Ecosystem Resources Quotes

Mayflower-Plymouth is a company, and it's an ecosystem. We are an Investment Holdings company that holds mostly small and medium sized businesses in our portfolio. And we also provide a variety of resources and business services such as consulting - in the interest of helping businesses to be better.

The way fungi and mycorrhizae direct nutrients in biological ecosystems is a case study for how we can direct resources within human economic systems. And in doing this, we cultivate a multitude of business opportunities.

Fungi broker resources between species via mycelium networks and in doing so they cultivate health and resilience for the entire ecosystem. In the same way, each business should cultivate health and resilience for the entire business ecosystem.

Whether we accept it or not, this will likely be the century that determines what the optimal human population is for our planet. It will come about in one of two ways: Either we decide to manage our own numbers, to avoid a collision of every line on civilization's graph - or nature will do it for us, in the form of famines, thirst, climate chaos, crashing ecosystems, opportunistic disease, and wars over dwindling resources that finally cut us down to size.

Managing waste is a really bad goal. Only an inefficient system would aim to manage waste. A better goal is making waste non-existent by designing the system itself, through it's participants, to continually upcycle resources.

The internet reminds us on a daily basis that it is not at all rewarding to become aware of problems that you have no reasonable hope of solving. And, more important, the internet already is what it is. It has already become the central organ of contemporary life. It has already rewired the brains of its users, returning us to a state of primitive hyperawareness and distraction while overloading us with much more sensory input than was ever possible in primitive times. It has already built an ecosystem that runs on exploiting attention and monetizing the self. Even if you avoid the internet completely—my partner does: he thought #tbt meant “truth be told” for ages—you still live in the world that this internet has created, a world in which selfhood has become capitalism’s last natural resource, a world whose terms are set by centralized platforms that have deliberately established themselves as near-impossible to regulate or control.

We don't think a sustainable society need be stagnant, boring, uniform, or rigid. It need not be, and probably could not be, centrally controlled or authoritarian. It could be a world that has the time, the resources, and the will to correct its mistakes, to innovate, to preserve the fertility of its planetary ecosystems. It could focus on mindfully increasing quality of life rather than on mindlessly expanding material consumption and the physical capital stock.

Fungi are decentralized intelligence networks. They send information multi-directionally, they constantly evolve and adapt based on feedback from their environment, they invent new molecules to collaborate... And they form a decentralized consensus on how to utilize resources, when to reproduce and what strategies to employ. This is how businesses and business ecosystems should be.

The messages coming back flooded the comm buffers with rage and sorrow, threats of vengeance and offers of aid. Those last were the hardest. New colonies still trying to force their way into local ecosystems so exotic that their bodies could hardly recognize them as life at all, isolated, exhausted, sometimes at the edge of their resources. And what they wanted was to send back help. He listened to their voices, saw the distress in their eyes. He couldn't help, but love them a little bit. Under the best conditions, disasters and plagues did that. It wasn't universally true. There would always be hoarders and price gouging, people who closed their doors to refugees and left them freezing and starving. But the impulse to help was there too. To carry a burden together, even if it meant having less for yourself. Humanity had come as far as it had in a haze of war, sickness, violence, and genocide. History was drenched in blood. But it also had cooperation and kindness, generosity, intermarriage. The one didn’t come without the other.

While the range of people, organizations, resources, and conditions involved in an entrepreneurial ecosystem are useful to understand, they are not the most critical construct. Instead, the interaction between each of the components is what matters.

The role of soil in natural ecosystems shares striking similarities with the role of capital in economies. Just as soil serves as the vital resource underpinning natural ecosystems, capital is the foundational resource driving economic systems. In both contexts, the effective allocation of resources, whether capital or nutrients, determines productivity, competitiveness, and overall stability.

I don’t presume to grasp Aboriginal knowledge fully. It comes from a way of knowing the earth—an epistemology—different from that of my own culture. It speaks of being attuned to the blooming of the bitterroot, the running of the salmon, the cycles of the moon. Of knowing that we are tied to the land—the trees and animals and soil and water—and to one another, and that we have a responsibility to care for these connections and resources, ensuring the sustainability of these ecosystems for future generations and to honor those who came before. Of treading lightly, taking only what gifts we need, and giving back. Of showing humility toward and tolerance for all we are connected to in this circle of life. But what my years in the forestry profession have also shown me is that too many decision-makers dismiss this way of viewing nature and rely only on select parts of science. The impact has become too devastating to ignore. We can compare the condition of the land where it has been torn apart, each resource treated in isolation from the rest, to where it has been cared for according to the Secwepemc principal of k̓wseltktnews (translated as “we are all related”) or the Salish concept of nə́c̓aʔmat ct (“we are one”). We must heed the answers we’re being given.

… what right [do] people in wealthy countries have to blame the poor for their poverty, much less for humanity’s environmental dilemma, when it [is] rich countries’ consumption patterns that [are] responsible for the vast majority of the world’s resource depletion and ecosystem destruction?

What are we individually doing to join effects to combat climate change?

The aquatic environment must be safeguarded by men. God created mankind to care for the environment and all the living resources.

Position B: Wolves, as top predators, are a natural part of healthy, complex, self-regulating ecosystems, and removing most of them (the plans call for 80, even 100 percent reduction in certain management units) is only bound to screw things up. Without wolves, deer and moose numbers explode in unsustainable numbers, then crash, over and over. Wolves, too, are a valued resource on which trappers and subsistence hunters depend, and a multimillion-dollar cash cow attracting throngs of ecotourists and photographers. Their presence also offers inestimable aesthetic value to many residents, even if they never manage to see one. Besides that, shooting wolves from airplanes is just plain wrong and reflects horribly on the state’s image. Anyone who doesn’t see things that way is a nearsighted, beetle-browed, knuckle-dragging redneck.

The more numerous we become, the more crowded, the more interconnected, the more demanding of resources, the more invasive of wild places, the more disruptive of richly diverse ecosystems—the closer we stand to the epidemic threshold for any new virus that probes us as a possible route to greater evolutionary success.

Thermophilic composting requires no electricity and therefore no coal combustion, no acid rain, no nuclear power plants, no nuclear waste, no petrochemicals and no consumption of fossil fuels. The composting process produces no waste, no pollutants and no toxic by-products. Thermophilic composting of humanure can be carried out century after century, millennium after millennium, with no stress on our ecosystems, no unnecessary consumption of resources and no garbage or sludge for our landfills. And all the while it will produce a valuable resource necessary for our survival while preventing the accumulation of dangerous pathogenic waste.

