|
If we keep the current formula for calculating representation for the U.S. Senate and Congress as presently conceived we have a starting point of 100 senators and 435 congressional representatives. To add bio-representation that covers the rest of the living community that human life is sustained by we need a means of calculating the number of seats that we would have to add to represent them. In the following table of representatives I have taken the biomass of the constituent parts of the food chain, based on Silver Springs Florida river ecosystem data collected by Howard T. Odum, and calculated the number of seats that would be necessary to provide equivalent biomass representation for these non-vioced constituencies.
Producers are primarily plants that convert the energy of the sun into organic molecules that form the base of the food chain. A smaller portion of the producers produce organic molecules from chemical reaction that does not require sunlight as a primary energy source. Primary consumers are the next plateau of the pyramid and they are the plant eating life forms, herbivores. Secondary consumers are the carnivores that eat primary consumers. An example of this type of creature is a frog that eats an insect that is an herbivore. Tertiary consumers are carnivores that eat other carnivores. These creatures are necessarily fewer in number than the smaller carnivores they eat and are the terminal consumers in a food chain. | Biomass Bio-Democracy Pyramid | Biomass | # Seats | | Human Consumers Senate Seats | 1.5 | 100 | Human Consumers Congressional Seats
| 1.5 | 435 | | Secondary Consumers Senate Seats | 11 | 733 | | Secondary Consumers Congressional Seats | 11 | 3,190 | Primary Consumers Senate Seats
| 37 | 2,467 | Primary Consumers Congressional Seats
| 37 | 10,730 | | Producers Senate Seats | 809 | 53,933 | | Producers Congress Seats | 809 | 234,610 |
It would be impractical to elect the large numbers of representatives required for full bio-representation. A more practical approach from the human systems and decision making perspective would be to create an equivalent number of seats in the congress and the senate for the three added groups. These representatives would carry the weight of their proportional biomass in votes that could be cast by each representative.
Another practical adjustment to the system would be to apportion voting privileges for the biomass constituent representatives to the policy issues that affect the constituencies. Legislative issues concerning some topics like education could be considered exclusively human because it resides exclusively in the human social sphere of influence. Energy policy, land use, transportation, agriculture etc would effect bio-constituencies outside the human because they involve the production and use of extra-biological power and those constituencies would be given full legislative rights in direct proportion to the degree of effect on the bio-constituency.
|
Political System