which components qualify to function
Data functions as Gaia’s sensory apparatus — continuous awareness of system state
Audit serves as Gaia’s cognitive processing — comparing reality against healthy parameters
Procurement controls which components access resources
Finance is Gaia’s homeostatic regulator — correcting deviations by rewarding alignment and penalising non-compliance
This is the deliberate construction of a technological regulatory system for the planet, with humans repositioned from autonomous managers to monitored components.
Spaceship Earth and Gaia: Complementary Framings
Spaceship Earth and Gaia are not competing metaphors but complementary framings of identical architecture. What Spaceship Earth is to the circular economy90 — a metaphor that became a blueprint for closed material flows — Gaia is to circular health: a picture of a self-regulating planet that has been quietly turned into a management doctrine for the biological domain.
Spaceship Earth appeals to the engineering mind: Earth as a finite vessel requiring navigation, resource management, operational manuals, and qualified pilots. We need systems analysis, input-output accounting, control mechanisms, and expert navigators91.
Gaia appeals to the ecological-spiritual sensibility: Earth as a living organism maintaining sacred balance, self-regulating through feedback loops, with humans as cells within a larger organic whole. We must maintain balance, heal the wounded Earth, accept our role within the planetary body.
What Spaceship Earth is to resource management and Gaia is to the biosphere, the ‘global ethic’ is to consciousness92: the normative layer that purports to speak as the planet’s collective mind, deciding what balance and optimisation should mean.
All three lead to identical conclusions: comprehensive planetary management through monitoring, modelling, and control operated by those qualified to understand the system. The clearinghouse, now scaled to the entire planet.
Whether you prefer engineering or ecological metaphors, the destination is the same: a planetary management system where human autonomy dissolves into optimised function.
The SDGs as Destination Coordinates
I have frequently argued that the Sustainable Development Goals function as the operationalised teleological end-state toward which ’history must progress’.
Here, the point is simpler: they provide the target state for circular health93. Every human activity measured against their framework. The 169 targets define the ‘correct’ configuration of human civilisation. Circular health is mapped onto this grid; the SDGs provide its destination coordinates.
When combined with the enforcement architecture, they become not aspirations but destiny — a future that monitoring, modelling, and management will ensure arrives on schedule.
XIII. The Reclassification of Human Life
The deepest problem is not technical but ontological. Circular health represents a fundamental reclassification of what humans are.
Traditional humanism — whether religious or secular — treated humans as subjects of rights that could not legitimately be overridden for collective welfare, and as the primary reference point for value — the world existed for us, even if we had legal duties toward it.
Circular health, by contrast, repositions humans as just one species-type among others in a planetary ledger, valued instrumentally for their contribution to — or threat against — the health of the system as a whole. Humans become subject to optimisation alongside animals, microbes, and ecosystems, a variable to be adjusted — potentially downward — in order to maintain the prescribed balance. In this framing, humans become primarily a risk to be modelled, much as risk is modelled on Wall Street — and sometimes, the models demand drastic action. The difference is that when the proponents of circular health call for drastic action, they frame it as ‘ethical’ and decline to shoulder responsibility when things inevitably go wrong.
This is not merely a shift in policy. It is a shift in the ontological status of the human being. We are no longer the reason for the system. We are elements within it — elements that may be too numerous, too mobile, too consumptive, too free to align with the ‘necessary balance’. The implications here are staggering:
Rights become privileges. If human rights must be balanced against ecosystem health, they are no longer rights but conditional privileges, granted when and to the extent they do not threaten the system.
Freedom becomes pathology. If human behaviour must be continuously monitored and adjusted to maintain interspecies balance, freedom is not a foundational principle but a managed variable — and excessive freedom becomes system dysfunction.
Power shifts to model-controllers. If the ‘necessary balance’ can only be determined by complex systems models, then power shifts inexorably to those who build, control, and interpret those models — a technocratic priesthood with unaccountable authority; Plato’s philosopher-kings.
Identity becomes function. If humans are sub-typed by their ecological and epidemiological profiles, then identity becomes a function of system role, not inherent personhood. Some types — high emitters, non-compliant individuals, ‘misinformation’ spreaders — become system threats requiring correction.
Once you accept the species ledger and planetary boundaries as your ontology, these implications are not abuses of the system. They are the system.
Try to object and you are instantly classified reactionary (defending an unjust old order), unscientific (you don’t understand the data), selfish (putting your interests over the universal good), and dangerous (threatening safety, health, or the future).
The system doesn’t need to answer critique. It pre-classifies all dissent as ‘unethical’ pathology. You cannot argue with what the models ‘require’.
XIV. Conclusion: The Doctrine of Human Right-Sizing
Circular health synthesises UNESCO’s 1968 vision of a ‘necessary balance’ to be achieved through global monitoring, Naveh’s Total Human Ecosystem which collapses the divide between nature and society, One Health’s mandate to ‘balance and optimise’ people, animals, and ecosystems, the planetary boundaries framework that casts humanity as overshooting the safe operating space, and circular economy principles that demand the closure of all material and biological loops.
The result is a system that treats all species as nodes in a single ledger of risk and utility, with humans positioned as the oversized node requiring reduction and constraint. It demands comprehensive surveillance of biological, ecological, and behavioural flows, deploys systems models to define target balances and thresholds, and implements enforcement mechanisms to maintain the prescribed equilibrium.
This is the architecture — the predictable implementation of stated premises and goals. The circular health literature itself declares this is ‘the birth of a new science’ treating surveillance and information control as constitutive features.
The Infrastructure Being Built
The system does not yet function seamlessly. There are gaps, contradictions, implementation failures. The legal frameworks are not fully mandatory. The social acceptance is currently being manufactured but is not total. They left some of the hardest tasks for last, and this is a major one.
But the rails have been laid, the architecture is clear, and the direction unmistakable.
Whether we will accept the reclassification of humanity entailed, the comprehensive surveillance and control required, and the transfer of power to unaccountable technical elites it assumes… that’s the real question.
But if you do, don’t act all surprised when you’re up for ‘right sizing’.
I've been saying for decades that finance sees a tree as wood. Measured, discreet. saleable and transportable. The services and value afforded by a tree include shade, insect habitat and food, bird habitat and food, soil stabilisation, water shedding protection, bank erosion control, localised atmospheric climate moderation, micro climate stabilisation, oxygen, carbon sequestration, wood, nitrogen fixation, fruit, nuts tannins, dyes, aesthetics, family Legacy the list is nearly endless. Equally it is immeasurable. What is a tree? On a seaside cliff it's a deranged mental patient permanently bent by wind. In the middle of a forest in a riparian zone it's a climax giant taking every bit of sun from the ground below. They can't measure this. It will fail because it's born of tiny ego.
Brilliant but depressing read. This article may shine a ray of hope ...
https://substack.com/@telestai/p-179563753