You see the impact of humans on Earth’s environment every day. We are trashing the place: There is plastic along our highways, the smell of a landfill, the carbonic acid (formed when carbon dioxide is dissolved in water) bleaching of coral reefs, the desertification of enormous areas of China and Africa (readily seen in satellite images), and a huge patch of plastic garbage in the Pacific Ocean. All of these are direct evidence of our effect on our world. We are killing off species at the rate of about one per day. It is estimated that humans are driving species to extinction at least a thousand times faster than the otherwise natural rate. Many people naïvely (and some, perhaps, deceptively) argue that loss of species is not that important. After all, we can see in the fossil record that about 99 percent of all the different kinds of living things that have ever lived here are gone forever, and we’re doing just fine today. What’s the big deal if we, as part of the ecosystem, kill off a great many more species of living things? We’ll just kill what we don’t need or notice. The problem with that idea is that although we can, in a sense, know what will become or what became of an individual species, we cannot be sure of what will happen to that species’ native ecosystem. We cannot predict the behavior of the whole, complex, connected system. We cannot know what will go wrong or right. However, we can be absolutely certain that by reducing or destroying biodiversity, our world will be less able to adapt. Our farms will be less productive, our water less clean, and our landscape more barren. We will have fewer genetic resources to draw on for medicines, for industrial processes, for future crops. Biodiversity is a result of the process of evolution, and it is also a safety net that helps keep that process going. In order to pass our own genes into the future and enable our offspring to live long and prosper, we must reverse the current trend and preserve as much biodiversity as possible. If we don’t, we will sooner or later join the fossil record of extinction.

A good family farm produces more, in net terms, than the farm family consumes. The good farmer has secured enough land to grow crops and support his or her livestock. The extra production beyond the farm family’s own consumption can be sold and traded for other goods and services—TVs, clothes, books. Some countries are like good family farms, with more bio-capacity than what it takes, in net terms, to provide for their inhabitants. Compare this with a weekend hobby farm, with honeybees, a rabbit, and an apple tree, where most resources have to be bought from elsewhere. Presently 80% of the world population lives in countries that are like hobby farms. They consume more, in net terms, than what the ecosystems of their country can regenerate. The rest is imported or derives from unsustainable overuse of local fields and forests.

Perhaps the founder of the National Resources Defense Council, Gus Speth, said it best: “I used to think the top environmental problems facing the world were global warming, environmental degradation and eco-system collapse, and that we scientists could fix those problems with enough science. But I was wrong. The real problem is not those three items, but greed, selfishness and apathy. And for that we need a spiritual and cultural transformation. And we scientists don’t know how to do that.”34

...humans now occupy or have seriously altered nearly all of the spaces outside our parks and preserves. Each of us carries an inherent responsibility to preserve the quality of earth's ecosystems. When we leave the responsibility to a few experts (none of whom hold political office), the rest of us remain largely ignorant of earth stewardship and how to practice it. The conservation of Earth's resources, including its living biological systems, must become part of the everyday culture of us all, worldwide.

Numerous animals, from Douglas squirrels to an assortment of tiny insects, as well as mosses, lichens, ferns, and other plants and fungi, all make their homes in living Douglas fir trees. When one of these mighty trees dies and falls to the forest floor, it becomes a nurse log—that is, a huge decaying hunk of wood that feeds countless living beings with its fibers and the nutrients therein. A tree sucks up a lot of resources in its lifetime, and when it dies, all those resources are released back into the ecosystem at large to be used by other beings.

There’s a common misconception that Silicon Valley is the accelerator of the world. The real story is that the world keeps getting faster—Silicon Valley is just the first place to figure out how to keep pace. While Silicon Valley certainly has many key networks and resources that make it easier to apply the techniques we’re going to lay out for you, blitzscaling is made up of basic principles that do not depend on geography. We’re going to show you examples from overlooked parts of the United States, such as Detroit (Rocket Mortgage) and Connecticut (Priceline), as well as from international companies, such as WeChat and Spotify. In the process you’ll see how the lessons of blitzscaling can be adapted to help build great companies in nearly any ecosystem, albeit with differing degrees of difficulty. That’s the mission of this book. We want to share the secret weapon that has allowed Silicon Valley to punch so much (more than a hundred times) above its population index so that those lessons can be applied far beyond the sixty-mile stretch between the Golden Gate Bridge and San Jose. It is sorely needed.

In natural ecosystems, the way the waste of one is turned into a resource for another is through systematic value added consumption. In human economic systems, waste is only a problem insofaras systematic value added consumption has not been holistically applied. So, the way to prevent waste is to have it exist in a system where the waste of one is viewed as a product for value added consumption by another. The way to prevent waste is to consider full lifecycle consumption during the design of materials and products and then ensure that for everything produced there exists a mechanism of value added consumption and an audience which will perceive the consumption of it as adding value to their lives. It must be value added consumption because people only voluntarily consume that which they deem to add value to their own lives. And it must be systematic because no amount of accumulated waste is acceptable. When the consumption of ones waste is perceived to be a value add to others, and those others are able to efficiently consume it, a system will organically emerge whereby in essence, the concept of waste is nullified.

Any people can fall into the trap of overexploiting environmental resources, because of ubiquitous problems that we shall consider later in this book: that the resources initially seem inexhaustibly abundant; that signs of their incipient depletion become masked by normal fluctuations in resource levels between years or decades; that it’s difficult to get people to agree on exercising restraint in harvesting a shared resource (the so-called tragedy of the commons, to be discussed in later chapters); and that the complexity of ecosystems often makes the consequences of some human-caused perturbation

If humanity continues its suicidal ways to change the global climate, eliminate ecosystems, and exhaust Earth's natural resources, our species will very soon find itself forced into making a choice, this time engaging the conscious part of our brain. It is as follows: shall we be existential conservatives, keeping our genetically-based human nature while tapering off the activities inimical to ourselves and the rest of the biosphere? Or shall we use our new technology to accomodate the changes important solely to our own species, while letting the rest of life slip away? We have only a short time to decide.

Alberta has taken these liabilities into account and, in order for the bitumen industry to be even remotely profitable, four conditions must be met: conventional oil must be trading above $50 a barrel; the natural resources needed to produce it (fresh water, natural gas, and the boreal forest ecosystem) must be had for next to nothing; the industry itself must be heavily subsidized; and exploration costs must be nil.[*2] There is a fifth condition, exploited not just by the bitumen industry but by the entire burning world: no consequences for emissions. This is what Alberta has built and bet its economy on, with mixed results.

By overexploiting the Earth’s natural resources, humanity is not putting nature at risk, but nature’s provisional capacity to nourish humanity. Humanity is putting itself at risk. It is highly unlikely that in 2050 nine billion people can live in a civilisation of economic development and growth as we do today. No massive technological progress can be seen on the horizon that will lower the burden of the energy, farming and fishing levies on the capital of the Earth. The ecosystem in itself is in no way threatened. The Earth still has 4 billion years before it can regenerate all its resources — without mankind! — thanks to the chemistry of carbon, oxygen and hydrogen. A ravaged ecosystem will regenerate itself very rapidly, that is, in less than 100,000 years.

