Sublime

We need exponentially less of the degenerative forms of capitalism and exponentially more of the increasingly resilient and regenerative forms.

Jared Diamond, in The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?

Our money derives its value from the right to harvest 300,000 tons of cod from the Newfoundland cod fishery, the right to draw 30 million gallons of water monthly from the Ogallala Aquifer, the right to emit 10 billion tons of CO2, the right to pump 2 billion barrels of oil from the ground, the use of the X-microhertz band of the electromagnetic

There is little room in any highly developed economy for further domestic growth. The solution for at least twenty years has been, in effect, to import growth from developing countries by using the monetization of their social and natural commons to prop up our own debt pyramid. This can take several forms: debt slavery, where a nation is forced to

A more holistic way of thinking about growth is to recognise that it is broadly equivalent to the rate at which our economy is metabolising the living world.

But there are far more serious issues here than merely trying to protect some treasured object, some particular ritual or a preferred corner of social life from the monetary calculus and the short-term contract. For at the heart of liberal and neoliberal theory lies the necessity of constructing coherent markets for land, labour, and money, and

Bacon actively sought to destroy the idea of a living world, and to replace it with a new ethic that not only sanctioned but celebrated the exploitation of nature. To this end, he took the ancient theory of nature-as-female and transformed her from a nurturing mother into what he called a ‘common harlot’. He cast nature, and indeed matter itself,