 In conventional environmental discourse there's a concept you'll come across quite often called green growth or sustainable development that says basically we can leave our fundamental economic system intact. We can have economic growth but do it in a way that takes care of the environment as well, that is ecological as well. Now I think in the long term it's pretty clear that this is that sustainable growth is an oxymoron. In nature nothing just grows and grows and grows. Things move in cycles, not in linear growth patterns or exponential growth patterns. Exponential growth is part of a larger cycle that usually includes some kind of a collapse. So I question the concept of sustainable development especially when what development means is converting land, converting ecosystems, converting places, converting subsistence peasant agriculture into production sites to feed the global commodity economy, to feed global markets. That's what development means. When the World Bank offers a development loan to Venezuela or Ecuador or Colombia it's to build some kind of infrastructure, roads, ports, power generation facilities that allow that country to join the global economy. That's what development is. You participate in what is really the conversion of the world into products. So if that's what we mean by development then sustainable development is an oxymoron just as green growth. The idea that growth can be ecological and persist forever is an oxymoron. This oxymoron though, this isn't just like some dumb idea, it's actually necessitated by the kind of economic system, the kind of money system actually that we have today that only works in the presence of growth. And that is essentially because money is created through lending at interest and in order for the debts that are generated through the lending of money to be repaid to avoid mass bankruptcies and layoffs and economic depression, more and more money needs to be created. There has to be, this is going to be a lot here. It's better to read about this but I'll just kind of breeze through it. There needs to be continual lending opportunities, continual investment opportunities and we can see that when economic growth stagnates that unemployment rises, that the concentration of wealth intensifies and the system basically stops working, which is why governments left right and center all agree that economic growth is crucial to solving our problems. We have a growth addicted system. To change that, we, and I'll just say that that is fundamentally unecological. We have to fight against a growth dependent system in order to keep rainforests, to keep fish, to keep pristine places out of the development machine. There's an internal imperative to find more and more and more to grow into, to feed economic growth. And I think that as long as that economic system remains intact, environmentalists are always going to be facing a losing battle. They're always going to be swimming against the tide of money. And we can see this play out all over the world. For example, Ecuador, which has lots of oil reserves, undeveloped oil. And the president of Ecuador, Evo Morales, he was like, hey, we don't want to develop this. Is that the right president? It sounds like Bolivia and Ecuador mixed up. They both, they both had very ecologically savvy presidents. Anyway, the president basically made the world an offer. He said, you know, we are willing to leave the oil in the ground, to not develop it, to keep our forests intact. If the world will give us just half of what we could make by drilling and exporting the oil, we'll swallow the other half, but at least compensate us for not drilling this oil. And there were no takers. So Bolivia, I mean Ecuador, went ahead. And right now there are Chinese oil companies that are developing oil fields in Ecuador. And it's not that they're greedy for that money. They are in the same boat as most countries on earth. They have to generate foreign exchange. They are in debt to the global financial system. It is hypocritical to tell a country like Bolivia, or Ecuador, or Brazil, or pretty much any country on earth to tell them, keep your forests intact, keep the oil in the ground. Don't develop your pristine natural resources, but keep the money coming. Keep servicing those debts. And the only way you can do that is by strip mining and cutting and drilling. But don't do that, but keep paying us. And that, that is essentially the situation in some sense that we're all in. All of us under pressure to make money in a system where money making is rooted in the conversion of nature into products. That's where the good jobs are. That's where the high paying jobs are, generally speaking. It's something that is going to contribute to the functioning of the economy as we know it. Where that takes me is we need a different financial system, a different economic system. And many people do name capitalism as the culprit in our world destroying trajectory. And that's a loaded word, capitalism. And it brings up the specter of its foil, socialism, or communism. But I think that this is again one of these polarizing debates that leaves the real issue untouched. Deep as the critique of capitalism goes, it leaves unexamined the question, what is capital? And actually, I'm sure, like, you know, real Marxist scholars don't leave this unexamined, but in the popular conception of the whole thing, you know, we rarely ask, well, what is capital? Capital consisting of money and property is basically an agreement among human beings. Money is only valuable because we agree that it is valuable. We have a story that holds it in value property to it's only yours because there's a social agreement that says that it's yours. It's not attached to your body. The land doesn't know that it's yours. The car doesn't know that it's yours. It's an agreement. So capital is formed with through human agreements. And these agreements can be changed. So what capital is depends on what we agree it to be. What capitalism is depends on what capital is. So the economic ideas that I work with involve changing what money and property is, changing, for example, the agreements by which money is produced and distributed. I mean, I kind of like some things about capitalism. I like business. I like the entrepreneurial creative spirit that comes through in business. There's something of value there. And I can also see how capitalism, especially on the corporate level and the global level, is ruining the earth. And part of that ruin is the growth imperative that's built into the design of the money system. So it's hard to really lay all this out methodically in whatever 20 minutes or however long I'm talking about it. But I'll just maybe mention two key reforms that could make money and economy no longer the enemy of ecology. And really it is about making economy ecological. Ecology goes in cycles and flows. It's not linear. Money, as we know it, does not decay like everything else in the world. It grows exponentially and leads us to think that if we could only attach ourselves to enough money, we would be immortal too. If we made money decay like everything else through a negative interest rate, it reverses a lot of the effects that money has in the world. And again, this is a more detailed argument that I'm prepared to make right now. But basically a negative interest system allows lending at zero interest or less, which means that the economy can work in the absence of growth. It means that future cash flows are no longer less valuable than money right now so that we no longer sacrifice the future for the present. It encourages long-term thinking. It reverses the concentration of wealth. Anyway, I'm not going to try to give an economics lesson right here, but I just want to mention that just to give an idea of how simple and how utterly radical the change could be. And the second thing I would mention is universal basic income, which says, which gives people money whether or not they are contributing to the production of stuff and supports activities that are not quantifiable, that are not producing something that can be brought into the market. But it empowers people to do the things that are meaningful and beautiful to them, which in many cases, it's kind of ironic, the things that we need the most right now, there's not a lot of money in those things. So all the NGOs and the idealistic young people, they're scrambling for crumbs to just do the work that we need so badly. So yeah, that's another piece of the picture is a universal basic income, which is becoming more prominent now in more and more people are advocating for that. And I guess just on a more general level, money is such a profound technology, such a powerful tool for coordinating human activity toward a goal that it is impossible to have a healing planet without aligning the money system to that goal. The story of money is part of the story of separation today. It necessitates endless growth. It generates competition. It creates artificial scarcity because it's lent at interest. There's always more debt than there is money. So it embodies a lot of the core principles of separation. And so we need to change that. If we are going to have reunion, if we're going to have an ecological planet, if we are going to live in a story of interbeing, the money system cannot stand as an exception to that. We need to bring it into alignment with the world that we want to see. It is inescapable. We cannot leave the economic issue untouched in our pursuit of an ecological and beautiful and healing world. I'm aware that some of the ideas I mentioned, negative interest and universal basic income, they seem outlandish. They seem like a half-baked idea. So if you want to dig into it, then you're going to have to read Sacred Economics, which is a book I wrote that really goes a lot into the nuts and bolts of these proposals. Otherwise, various obvious objections come up. If you're not familiar with these ideas, wouldn't it cause inflation? Or wouldn't people stop working if they had universal basic income? Or there's all kinds of objections that arise, and it seems like, oh, I must not have thought of that. And I'm not going to say that the plan is flawless, but these trivial objections are the thinking is not susceptible to these trivial objections. There's been a lot of thinking done by me and other people on these topics. So if you want to get deeper into the conversation, read Sacred Economics.