We therefore have a good chance of overcoming the problem of resource scarcity. The real nemesis of the modern economy is ecological collapse. Both scientific progress and economic growth take place within a brittle biosphere, and as they gather steam, so the shock waves destabilise the ecology. In order to provide every person in the world with the same standard of living as affluent Americans, we would need a few more planets – but we have only this one. If progress and growth do end up destroying the ecosystem, the cost will be dear not merely to vampires, foxes and rabbits, but also to Sapiens. An ecological meltdown will cause economic ruin, political turmoil, a fall in human standards of living, and might threaten the very existence of human civilisation. We could lessen the danger by slowing the pace

Egocentrism is the problem, then, not Egos. Egocentric people are agents for themselves only (and perhaps also for their immediate families), without awareness of or tending of the social and natural environments that sustain their lives. Their consciousness is Ego-centered. A person with a healthy, mature Ego, in contrast, is ecocentric; she understands herself as, first and foremost, an agent for (the health of) her ecosystem (and second, as an agent for the health of her human community, which dwells within that ecosystem; and third, as an agent for her immediate family and self). Spiritual practice helps mature our Egos. Faced with the assertion that the goal of spiritual practice is to eliminate the Ego, the East facet of the Self might respond with a hearty laugh and the blended perspectives of the Trickster, Fool, and Sage, as, for example, expressed by Jay Leeming: Trying to get rid of your ego Is like trying to get rid of your garbage can. No one believes you are serious. The more you shout at the garbage man The more your neighbors remember your name.6 Rather than attempting to jettison the Ego, a sensible person draws on the resources of her East Self to cultivate her relationship to innocence, wisdom, humor, and the great, transpersonal, and universal mysteries of life.

Liberals are imperfect. Yes, of course. Liberals need to grow one fucking vertebrae, stop massaging capitalism’s nards, and actually serve their constituents. But, on the other hand, if you look at the actual fucking laws they are trying to pass and the actual fucking leader they are supporting, the Republicans of 2019 literally do not want human beings to have health care. They do not want millennials to be able to earn a living wage, own property, or comfortably retire, ever. They want to expand access to guns and shrink police accountability. They want refugees tossed into concentration camps. They want pregnant people to be forced to incubate and birth unwanted children and for barely pubescent rape victims to die in childbirth. They certainly want to roll back marriage equality, if they can, and they’ve already begun stripping rights and protections from trans people. They want to squeeze every last resource out of our ecosystem until everything you love—manatees, dragonflies, fruit, your grandchildren—either burns or starves or drowns. They want to steal your money and waste it on gold-leafed steaks that they can shit into their gold toilets while they watch the sun swallow the earth. They are very, very bad! Similarly, sometimes Democrats ask you to respect people’s pronouns!

The real improvements then must come, to a considerable extent, from the local communities themselves. We need local revision of our methods of land use and production. We need to study and work together to reduce scale, reduce overhead, reduce industrial dependencies; we need to market and process local products locally; we need to bring local economies into harmony with local ecosystems so that we can live and work with pleasure in the same places indefinitely; we need to substitute ourselves, our neighborhoods, our local resources, for expensive imported goods and services; we need to increase cooperation among all local economic entities: households, farms, factories, banks, consumers, and suppliers. If. we are serious about reducing government and the burdens of government, then we need to do so by returning economic self-determination to the people. And we must not do this by inviting destructive industries to provide "jobs" to the community; we must do it by fostering economic democracy. For example, as much as possible the food that is consumed locally ought to be locally produced on small farms, and then processed in small, non- polluting plants that are locally owned. We must do everything possible to provide to ordinary citizens the opportunity to own a small, usable share of the country. In that way, we will put local capital to work locally, not to exploit and destroy the land but to use it well. This is not work just for the privileged, the well-positioned, the wealthy, and the powerful. It is work for everybody. I acknowledge that to advocate such reforms is to advocate a kind of secession-not a secession of armed violence but a quiet secession by which people find the practical means and the strength of spirit to remove themselves from an economy that is exploiting and destroying their homeland. The great, greedy, indifferent national and international economy is killing rural America, just as it is killing America's cities--it is killing our country. Experience has shown that there is no use in appealing to this economy for mercy toward the earth or toward any human community. All true patriots must find ways of opposing it. --1991

We chose not to discuss a world warmed beyond two degrees out of decency, perhaps; or simple fear; or fear of fearmongering; or technocratic faith, which is really market faith; or deference to partisan debates or even partisan priorities; or skepticism about the environmental Left of the kind I'd always had; or disinterest in the fates of distant ecosystems like I'd also always had. We felt confusion about the science and its many technical terms and hard-to-parse numbers, or at least an intuition that others would e easily confused about the science and its many technical terms and hard-to-parse numbers. we suffered from slowness apprehending the speed of change, or semi-conspiratorial confidence in the responsibility of global elites and their institutions, or obeisance toward those elites and their institutions, whatever we thought of them. Perhaps we felt unable to really trust scarier projections because we'd only just heard about warming, we thought, and things couldn't possibly have gotten that much worse just since the first Inconvenient Truth; or because we liked driving our cars and eating our beef and living as we did in every other way and didn't want to think too hard about that; or because we felt so "postindustrial" we couldn't believe we were still drawing material breaths from fossil fuel furnaces. Perhaps it was because we were so sociopathically good at collating bad news into a sickening evolving sense of what constituted "normal," or because we looked outside and things seemed still okay. Because we were bored with writing, or reading, the same story again and again, because climate was so global and therefore nontribal it suggested only the corniest politics, because we didn't yet appreciate how fully it would ravage our lives, and because, selfishly, we didn't mind destroying the planet for others living elsewhere on it or those not yet born who would inherit it from us, outraged. Because we had too much faith in the teleological shape of history and the arrow of human progress to countenance the idea that the arc of history would bend toward anything but environmental justice, too. Because when we were being really honest with ourselves we already thought of the world as a zero-sum resource competition and believed that whatever happened we were probably going to continue to be the victors, relatively speaking anyway, advantages of class being what they are and our own luck in the natalist lottery being what it was. Perhaps we were too panicked about our own jobs and industries to fret about the future of jobs and industry; or perhaps we were also really afraid of robots or were too busy looking at our new phones; or perhaps, however easy we found the apocalypse reflex in our culture and the path of panic in our politics, we truly had a good-news bias when it came to the big picture; or, really, who knows why-there are so many aspects to the climate kaleidoscope that transforms our intuitions about environmental devastation into n uncanny complacency that it can be hard to pull the whole picture of climate distortion into focus. But we simply wouldn't, or couldn't, or anyway didn't look squarely in the face of science.

