What it would take to run the island story with today’s tools — no robots, no new technology, and no claim larger than one community and two resources.

J.W. Sher

Companion to The Abdication. The story is the narrative prospectus; this is the engineering body. Everything below uses existing institutions — stock assessments, credit unions, registries, exchanges, tariff schedules — assembled in a combination that has never been run. The pilot’s purpose is to test exactly and only the combination.

What the world has already proven, and what it hasn’t

Every component of the island constitution has a real-world existence proof. New Zealand and Iceland have run capped, tradeable fishing shares for decades. Alaska has paid every resident a yearly share of its oil wealth since 1982, and it is the most politically durable program in the state. The Chesapeake nutrient markets clear same-watershed restoration against same-watershed damage. Irrigation districts meter and trade water by the acre-foot. The EU’s carbon border adjustment assesses imported goods for embedded content at the frontier.

What has never been run is the combination that carries Free Market Ecology’s distinctive content:

1. Shares to citizens, not quota to operators. The cap’s asset side distributed per capita as permanent, heritable property — the commons paying its owners — rather than grandfathered to incumbent harvesters as it was in every ITQ system.
2. Credit, not permits. Producers finance their draw by borrowing against collateral and repaying in kind, rather than owning allowances they can hoard and financialize.
3. The boundary rules. Sales outside the community clear at metered actual draw only; the exchange between rights and money is a two-sided market where every surrender is willing; markup is earned only from a buyer who willingly surrenders assets.

A pilot does not need to prove that caps work, that trading works, or that dividends are popular. The world proved those. It needs to prove the conversion — and the conversion is small enough to test in one community with two resources.

The three venue tiers

Tier 0 — a private community. A network-state village, an intentional community, a cooperative landholding. No government support required at all: the registry is a membership ledger, the caps are bylaws, the “dock” is every sale to a non-member. Cheapest to start, weakest as evidence, because exit is easy and the stakes are social rather than livelihood.

Tier 1 — a district or co-operative with a real resource. A single fishery management area, an irrigation district, a native or community corporation that already owns its resource. Requires bylaws plus, in most places, one enabling statute recognizing the share registry as property and the council’s caps as binding. This is the recommended tier: real livelihoods, real meters, existing legal personality, and a bounded membership.

Tier 2 — a small jurisdiction. An island territory or microstate that can run the full constitution under its own sovereignty. The story’s Mareva. Strongest evidence, hardest to arrange, and not necessary for the first test. (Note that even here, imports stay out of scope — a community keeps its own books and calls the rest even. The embodied damage in goods from off-system economies is written down nowhere: it is dissolved into the dollar price and scattered across millions of buyers in proportions nobody can reconstruct, and inventing estimates to charge requires an assessment apparatus whose overhead only continental-scale jurisdictions can carry, as the EU’s carbon border adjustment shows. No part of this pilot.)

Minimum viable scope

Two dimensions, no more. One renewable flow with an existing meter — a fishery with monitored landings, or an aquifer with metered draws — and optionally one land-class layer if the community controls land. Everything else stays in ordinary money, exactly as the bounded-set doctrine requires. Nonpoint dimensions (runoff, biodiversity, soil) are excluded by design: the pilot tests the mechanism, not the measurement frontier, and choosing metered dimensions is honest scoping rather than evasion.

The eight documents (most are one page):

1. The cap schedule. The sustainable draw per period, from the existing stock assessment or hydrology, set at the conservative end of the published error bars, with the revision rule stated: upward on evidence, downward only by the untested hardship clause (below).
2. The registry. Equal shares of each period’s cap issued to every member, permanent and heritable, recorded on a ledger the cap council cannot edit. Blockchain if outside verification matters (Tier 2 trade, skeptical funders); a notarized database run by an independent registrar otherwise. The registrar holds the keys and sits on no council — the Ana seat.
3. The credit facility. A credit union or community development bank lends draw-rights to producers against posted collateral (gear, vessels, equipment), repayment in kind plus interest. Collateral on default funds restoration or is sold for rights; it never substitutes for the repayment.
4. The exchange. A simple two-sided market: rights for money, continuous or weekly call auction. This is also the window: producers buy rights here to repay loans; members sell unspent shares here. Every transfer is a willing trade at an asked price.
5. The boundary clause. Goods sold outside the community owe settlement of the producer’s metered actual draw, nothing declared, nothing more — the no-markup-against-outsiders rule, adopted verbatim: a markup is earned only from a buyer who willingly surrenders assets, and a boundary is not a buyer.
6. The conversion terms. The named losers are the incumbent quota holders or senior rights holders, and they must be bought in, not expropriated: a declining glide of supplementary shares over a fixed term, or a money payment funded by the credit facility’s interest stream. This document is the political heart of the pilot and the one the Gradual Path essay says the literature has dodged.
7. The governance charter. Cap council seats carry no operating interest; the registrar is independent; cap revisions require published evidence and a public meeting; the hardship clause for a forced downward revision states in advance who absorbs the loss (pro-rata across shares, with outstanding loans written down in proportion — stated now, while it is hypothetical).
8. The metrics protocol (below), pre-registered so success cannot be redefined afterward.

What the pilot must measure

Stated as falsifiable hypotheses, because the audience that matters is the skeptical economist:

• H1 (market function): the credit-form market clears with bid-ask spreads and volumes comparable to the nearest ITQ benchmark. Falsified by: chronic illiquidity, cornering of a period’s rights, or trades collapsing to bilateral side deals off the registry.
• H2 (the UBI constituency): member support for the cap rises or holds as share values become tangible, and members report violations at higher rates than the regulator baseline. Falsified by: members voting to inflate the cap at the first price spike — the Weitzman stress test in the wild.
• H3 (the markup engine): producers’ asset-bills-per-unit-output disperse, the efficient gain margin, and at least one operator changes technique because the ledger made the difference visible. Falsified by: no dispersion, or margin tracking political connection rather than measured draw.
• H4 (the boundary): outside sales clear at metered draw with no inflation channel; the leak the story’s first draft contained stays closed. Falsified by: any minting of claims against members without a willing surrender.
• H5 (the books): stock-flow consistency — issued shares, borrowed rights, repayments, and the cap reconcile every period, published.

Eighteen to twenty-four months of operation is enough for a first read on H1, H3, H4, and H5. H2 needs one genuine scarcity event, which cannot be scheduled and should not be faked.

What this pilot deliberately does not test

The honesty list, stated up front: nonpoint measurement (excluded by dimension choice); cross-jurisdictional flows (one community, one watershed); the falling-cap clause (written, untested, and hopefully untouched); demographic dilution (new members dilute per-capita shares — the charter must pick admission terms, and the pilot will only observe, not resolve, the tension); and scale (nothing about three hundred members guarantees three hundred million — the pilot’s claim is feasibility and mechanism behavior, not scalability).

The strategic point

The Weitzman paper answers the field’s theoretical objection. The Dasgupta engagement situates the framework in the discipline’s accounting. The pilot is the third leg, and it is the only one that produces a fact: a community that converted, books that closed, a universal income that paid, and an efficient producer who got rich on the ledger’s testimony. One fact of that kind outweighs any quantity of prose — including the story this protocol is named after, and including this protocol.