When Life Becomes a Market: Why Capitalism Cannot Sustain the Living World
“The foundation of capitalism is the belief that nature exists to be owned, consumed, and sold, that life itself is a market, and value begins only when something can be priced.”
— Resourceism: A Philosophy for a Living Planet
The Great Misunderstanding
Every civilization tells a story about its relationship to the world that sustains it. Ours tells a story of ownership. We speak of “natural resources,” “real estate,” and “property rights,” as though the earth were a ledger and life itself a transaction. What began as a system of exchange became a theology of control.
The foundation of capitalism is not innovation or freedom. It is the belief that the living world exists to be owned, consumed, and sold. This belief is so deeply woven into our language that few recognize it as ideology. To the capitalist mind, the river is not a river; it is water rights. The tree is not a being; it is board feet. The cow is not life; it is beef.
This is the great misunderstanding of our age, the illusion that we can consume the planet and still inhabit it.
Nature as Commodity
A commodity is something stripped of identity, reduced to what it can fetch on the market. Under capitalism, nature herself has been converted into a commodity. Forests are reduced to lumber, animals to protein, and oceans to inventory.
The tragedy is not only ecological but spiritual. When we divide the world into buyers and sellers, we divide ourselves from the living whole we belong to. We are taught to see value only in what can be measured in money, forgetting that the most vital forces, air, soil, compassion, beauty, have no price.
The so-called “free market” is not free. It depends upon theft: the taking of what was once shared, living, and sacred, and its rebranding as property. The marketplace did not liberate humanity from nature; it enslaved humanity to the idea of profit.
Capitalism did not conquer nature; it rebranded her.
The Machinery of Extraction
Capitalism is not simply an economic system. It is a machine that requires perpetual motion. Its lifeblood is extraction, and its engine is growth. But infinite growth on a finite planet is a mathematical impossibility and a moral obscenity.
The system depends on hiding its costs. Every barrel of oil, every factory-farmed animal, every mined landscape represents a debt not counted in dollars but in destroyed futures. The balance sheets of corporations glow green only because the forests no longer do.
Industrial agriculture offers the clearest example. It converts living soil into sterile fields, animals into production units, and communities into consumers. The suffering of sentient beings becomes “collateral damage,” the poisoning of rivers becomes “economic necessity,” and the extinction of species becomes “external cost.”
This is not economics; it is ecocide measured in quarterly profits.
The Moral Inversion
Capitalism inverted morality. What was once vice, greed, exploitation, domination, became celebrated as virtue. What was once virtue, moderation, empathy, stewardship, became dismissed as weakness.
The culture of endless consumption teaches that more is never enough. It turns the human spirit into an engine of appetite. Advertising and entertainment merge to create a single doctrine: that happiness can be purchased and identity can be branded.
Even spirituality is not spared. The “prosperity gospel,” the commodification of mindfulness, and the rebranding of ethics as “lifestyle” all reflect a system that has replaced reverence with marketing. In the capitalist faith, salvation is profit, and paradise is privatized.
In the capitalist faith, salvation is profit, and paradise is privatized.
Resourceism as Restoration
Against this backdrop, Resourceism offers a new story, or perhaps the oldest one, remembered. It begins with a simple recognition: the Earth does not belong to us; we belong to the Earth.
Resourceism is not anti-technology or anti-progress. It is pro-balance, pro-life, and pro-future. It proposes that humanity manage the planet’s resources intelligently and ethically, not for private accumulation but for collective well-being and ecological harmony.
At its heart lies stewardship: the understanding that every resource is part of an interdependent system. When managed consciously, abundance can be sustained for all. When exploited blindly, scarcity becomes inevitable.
Resourceism rejects the idea that value begins with ownership. It declares that value begins with life. The goal is not perpetual growth but sustainable sufficiency, a civilization aligned with the regenerative cycles of the planet itself.
Resourceism envisions an economy where the worth of a thing is measured not by what it sells for, but by what it sustains. Clean air, fertile soil, healthy ecosystems, and human dignity are not luxuries. They are the foundation of all true wealth.
Rethinking Value
If capitalism’s god is profit, Resourceism’s compass is life.
We must ask, what is value if not monetary? Value is what nurtures the continuity of being. Value is what preserves the possibility of tomorrow. A tree’s worth is not in its timber but in its breath, its shade, its quiet participation in the web of life.
Indigenous cultures have long known this truth: the world is alive, and to take from it requires gratitude and restraint. New Thought philosophy echoes the same wisdom, that consciousness and creation are inseparable, and that all separation is illusion. Resourceism unites these insights with practical ethics: to live as though the planet were alive because it is.
Value is not what we take from the world, but what we allow it to become.
The Path Forward
The transformation begins not in policy but in perception. Once we see the Earth as living, the logic of exploitation collapses. From there, everything changes.
Economically, it means redesigning production to mimic ecosystems, circular, regenerative, waste-free. It means investing in renewable energy not as a profit strategy but as an ethical imperative. It means ending factory farming, deforestation, and pollution as forms of theft from the future.
Socially, it means redefining prosperity. A nation’s greatness is not its GDP but its health, its biodiversity, its equity, its capacity for joy.
Politically, it means governance that measures success by well-being, not wealth. Education, healthcare, and food systems become expressions of stewardship. Citizenship becomes participation in the care of the planet, not competition for its spoils.
Personally, it means a spiritual reorientation, to consume less, care more, and live with conscious gratitude for the gift of existence. Each act of mindfulness becomes a seed of restoration.
The Return to Reverence
The foundation of capitalism is ownership. The foundation of Resourceism is reverence.
When we no longer see life as a market, we begin to see it as sacred again. We remember that the Earth does not need to be conquered or monetized. She needs to be understood, protected, and loved.
Resourceism is not a utopian fantasy. It is a practical awakening to reality: the planet is alive, interdependent, and finite. The laws of ecology are not suggestions; they are conditions for survival.
We stand at a turning point between two stories, one of consumption, the other of communion. If capitalism is the story of taking, Resourceism is the story of returning.
The future depends on which story we choose to tell with our lives.