Permanent Revolution THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION OPENED up new ways to convert energy and to produce goods, largely liberating humankind from its dependence on the surrounding ecosystem. Humans cut down forests, drained swamps, dammed rivers, flooded plains, laid down hundreds of thousands of miles of railroad tracks, and built skyscraping metropolises. As the world was moulded to fit the needs of Homo sapiens, habitats were destroyed and species went extinct. Our once green and blue planet is becoming a concrete and plastic shopping centre. Today, the earth’s continents are home to billions of Sapiens. If you took all these people and put them on a large set of scales, their combined mass would be about 300 million tons. If you then took all our domesticated farmyard animals – cows, pigs, sheep and chickens – and placed them on an even larger set of scales, their mass would amount to about 700 million tons. In contrast, the combined mass of all surviving large wild animals – from porcupines and penguins to elephants and whales – is less than 100 million tons. Our children’s books, our iconography and our TV screens are still full of giraffes, wolves and chimpanzees, but the real world has very few of them left. There are about 80,000 giraffes in the world, compared to 1.5 billion cattle; only 200,000 wolves, compared to 400 million domesticated dogs; only 250,000 chimpanzees – in contrast to billions of humans. Humankind really has taken over the world.1 Ecological degradation is not the same as resource scarcity. As we saw in the previous chapter, the resources available to humankind are constantly increasing, and are likely to continue to do so. That’s why doomsday prophesies of resource scarcity are probably misplaced. In contrast, the fear of ecological degradation is only too well founded. The future may see Sapiens gaining control of a cornucopia of new materials and energy sources, while simultaneously destroying what remains of the natural habitat and driving most other species to extinction. In fact, ecological turmoil might endanger the survival of Homo sapiens itself. Global warming, rising oceans and widespread pollution could make the earth less hospitable to our kind, and the future might consequently see a spiralling race between human power and human-induced natural disasters. As humans use their power to counter the forces of nature and subjugate the ecosystem to their needs and whims, they might cause more and more unanticipated and dangerous side effects. These are likely to be controllable only by even more drastic manipulations of the ecosystem, which would result in even worse chaos. Many call this process ‘the destruction of nature’. But it’s not really destruction, it’s change. Nature cannot be destroyed. Sixty-five million years ago, an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs, but in so doing opened the way forward for mammals. Today, humankind is driving many species into extinction and might even annihilate itself. But other organisms are doing quite well. Rats and cockroaches, for example, are in their heyday. These tenacious creatures would probably creep out from beneath the smoking rubble of a nuclear Armageddon, ready and able to spread their DNA. Perhaps 65 million years from now, intelligent rats will look back gratefully on the decimation wrought by humankind, just as we today can thank that dinosaur-busting asteroid. Still, the rumours of our own extinction are premature. Since the Industrial Revolution, the world’s human population has burgeoned as never before. In 1700 the world was home to some 700 million humans. In 1800 there were 950 million of us. By 1900 we almost doubled our numbers to 1.6 billion. And by 2000 that quadrupled to 6 billion. Today there are just shy of 7 billion Sapiens.

What really scares me is that the accelerating evolution of temes and their machinery requires vast amounts of energy and material resources. We will go on supplying these as long as we want to use the technology, and it will adapt to provide us what we want while massively expanding of its own accord. Destruction of the climate and of earth’s ecosystems is the inevitable outlook. It is this that worries me—not whether they are amoral or not.

The costs of coordinating labor and resources toward value creation are declining rapidly as new coordination tools enable a distributed ecosystem to work together to create value.

What would happen if the parasites were removed from this picture? Would there be fewer birds in the sky, more fish in the sea? Lafferty doesn’t know, but the change would almost certainly have a domino-like effect on the food chain. In some fragile ecosystems where animals struggle to get by on scarce resources, manipulative parasites might even tip the balance toward the survival or extinction of a species. Lafferty recounted joining Japanese biologists who were studying a type of endangered trout in hopes of increasing its numbers. In the fall, the team noticed, the fish were unusually well nourished; their bellies were packed full of crickets. What had made this source of nutrients suddenly so plentiful? A hairworm closely related to the species Thomas has long been studying was sending droves of the crickets into the water in late summer. If it weren’t for the parasite, said Lafferty, it’s possible the trout might already be extinct.

But for this, we need a new development model. We have designed an economic system that sees no value in any human or natural resource unless it is exploited. A river is unproductive until its catchment is appropriated by some industry or its waters are captured by a dam. An open field and its natural bounty are useless until they are fenced. A community of people have no value unless their life is commercialised, their needs are turned into consumer goods, and their aspirations are driven by competition. In this approach, development equals manipulation. By contrast, we need to understand development as something totally different: development is care. It is through a caring relationship with our natural wealth that we can create value, not through its destruction. It is thanks to a cooperative human-to-human interaction that we can achieve the ultimate objective of development, that is, wellbeing. In this new economy, people will be productive by performing activities that enhance the quality of life of their peers and the natural ecosystems in which they live. If not for moral reasons, they should do so for genuine self-interest: there is nothing more rewarding than creating wellbeing for oneself and society. This is the real utility, the real consumer surplus, not the shortsighted and self-defeating behaviour promoted by the growth ideology. The wellbeing economy is a vision for all countries. There are cultural traces of such a vision in the southern African notion of ‘ubuntu’, which literally means ‘I am because you are’, reminding us that there is no prosperity in isolation and that everything is connected. In Indonesia we find the notion of ‘gotong royong’, a conception of development founded on collaboration and consensus, or the vision of ‘sufficiency economy’ in Thailand, Bhutan and most of Buddhist Asia, which indicates the need for balance, like the Swedish term ‘lagom’, which means ‘just the right amount’. Native Alaskans refer to ‘Nuka’ as the interconnectedness of humans to their ecosystems, while in South America, there has been much debate about the concept of ‘buen vivir’, that is, living well in harmony with others and with nature.

It has also become clearer how the schemes of human expansion and fulfilment offered by the left, right, or ‘centrist’ liberals and technocrats rarely considered such constraining factors as finite geographical space, degradable natural resources and fragile ecosystems.

In a world of ecosystems, being early often means waiting for other elements and partners to arrive before the real race starts. For defenders, the question is when to actively engage the new proposition—when to shift resources to the yet-to-be-proven offer and reduce investment in the historical, profitable core. Reacting too early means loss of margin; reacting too late means loss of position. For attackers, the frustration of waiting is amplified as the old regime continues on its own trajectory of incremental improvement. The would-be disruptor is stuck at the starting line, while the finish line moves farther and farther away.

We can't continue to beat the planet into submission, to control, to dominate and all too often destroy ecosystems... We can't retreat into past; but rather than squander what went before we can use our inheritance as a source of strength, as a resource to rebuild with.

Presently, foundational resources essential to cutting-edge AI research and development like compute power, datasets, development frameworks and pre-trained models, remain overwhelmingly centralized under the control of Amazon, Microsoft, Google and several other giants who operate the dominant cloud computing platforms. Open source efforts cannot truly flourish or compete if trapped within the confines of the Big Tech clouds and proprietary ecosystems.

