Deep underground in the bedrock of Manhattan lies the vault of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, home to 7 million kilograms of gold bullion owned by governments and banks from around the world.
There’s an inescapable irony in expending massive amounts of time, money and human energy, even lives, to extract this metal from the great depths of the earth only polish it up and then hide it underground again.
The depositors of the gold are the ultimate beneficiaries of a series of transactions that begin with a premise that resources located beneath a particular section of the earth’s surface automatically belong to the people who exercise control over that patch of the planet’s crust.
It should come as no surprise then, that from colonial times through to contemporary, the relationship between natural resources and warfare has always proven to be intimate.
As recently as April 2007, a Russian submarine provocatively planted a flag on the Artic shelf as part of an expedition to claim exclusive ownership over the region’s estimated 10 trillion tonnes of fuel reserves in accordance with the UN Convention on the Laws of the Sea. Tension over this claim is bound to heat up as the surface ice continues to melt, making exploitation of the region increasingly viable.
In an era characterised by a rapidly growing populations and diminishing natural resources, International Law 2.0 needs to be urgently developed.
The Earth is, quite obviously, one indivisible system and only a global framework of shared, equitable access to the planet’s natural resources, including fossil fuels and water, will achieve humanity’s sustainable occupation of the planet. Unless every single nation on the planet commits to a new, enforceable global resource and environmental protection framework, then every other nation’s future will be at risk.
Commentators that confine contemporary debate over the ownership of underground resources to private versus national ownership are trapped within the context of a very outdated paradigm.
It’s time that debate on inter-nationalisation of natural resources began.
