🌱 Right now, a tree does not show up on a balance sheet until it’s cut down, but a tree is producing value that is being neither measured nor recognized.
In this third installment of our ongoing series, we dive deep into the concept of Natural Capital—what it really is, what it isn’t, and why our current economic systems are setting us up for a major reckoning.
In This Episode:
What is Natural Capital? We break down natural capital as the irreplaceable primary stock of real assets—geology, soil, air, water, and living organisms.
The Illusion of Production: Drawing on economist Herman Daly, we explore how humans don’t actually produce anything new; we merely manufacture short-lived artifacts out of components nature took billions of years to create.
Entropy and the Speed of Nature: Nature produces low-entropy matter through slow, multi-billion-year progress. Human manufacturing, by contrast, puts entropy into overdrive, transforming nature’s resilience into short-lived goods and waste.
Commodity Exploitation: We analyze three real-world examples of human extraction overriding nature’s resilience:
🍫 Cacao: Monoculture, severe soil degradation, rampant plant diseases (like the cocoa swollen shoot virus), and microclimatic shifts—all while the laborers harvesting the crops receive a paltry 3% of the final retail price.
☕ Coffee: Deforestation destroying narrow temperature microclimates, forcing farmers higher up mountains until there is nowhere left to grow.
🔋 Lithium Mining & Data Centers: Depleting scarce freshwater supplies in Chile’s Atacama Desert to power technological “solutions” and cooling systems for data centers.
The Fantasy Economy vs. Thermodynamics: Over the last 50 years, the global money supply has grown by over 500%, while global wildlife populations have dropped by 70%. We discuss why compound interest in financial systems creates a dangerous fantasy disconnected from the physical laws of nature.
Glimmers of Hope: From the Santiago Theory of Cognition to natural risk management, we look at systemic shifts like the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund using divestment to change corporate behavior, and the Naturance Project bringing nature-based solutions to the insurance industry.
Join us as we question human orthodoxy, explore deep systemic memory, and rethink our relationship with the planet.
I would like to thank MAATTR for being a major inspiration for this show. Matt is one of the great thinkers in this domain, and his insight never ceases to amayze me.
Tune in for the final two segments of the series, where we’ll explore The Commons and Energy Harvesting!