Modern biomimicry is far more than just copying nature's shapes. It includes systematic design and problem-solving processes, which are now being refined by scientists and engineers in universities and institutes worldwide. The first step in any of these processes is to clearly define the challenge we're trying to solve. Then we can determine whether the problem is related to form, function, or ecosystem. Next, we ask what plant, animal, or natural process solves a similar problem most effectively. For example, engineers trying to design a camera lens with the widest viewing angle possible found inspiration in the eyes of bees, which can see an incredible five-sixths of the way, or three hundred degrees, around their heads. The process can also work in reverse, where the exceptional strategies of a plant, animal, or ecosystem are recognized and reverse engineered. De Mestral's study of the tenacious grip of burrs on his socks is an early example of reverse engineering a natural winner, while researchers' fascination at the way geckos can hang upside down from the ceiling or climb vertical windows has now resulted in innovative adhesives and bandages. Designs based on biomimicry offer a range of economic benefits. Because nature has carried out trillions of parallel, competitive experiments for millions of years, its successful designs are dramatically more energy efficient than the inventions we've created in the past couple of hundred years. Nature builds only with locally derived materials, so it uses little transport energy. Its designs can be less expensive to manufacture than traditional approaches, because nature doesn't waste materials. For example, the exciting new engineering frontier of nanotechnology mirrors nature's manufacturing principles by building devices one molecule at a time. This means no offcuts or excess. Nature can't afford to poison itself either, so it creates and combines chemicals in a way that is nontoxic to its ecosystems. Green chemistry is a branch of biomimicry that uses this do-no-harm principle, to develop everything from medicines to cleaning products to industrial molecules that are safe by design. Learning from the way nature handles materials also allows one of our companies, PaxFan, to build fans that are smaller and lighter while giving higher performance. Finally, nature has methods to recycle absolutely everything it creates. In natures' closed loop of survival on this planet, everything is a resource and everything is recycled-one of the most fundamental components of sustainability. For all these reasons, as I hear one prominent venture capitalist declare, biomimicry will be the business of the twenty-first century. The global force of this emerging and fascinating field is undeniable and building on all societal levels.

These groups were a new kind of vehicle: a hive or colony of close genetic relatives, which functioned as a unit (e.g., in foraging and fighting) and reproduced as a unit. These are the motorboating sisters in my example, taking advantage of technological innovations and mechanical engineering that had never before existed. It was another transition. Another kind of group began to function as though it were a single organism, and the genes that got to ride around in colonies crushed the genes that couldn’t “get it together” and rode around in the bodies of more selfish and solitary insects. The colonial insects represent just 2 percent of all insect species, but in a short period of time they claimed the best feeding and breeding sites for themselves, pushed their competitors to marginal grounds, and changed most of the Earth’s terrestrial ecosystems (for example, by enabling the evolution of flowering plants, which need pollinators).43 Now they’re the majority, by weight, of all insects on Earth. What about human beings? Since ancient times, people have likened human societies to beehives. But is this just a loose analogy? If you map the queen of the hive onto the queen or king of a city-state, then yes, it’s loose. A hive or colony has no ruler, no boss. The queen is just the ovary. But if we simply ask whether humans went through the same evolutionary process as bees—a major transition from selfish individualism to groupish hives that prosper when they find a way to suppress free riding—then the analogy gets much tighter. Many animals are social: they live in groups, flocks, or herds. But only a few animals have crossed the threshold and become ultrasocial, which means that they live in very large groups that have some internal structure, enabling them to reap the benefits of the division of labor.44 Beehives and ant nests, with their separate castes of soldiers, scouts, and nursery attendants, are examples of ultrasociality, and so are human societies. One of the key features that has helped all the nonhuman ultra-socials to cross over appears to be the need to defend a shared nest. The biologists Bert Hölldobler and E. O. Wilson summarize the recent finding that ultrasociality (also called “eusociality”)45 is found among a few species of shrimp, aphids, thrips, and beetles, as well as among wasps, bees, ants, and termites: In all the known [species that] display the earliest stages of eusociality, their behavior protects a persistent, defensible resource from predators, parasites, or competitors. The resource is invariably a nest plus dependable food within foraging range of the nest inhabitants.46 Hölldobler and Wilson give supporting roles to two other factors: the need to feed offspring over an extended period (which gives an advantage to species that can recruit siblings or males to help out Mom) and intergroup conflict. All three of these factors applied to those first early wasps camped out together in defensible naturally occurring nests (such as holes in trees). From that point on, the most cooperative groups got to keep the best nesting sites, which they then modified in increasingly elaborate ways to make themselves even more productive and more protected. Their descendants include the honeybees we know today, whose hives have been described as “a factory inside a fortress.”47

If we do not change our way of life, and fast, we will destroy ourselves by continuing to pollute the environment that sustains us, abusing natural resources, poisoning our food supply, destroying large ecosystems, contaminating the air, and perpetuating climate change.

Human welfare depends on healthy ecosystems.

(B) Raised seawater levels and heavy rainfalls, causing an elevation of groundwater levels, which resulted in (C) flooding of at least 63% of all sewer lines worldwide and substantial fluxes of faecal matter into aquifers, rivers, and lakes, contaminating all major drinking water resources. (D) Frequent long-distance travelling of Western and Central Europeans, North Americans, Australians, and Asians by air, sea, and land, facilitating the spreading of virulence factors and antibiotic resistance genes, and later, significantly accelerating the spreading of disease. (E) Use of large amounts of antibiotics (in the range of hundreds of thousands of tonnes per year), both for the treatment of disease and for industrial meat production, leading to antibiotics contamination of soils, aquifers, rivers, and lakes, and thus triggering bacterial multidrug-resistance in a great variety of ecosystems. (F) Spontaneous acquisition of an extremely potent virulence factor in a multidrug-resistant strain of V. cholerae, and (G) prevalence of various multidrug-resistant strains of M. tuberculosis since the 21st century.

Climate change is a global problem with grave implications: environmental, social, economic, political and for the distribution of goods. It represents one of the principal challenges facing humanity in our day. Its worst impact will probably be felt by developing countries in coming decades. Many of the poor live in areas particularly affected by phenomena related to warming, and their means of subsistence are largely dependent on natural reserves and ecosystemic services such as agriculture, fishing and forestry. They have no other financial activities or resources which can enable them to adapt to climate change or to face natural disasters, and their access to social services and protection is very limited. For example, changes in climate, to which animals and plants cannot adapt, lead them to migrate; this in turn affects the livelihood of the poor, who are then forced to leave their homes, with great uncertainty for their future and that of their children. There has been a tragic rise in the number of migrants seeking to flee from the growing poverty caused by environmental degradation. They are not recognized by international conventions as refugees; they bear the loss of the lives they have left behind, without enjoying any legal protection whatsoever. Sadly, there is widespread indifference to such suffering, which is even now taking place throughout our world. Our lack of response to these tragedies involving our brothers and sisters points to the loss of that sense of responsibility for our fellow men and women upon which all civil society is founded.

