intergenerational equity - TOWARDS LIFE-KNOWLEDGE

This Charter advances a unified scientific and governance framework founded on intrinsic health, defined as the latent, integrated regulatory capacity of living systems to adapt, recover, and sustain function across time. Building on recent advances in integrative biology — particularly the intrinsic health construct formalized by Cohen et al. (2025) — the Charter establishes intrinsic health as a scale-invariant law of living systems, governing viability from cellular metabolism to planetary civilization.

The work demonstrates that contemporary patterns of disease, ecological breakdown, economic instability, climate vulnerability, and social fragmentation are not discrete crises, but coordinate expressions of a single systemic failure: the progressive erosion of intrinsic health under chronic regulatory overload and suppressed recovery. Modern development strategies, centered on output growth and GDP maximization, are shown to systematically violate biological recovery constraints, producing rising multimorbidity, intergenerational vulnerability, climate-amplified disaster losses, and accelerating biological debt.

The Charter reframes health as the operating system of civilization, not a sector, and redefines development as the durable expansion of adaptive capacity without depletion of regenerative reserve. It proposes a comprehensive transformation of governance structured around national and regional Intrinsic Health Systems, mandatory Intrinsic Health Impact Assessments, recovery-centered public finance, intergenerational reserve accounting, and the elevation of intrinsic health to a protected public trust and justiciable legal right.

A fully operational policy toolkit is specified, including recovery-time indices, life-course stress exposure mapping, intergenerational intrinsic health ledgers, and community recovery capacity audits. The Caribbean is presented as a frontline global pilot region for intrinsic health governance under converging climate, economic, and social stress. The Charter further proposes a Global Intrinsic Health Order anchored in principles of cross-border non-degradation, restitution for historically imposed biological damage, and intergenerational fiduciary protection.

The central conclusion is direct: civilizational survivability in the 21st century depends not on rates of growth, but on the preservation of intrinsic health across organisms, societies, ecosystems, and generations.

This white paper argues that contemporary civilization is structurally predicated on incoherent jurisprudence. While legal systems have achieved remarkable procedural refinement and transnational integration, they remain substantively misaligned with the universal conditions of life. Across history, law has stabilized exchange, property, and sovereignty, yet has consistently subordinated ecological integrity, intergenerational equity, and communal responsibility.

By tracing jurisprudence from Mesopotamian codes through Roman law, medieval religious orders, Enlightenment codification, post-war human rights frameworks, and the globalization era, this paper identifies five recurring patterns of incoherence: (1) property primacy over life primacy, (2) sovereignty without stewardship, (3) proceduralism over purpose, (4) coloniality of law, and (5) commodification of meaning.

The paper proposes a re-grounding of jurisprudence in life-coherent principles: the life-value axiom, holarchic responsibility, planetary boundaries as justiciable limits, and intergenerational equity. It outlines pathways for institutional redesign — including constitutional reform, trade and finance restructuring, corporate re-chartering, and legal pluralism — and develops doctrinal tools such as substantive coherence tests, ecocide liability, restorative remedies, and algorithmic due process.

This work concludes with a call to the legal profession to reclaim its role as custodian of coherence. By embedding life-value as the first principle of law, jurisprudence can transform from stabilizer of systemic contradictions into the architecture of civilizational renewal.