Questions of value are political, containing arguments about how the Earth should be valued and distributed in the present, and what the future can be. They are human questions.

Owning a herd necessarily came with habits of mind. Thus, the market’s way of understanding time as linear and driven by short-term material increase crept—unevenly, with deviations and adaptations—over the tundra. The Soviets were, by contrast, without artifice. Where capitalism required individuals to work their way out of material injustice

An ecosystem is the aggregate of many species’ habits of transformation, their ways of moving energy from its origin in the sun across space and condensing it over time. To be alive is to take a place in a chain of conversions.

In selling the self to kill the selves of whales, work became a thing divisible by units of trade and time, measured out in bags of sugar or rounds of ammunition.

But making time a commodity did not make for self-sufficiency or even, with severe depressions in the 1870s and 1890s, basic stability.

You live here by never boasting about the number of animals that died, and by giving meat to people without any. You live here by not offending the beings that make your life possible. You live here because other lives give themselves to you. To articulate the act of consumption, of taking energy this way, is not romantic. It is a political

Capitalism does not require that every space and every person make equal profits; it requires enough dependency on its products to ensure growth, the aggregate total of consumption.

From this perspective, capitalism and socialism are not laws of history that separate the human from the nonhuman; they are ideas about time and value that shape particular relationships with the basic matter of existence, matter that has its own influence over human ambition.

Missionaries believed their message of earthly increase and heavenly salvation would inevitably replace such empty performing: after all, to its believers, Christian industriousness seemed universally true and transparently desirable. Who did not want more goods and more good life after death?