Mainstream economists habitually treat asset depletion as income, while ignoring the value of the assets themselves. If the owner of an old-growth forest cuts it and sells the timber, the market may record a drop in the land’s monetary value, but otherwise the ecological damage done is regarded as an externality. Irreplaceable biological assets, in this case, have been liquidated; thus the benefit of these assets to future generations is denied. From an ecosystem point of view, an economy that does not heavily tax the extraction of non-renewable resources is like a jobless person rapidly spending an inheritance.

continue polluting while trying to offset the damage through some face-saving corporate philanthropy exercises. We would be fools to assume that we can simply pay our way out of this mess. Nature cannot be bailed out, as if it were a financial market. We need to stop breaking things in the first place. But for this, we need a new development model. We have designed an economic system that sees no value in any human or natural resource unless it is exploited. A river is unproductive until its catchment is appropriated by some industry or its waters are captured by a dam. An open field and its natural bounty are useless until they are fenced. A community of people have no value unless their life is commercialised, their needs are turned into consumer goods, and their aspirations are driven by competition. In this approach, development equals manipulation. By contrast, we need to understand development as something totally different: development is care. It is through a caring relationship with our natural wealth that we can create value, not through its destruction. It is thanks to a cooperative human-to-human interaction that we can achieve the ultimate objective of development, that is, wellbeing. In this new economy, people will be productive by performing activities that enhance the quality of life of their peers and the natural ecosystems in which they live. If not for moral reasons, they should do so for genuine self-interest: there is nothing more rewarding than creating wellbeing for oneself and society. This is the real utility, the real consumer surplus, not the shortsighted and self-defeating behaviour promoted by the growth ideology. The wellbeing economy is a vision for all countries. There are cultural traces of such a vision in the southern African notion of ‘ubuntu’, which literally means ‘I am because you are’, reminding us that there is no prosperity in isolation and that everything is connected. In Indonesia we find the notion of ‘gotong royong’, a conception of development founded on collaboration and consensus, or the vision of ‘sufficiency economy’ in Thailand, Bhutan and most of Buddhist Asia, which indicates the need for balance, like the Swedish term ‘lagom’, which means ‘just the right amount’. Native Alaskans refer to ‘Nuka’ as the interconnectedness of humans to their ecosystems, while in South America, there has been much debate about the concept of ‘buen vivir’, that is, living well in harmony with others and with nature. The most industrialised nations, which we often describe in dubious terms like ‘wealthy’ or ‘developed’, are at a crossroads. The mess they have created is fast outpacing any other gain, even in terms of education and life expectancy. Their economic growth has come at a huge cost for the rest of the world and the planet as a whole. Not only should they commit to realising a wellbeing economy out of self-interest, but also as a moral obligation to the billions of people who had to suffer wars, environmental destruction and other calamities so that a few, mostly white human beings could go on

In the complex ecosystem of schools, administrators provide direction, support, and resources for teachers and students to thrive.

All biology, I began to understand, is in fact ecology. Ecosystem dynamics that ecologists study apply just as easily to single plants themselves. Resources like food and water fluctuate in an ecosystem, which causes different individuals to take up residence in different groupings at different times.

These two laws have been heralded as landmark efforts by legislatures to bring new privacy rights to consumers in Europe and California. But in reality, any consumer who wants to meaningfully exercise those rights often ends up frustrated. Websites have mastered the art of getting people to click “I accept,” burying a consumer’s right to decline tracking deep in screens that you must click through. And neither law meaningfully allowed even professional reporters from well-resourced media outlets to trace the flow of data through the advertising data ecosystem.

in order for the bitumen industry to be even remotely profitable, four conditions must be met: conventional oil must be trading above $50 a barrel; the natural resources needed to produce it (fresh water, natural gas, and the boreal forest ecosystem) must be had for next to nothing; the industry itself must be heavily subsidized; and exploration costs must be nil.[*2] There is a fifth condition, exploited not just by the bitumen industry but by the entire burning world: no consequences for emissions.” Excerpt From Fire Weather: A True Story From a Hotter World - Winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction John Vaillant

American citizens are self-absorbed, and the U.S. government devotes its immense resources to achieving the capitalistic demands of its citizenry. Thoughts do not saturate American politics. Corporations employ lobbyist and they fund political action committees that exert inordinate influence in shaping the outcome of this nation’s political agendas. Lobbyist devote their paid for services to sway government officials including legislators and members of regulatory agencies to carry out the programs of powerful corporations and wealthy individuals, granting unprecedented socioeconomic power in the hallowed chambers of the American government to wealthy segments of society. American corporations and affluent people exploit American culture, morals, and religion to push their private interests including inexplicable economic and military incursions into foreign counties. I feel increasingly disenfranchised and unrepresented in America’s supposedly participatory democratic government given the entrenchment of power in a select few. American democracy grants material benefits to the wealthy, vulgarizes the middle class, and ignores the disenfranchised poor. Many Americans applaud prosperous groups exploiting the lower classes, presumably because everyone aspires to become rich. A person and a society that employs vanities and greediness to measure their worthiness is hopelessly doomed. Future historians will venerate an empire that pursued achievement of great deeds based upon virtuous principles. Conversely, the historians of tomorrow will skewer contemporary Americans for their compulsive need to consume the ecosystem and trounce upon the rights of other nations to live peacefully. American vanities and unchecked desire to enjoy an easy life could destroy the world, as we know it.

Europeans and Americans have spent five centuries conquering, plundering, exploiting, and polluting the earth in the name of human progress. They used their technological superiority to create the most efficient killing machines on the planet, directed against anyone and anything, especially indigenous cultures, which stood in their way. They stole and hoarded the planet’s wealth and resources. They believed that this orgy of blood and gold would never end, and they still believe it. They do not understand that the dark ethic of ceaseless capitalist and imperialist expansion is dooming the exploiters as well as the exploited. But even as we stand on the cusp of extinction we lack the intelligence and imagination to break free from our evolutionary past. As the warning signs become more palpable—rising temperatures, global financial meltdowns, mass human migrations, endless wars, poisoned ecosystems, rampant corruption among the ruling class—we turn to those who chant, either through idiocy or cynicism, the mantra that what worked in the past will work in the future. Factual evidence, since it is an impediment to what we desire, is banished

In the theory of classic disruption, established customers initially reject the inferior, good-enough offer, and hence create a liability for incumbents, for whom allocating resources to the disruptive offer meant going against the feedback of their best customers. This was the tension at the root of the dilemma in Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma.3 In contrast, established customer relationships are an asset in introducing ecosystem disruption, as they open the door to credibility and ecosystem carryover

If you have economies of scale, penetration pricing often works best Would your business benefit from economies of scale? (Most web businesses do.) If so, your ideal pricing strategy may be penetration pricing—charging a low price, basing your financial model on eventually reaching market-dominating economies of scale. Supply-side economies of scale mean that your profit margins increase the more you sell, because as you sell more, your cost of sales (unit costs) usually becomes lower, and your fixed costs become a smaller fraction of your overall costs. Demand-side economies of scale mean that the more customers you get, the more value each customer gets from your service, for the following reasons. You may benefit from having a network of customers. For example, if a phone system had only two users, only one type of call could be made (one between User A and User B). If it had three users, then three types of call could be made (A–B, B–C and A-C). If it had twelve users, sixty-six different types of calls could be made. The overall value of a phone system to its users is roughly proportional to the square of the number of users. You may benefit from there being a market of complementary products and services. The project-management web app Basecamp has many integrations, which it promotes on its website. At the bottom of the page, Basecamp shows off how quickly it’s acquiring new users, to persuade other companies to add integrations. You may benefit from having a bigger knowledge base, more forums, or more trained users. The ecosystem of knowledge around a product can be valuable in itself. WordPress grows because it’s easy to find a WordPress developer and it’s easy for those developers to find answers to their questions. You may benefit from the perception that yours is the standard. Users are aware of the value of choosing the ultimate winner—especially when they have to invest time and resources into using your company—so they will be attracted by the perception that you’ll win.

