The summer of 2025 is a time of turmoil and tension. While just 22% of the U.S. population voted to give Donald Trump a second chance at the office of President, his administration is rapidly moving to remake American governance and reshape American communities, with few clear legal foundations for its actions. Even the Supreme Court, in removing blocks on potentially unlawful actions of government, admits that those actions might be unlawful and causing serious injustice to millions of people.
Meanwhile, the industrial disruption of Earth’s climate system continues to worsen. Catastrophic storms and floods are taking lives on every continent. Public budgets are being strained, as institutions struggle to deal with proliferating risks, unprecedented costs, and political pressure to reduce spending.
Threats to international peace and security are spreading, as threats to local safety, security, and stability are deepening. In much of the world, we see routine reporting—both formal and informal, sourced and based on conversation and inference—that trust is declining all around. Trust in institutions is failing; trust in how our respective societies organize to solve big problems is failing; conservative interests are losing faith in modernity, and technocratic thinkers are losing trust in traditional wisdom.
The foundation of legitimate authority is the will and the demonstrated ability to prioritize the basic humanity of all people, and to protect the vulnerable. So long as public authorities support impunity, pollution will get worse, climate conditions will become more unstable and perilous, and people will migrate in larger and larger numbers.
One of the great injustices of industrial-scale pollution is the fact that everyday individual actions contribute to the overall crisis, but individuals are helpless to stop pollution at scale. Pollution is built structurally into the ways in which we solve everyday problems. This is true for climate pollution and also for plastic pollution and other toxic pollutants that contaminate air and water supplies. It is estimated that plastic pollution in the ocean may exceed biomass, by weight, by 2050. As biomass collapses, all other forms of ecological and climate breakdown become more likely.
In the dynamics of that injustice, we may find the answer to this existential challenge. All people have a right to know whether they are making everyday choices that make this planetary crisis—which affects all life on Earth—worse, or whether they are helping to improve our chances of surviving in a dignified and liberated way.
Actionable insight is the missing piece of a decentralized just transition strategy. If all people are able to access reliable information about the impact of their decisions on planetary health, human security, and sustainable prosperity, then those that lead in developing the best practices can out-compete rivals in the marketplace of everyday economic activity. Public incentives can more easily be shaped to support better outcomes and reduce harm, cost, and injustice, while competitive enterprise drives innovation, with benefits to human health and wellbeing, and to natural systems.
There is no good reason for abusive or destructive practices to exist, let alone to be the mainstream norm. We need to know what we are doing, and make better decisions. This is the idea behind the Active Value Trust Ratings system (Activv.net).
We all have big work to do. Soon, we will be better equipped to get it right.
