Last year I went looking for an ethicist and couldn't find a peer. What I found instead might be a discipline.
I’m starting to appreciate how much of Savimbo’s work falls under a single word: ethics.
The endless ball of awesome chaos
This came from the big Savimbo cosmic soup. Which is three years of rapid growth — and currently 8M hectares of semi-public ecosystem protection at the equator.
As a result we’ve been pulled into so many negotiations, rights conversations, allocations of limited resources, and cross-cultural translations that the pattern is impossible to ignore. Our network now reaches about 400 Indigenous leaders, in 45 countries, across 100 Indigenous nations — friends, not members in the classical sense. It extends into Afro-descendant and tribal organizations, and into smallfarming communities.
It’s an endless ball of awesome chaos that powers the whole organization — charity arm and business arm both — from a protected space within. Or maybe it’s an interconnected web. I don’t really know.
We don’t define it much. It kind of defies logical explanation.
The nearest Gringos
Because we’re often the nearest Gringos, and because we run a “community concierge” hotline anywhere we work, a lot of cases find their way to us: human rights cases, geopolitical conflicts, territorial disputes, negotiations that are — frankly — somewhat extreme. Including the hardest ones, the emerging-technology cases, where new tools meet traditional cultures in ways that are sometimes profoundly good, sometimes profoundly harmful, and sometimes simply undetermined.
Last month, I hit my saturation limit on the decisions I could make alone. Some are bicultural. Some are steeped in uncertainty. So I reached out to close friends looking for an ethicist — a peer.
I didn’t find one.
There are medical ethics, international-development ethics, military ethics. There are Indigenous elders. There are emerging-technology and science ethics, legal ethics, animal and Nature ethics, and plain old “my-neighbor-is-a-jerk” ethics (big fan of Kwame Appiah, Jonathan Kimmelman and A Course in Miracles). But there is no clear practice discipline at the intersection of all of them — especially not when everything is moving this fast, and a single misstep can land on an entire population or ecosystem.
We need planetary ethics. I wish there were a better word for it.
What is planetary ethics
I went looking and the term exists, it turns out — but only in the academy, as a theory of what we owe the Earth. Not as a practice. Not as who you call at 2am.
Here is the definition I keep returning to: ethics is making decisions from a position of power, under uncertainty. And the ethics of inaction are another level entirely. Most people default to inaction. “I can’t help” — or “I refuse to perceive that I could help, so it’s someone else’s problem, or no one’s” — is a common response to the cases we handle. But that refusal is itself a choice. So is standing there and making the call.
That’s what Savimbo does differently, if you’ve ever wondered why. Ethics. The hard, accountable, responsible judgment call — made now, with the best intercultural wisdom we can scrabble together, at the right moment, when it actually matters. It is really not easy to be the one standing there.
I have a serious advantage in that I was explicitly trained on anthropology, ethics, and consent as a doctor. I often call on that training, which many biologists, ecologists, and business people trying to work with grassroots populations in a position of power imbalance don’t get formally trained on.
But I couldn’t do it without a serious core of Indigenous and industrial domain-specific advisors who answer my midnight calls, form pop-up panels, and help us think through this in real time. We try to make our results public. But this deserves far more attention than it’s getting.
We need planetary ethics.