Attempting to sustain GDP growth in an economy that may actually be close to maturing can drive governments to take desperate and destructive measures. They deregulate—or rather reregulate—finance in the hope of unleashing new productive investment, but end up unleashing speculative bubbles, house price hikes and debt crises instead. They promise business that they will ‘cut red tape’, but end up dismantling legislation that was put in place to protect workers’ rights, community resources and the living world. They privatise public services—from hospitals to railways—turning public wealth into private revenue streams. They add the living world into the national accounts as ‘ecosystem services’ and ‘natural capital’, assigning it a value that looks dangerously like a price. And, despite committing to keep global warming ‘well below 2°C’, many such governments chase after the ‘cheap’ energy of tar sands and shale gas, while neglecting the transformational public investments needed for a clean-energy revolution. These policy choices are akin to throwing precious cargo off a plane that is running out of fuel, rather than admitting that it may soon be time to touch down.

And where excess energy was being lost by lack of completely effective storage methods, people were finding more ways to use it while they had it: for desalination, or more direct air carbon capture, or seawater pumped overland into certain dry basins, and so on. On and on and on it went. So clean energy, the crux of the challenge, had been met, or was being met. Then also, another great poster: the Global Footprint Network had the world working at par in relation to the Earth’s bioproduction and waste intake and processing. World civilization was no longer using up more of the biosphere’s renewable resources than were being replaced by natural processes. What for many years had been true only for Cuba and Costa Rica had become true everywhere. Part of this achievement was due to the Half Earth projects; though this was not yet an achieved literal reality, because well more than half the Earth was still occupied and used by humans, nevertheless, broad swathes of each continent had been repurposed as wild land, and to a large extent emptied of people and their most disruptive structures, and left to the animals and plants. There were more wild animals alive on Earth than at any time in the past two centuries at least, and also there were fewer domestic beasts grown for human food, occupying far less land. Ecosystems on every continent were therefore returning to some new kind of health, just as the result of the planetary ecology doing its thing, living and dying under the sun. Most biomes were mongrels of one sort or another,

the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC), a hypothesis with a large following in the field of economics, the environment worsens in tandem with economic growth until a certain income per person is reached. At that point, resources start flowing toward environmental protection, and the ecosystem is restored.

In the complex ecosystem of schools, administrators provide direction, support, and resources for teachers and students to thrive.

You need, for example, to keep hiring new people to keep your perspective fresh—and especially people from a wide variety of different backgrounds and sectors. Even if you're not hiring them, meet with people from other companies and other sectors—keep your finger on the pulse of what is happening in other areas. Always have dedicated resources entirely focused on scouring the market to look for potential unexpected competitors—players who may, unbeknownst to you, or perhaps even themselves, be amassing valuable data or some other advantage.

Another value that is key to building an effective culture around ecosystems is the servant leadership mindset. This means taking a holistic view of your employees, learning what they need in order to do their jobs effectively, and figuring out everything you can do to help them reach their full potential. In contrast to the traditional model of leadership, in which the leader's main focus is giving direction and enforcing standards, servant leadership seeks to build employees up—to give them the resources they need to feel comfortable executing the tasks they need to.

Most traditional businesses have a culture of not accepting failure, which sometimes leads them to declare new business projects successful even when they plainly are not. This incentivizes company leaders to do all sorts of irrational things, like inefficiently allocating resources, investing imprudently in struggling ecosystem businesses, and—perhaps most importantly—pulling resources and management attention away from promising new ventures by keeping them focused on old, failing ones that everyone is too proud to admit are failing. Only radical transparency and not just the acceptance but celebration of failures can help here.

Deep in the hot thinking depths of the solar system, vast new intellects come up with a new theory of wealth that optimizes resource allocation better than the previously pervasive Free Market 1.0. With no local minima to hamper them, and no need to spawn and reap start-ups Darwin-style, the companies, group minds, and organizations that adopt the so-called Accelerated Salesman Infrastructure of Economics 2.0 trade optimally with each other. The phase-change accelerates as more and more entities join in, leveraging network externalities to overtake the traditional ecosystem.

A long-lived overstory can dominate the forest for generations, setting the ecological conditions for its own thriving while suppressing others by exploiting all the resources with a self-serving dominance. But, all the while it sets the stage for what happens next and something always happens that is more powerful than that over story: a fire, a windstorm, a disease. Eventually, the old forest is disrupted and replaced by the understory, by the buried seedbank that has been readying itself for this moment of transformation and renewal. A whole new ecosystem rises to replace that which no longer works in a changed world.

Hierarchies are best suited for situations that require tight control of production, information, or resources, such as manufacturers or large bureaucracies that exist in universities, governments, and militaries. Hierarchies are robust and inflexible, requiring formal rules, standard operating procedures, and a chain of command. In contrast, networks are resilient and adaptable, requiring flexibility and horizontal flows of information. Healthy startup communities rely upon unencumbered information flows organized in network-based structures. Conversely, they suffocate under hierarchical control.

Developing sound policies requires seeing natural resources as dividends of sustained ecosystem productivity rather than as a stockpile of assets.

An ecosystem token essentially solves the problem of the “Tragedy of the Commons” that characterizes many common-pool resources.169 The tragedy of the commons emerges from two conditions: 1.​Participants individually benefit from the use of common-pool resources 2.​The externalities of overuse or under-contribution are shared among all members of the community.

Humans hadn't even fully acknowledged the equal rights of each other, let alone those of animals or the planet. Animal slavery was as common as housecats and feedlots. Subjugation of ecosystems for natural resources ran as rampant as the rape and abuse of women. The same mentality that sought to possess and extract from the land also sought absolute dominance over the Internet and computers. And now this current corporate-political regime strove to shove humanity back into the dark ages just when our survival depended on recognizing the equal rights of all creation.

A related theme is to leverage external resources to the extent that you can, rather than trying to complete an ecosystem all by yourself.

From Alan Thein Durning: The extreme disruption of ecosystems will end. The question is whether people will end it voluntarily and creatively, or whether nature will end it for them, savagely and catastrophically... Humanity’s failure to act in defense of the Earth is conventionally explained as a problem of knowledge: not enough people yet understand the dangers or know what to do about them. An alternative explanation is that this failure reflects a fundamental problem of motivation. People know enough, but they don’t care enough. They do not care enough because they do not identify themselves with the world as a whole. The Earth is such a big place that it might as well be no place at all. If places motivate but the planet does not, a curious paradox emerges. The wrenching global problems that the world’s leading thinkers so earnestly warn about- crises such as deforestation, hunger, population growth, climate change, loss of cultural and biological diversity- may submit to solutions only obliquely. The only cures possible may be local and motivated by a sentiment- the love of home- that global thinkers often regarded as divisive and or provincial. Thus, it may be possible to diagnose problems globally, but impossible to solve them globally. There may not be any ways to save to world that are not, first and foremost, ways for people to say their own places. Here is the hope: that this generation becomes the next wave of natives, first in this place on Earth and then in others. This newfound permanence allows the quiet murmur of localities to become audible again. And that not long thereafter, perhaps very soon, the places of this Earth will be healed and whole again. ...AJ Auden said, “We have spent thee past 250 years in restless movement, recklessly skimming off the cream of superabundant resources, but we have not used the land in the true sense of the word, not have we done ourselves much permanent good. It’s high times that we settled down, not for a hundred years, but for a thousand, forever.

