rights of nature - TOWARDS LIFE-KNOWLEDGE

Humanity is facing not multiple crises but a single, systemic disorder: the global breakdown of coherence across biological, ecological, social, economic, and informational systems. Climate destabilization, chronic disease, biodiversity collapse, digital manipulation, democratic erosion, and intergenerational injustice all stem from the same underlying architecture — a civilization built on extraction, fragmentation, and short-termism.

This book introduces the Coherence Operating System (Coherence OS), a new governance paradigm shaped by the science of complex systems, developmental biology, systems ecology, social neuroscience, Indigenous worldviews, and the mathematics of relational patterns. Coherence OS redefines governance around four conditions for flourishing: viable bodies, viable communities, viable ecosystems, and viable futures.

The book offers technical and philosophical foundations; a comprehensive policy and legal blueprint; a replacement for Investor–State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) through the Life Tribunal; a metrics architecture for cumulative and intergenerational harm; digital and biotech governance frameworks; economic and financial redesign; and a Caribbean SIDS implementation playbook demonstrating how small nations can lead global transformation.

The Coherence OS reveals that life has always operated by relational grammar — patterns of resonance, reciprocity, and regeneration across scales. When governance aligns with those patterns, societies flourish. When it diverges, collapse accelerates. This work charts a pathway toward a life-coherent civilization rooted in truth, responsibility, and the interdependence of all beings.

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.