Climate change is slow, but a cumulative process. Individual human lifespan is only an infinitesimally small fraction of the life of environmental resources and ecosystem services. Hence, the self- centric and this-worldly view of life is incompatible with the concerns of sustainability and socially responsible behaviour. Rather, the dogmatic commitment to self-centric worldview results in the inevitable proliferation of pollution as a right and product to be bought and sold in the market economy. It is ironic, but inevitable to see measures such as ‘statistical value of life’. On the action and policy front in capitalistic democracies, voter ignorance as well as the public-good nature of any results of political activity tends to create a situation in which maximizing an individual’s private surplus through rent seeking can be at the expense of a lower economic surplus for all consumers and producers.

Strategy has moved from controlling unique internal resources and erecting competitive barriers to orchestrating external resources and engaging vibrant communities. And innovation is no longer the province of in-house experts and research and development labs, but is produced through crowdsourcing and the contribution of ideas by independent participants in the platform. External resources don’t completely replace internal resources—more often they serve as a complement. But platform firms emphasize ecosystem governance more than product optimization, and persuasion of outside partners more than control of internal employees.

If you made a country out of all the companies founded by Stanford alumni, it would have a GDP of roughly $ 2.7 trillion, putting it in the neighborhood of the tenth largest economy in the world. Companies started by Stanford alumni include Google, Yahoo, Cisco Systems, Sun Microsystems, eBay, Netflix, Electronic Arts, Intuit, Fairchild Semiconductor, LinkedIn, and E* Trade. Many were started by undergraduates and graduate students while still on campus. Like the cast of Saturday Night Live, the greats who have gone on to massive career success are remembered, but everyone still keeps a watchful eye on the newcomers to see who might be the next big thing. With a $ 17 billion endowment, Stanford has the resources to provide students an incredible education inside the classroom, with accomplished scholars ranging from Nobel Prize winners to former secretaries of state teaching undergraduates. The Silicon Valley ecosystem ensures that students have ample opportunity outside the classroom as well. Mark Zuckerberg gives a guest lecture in the introductory computer science class. Twitter and Square founder Jack Dorsey spoke on campus to convince students to join his companies. The guest speaker lineups at the myriad entrepreneurship and technology-related classes each quarter rival those of multithousand-dollar business conferences. Even geographically, Stanford is smack in the middle of Silicon Valley. Facebook sits just north of the school. Apple is a little farther south. Google is to the east. And just west, right next to campus, is Sand Hill Road, the Wall Street of venture capital.

If we want to survive on this planet, we are going to have to understand that we need to respect the laws of ecology: Law No. 1: The strength of any ecosystem is based on biodiversity. The decreased level of biodiversity on the planet today is our most serious problem, even more serious than global warming. Because… Law No. 2 is interdependence: all species are interdependent; they need each other. Law No. 3 is the law of finite resources: growth has a limit and there is a limit to the earth's carrying capacity. (p. 54)

Unlike human laws (and the Malthusian approach), the natural laws of ecology do not discriminate on the basis of race, status or bank account balance. Simply put, there are not enough resources on the planet to feed a human population that is growing and consuming like we are. We are killing the coral reefs, the forests, the wetlands and the oceans. And we are violating the third law of ecology: "There is a limit to population growth because there is a limit to the planet's carrying capacity." We are literally stealing the carrying capacity that could support other species, and that is a violation of the first law of ecology: "The strength of an ecosystem depends on the diversity of the species that make up that ecosystem." Decreased biodiversity has an impact on everything else; it's the second law of ecology, the law of interdependence. In other words, the increase in the human population is contributing to a decrease in the carrying capacity, and that has an impact on our interactions with other species. It reduces our chance of survival even further and makes a future for us on this earth unlikely. The human population must stabilize itself and if we don't do it voluntarily, nature will look after it for us. Were that to happen, our numbers would be reduced in a very painful manner over which we would have no control. I am not religious, but I think that the four horsemen of the Apocalypse - famines, epidemics, wars and civil strife - will reduce the human population and [bring about] the loos of planetary carrying capacity. (p. 118-119)

Wolves, as top predators, are a natural part of healthy, complex, self-regulating ecosystems, and removing most of them (the plans call for 80, even 100 percent reduction in certain management units) is only bound to screw things up. Without wolves, deer and moose numbers explode in unsustainable numbers, then crash, over and over. Wolves, too, are a valued resource on which trappers and subsistence hunters depend, and a multimillion-dollar cash cow attracting throngs of ecotourists and photographers.

Reducing resource use removes pressure from ecosystems and gives the web of life a chance to knit itself back together, while reducing energy use makes it much easier for us to accomplish a rapid transition to renewables before dangerous tipping points begin to cascade. This is called ‘degrowth’ – a planned downscaling of energy and resource use to bring the economy back into balance with the living world in a safe, just and equitable way.

The problem with economic growth isn’t just that we might run out of resources at some point. The problem is that it progressively degrades the integrity of ecosystems.

The outcome of colonialism has been a controlling or blocking of interconnectivity and interdependence in related arenas: the environment (where rivers are dammed, channeled, or drained and natural geographies replaced by grids), in societies (where communities are divided in a pseudologic of superiority/inferiority), in economies (where resources like trees, coal, or oil are extracted as rapidly and brutally as possible without regard for surrounding destruction and pollution), and thought (where knowledge is organized under the rubrics of specialization, expertise, and compartmentalization, affected by racism and Eurocentrism). Colonialism, globalization, and development planning are ways of thinking as well as ways of life, and we need to find their alternatives, islands where other ways of life are explored through the resurgence of interconnectivity at local levels, creating dialogue among diverse points of view and projects of counter-development and liberation. When we take the idea of colonialism out of its location in history texts as a period of conquest located in the past, and begin to think of it as a metaphor for a way to live in the environment, certain general patterns appear. Before colonialism, there were environments of interpenetrating local biodiversities with cyclic retreats and advances, in which human groups integrated and competed; after colonialism, there was a large-scale monoculture, control of land and resources by distant privileged elites who exploit and fragment local communities while polluting and destroying ecosystems. Before colonialism, there were many diverse cultural worlds, each its own center of meaning-making and language arts, with Europe at the periphery. After colonialism, cultures were ranked on a kind of "great chain of being" according to European notions of culture and development, with Europe at the center. As a corollary, individual subjectivities were ranked as to how completely they could think through decontextualized universals in European languages. One way to think about liberation psychologies is as an evolving and multiple set of projects of decolonization.

This abundance of berries feels like a pure gift from the land. I have not earned, paid for, nor labored for them. There is no mathematics of worthiness that reckons I deserve them in any way. And yet here they are—along with the sun and the air and the birds and the rain, gathering in towers of cumulonimbi, a distant storm building. You could call them natural resources or ecosystem services, but the Robins and I know them as gifts. We both sing gratitude with our mouths full.