What if nature was not something to extract from but something we nurtured?
What if the environmental crisis is not only a crisis of carbon or consumption, but a crisis of relationship?
For generations, we have been taught to see the Earth as a collection of resources. Timber. Water. Minerals. Land. Even the language gives it away: natural resources, suggesting the living world exists for us to use, own, and extract from. We say human resources too, as if people are raw material waiting to be spent.
When we look at our economic models, we quickly start to trace where the nature as a resource mindset came from.
In a series that explores myths we’re taught in business school, Nate Hagens explains the myth that Price = Value. Markets recognize only what can be bought and sold, and today, price reflects the ability to pay, not genuine need or systemic importance. He illustrates this with the example of a forest that protects a village from flooding. To the market, the forest has no value until the trees are cut down and sold as timber. This exposes a deeper flaw at the heart of our economic system: the market does not exist to improve our lives but to sustain itself. It rewards whatever can be sold while ignoring what truly sustains us, such as clean water, stable communities, or protection from disaster. As Hagens puts it, “this is a kind of blindness that economists refer to as externalities, but these externalities are often the foundations of life. Breathable air, drinkable water, a stable climate, ecosystem, functions of a forest. And the markets measuring stick in today’s economy of value doesn’t see them at all.”
This examples shows that today, our relationship to nature I based on how much money “it” can help us produce. It ignores it’s lifesaving aspect and it ignores real human needs. And most of all, it ignores how we are all part of it.
What would it look like to shift from treating nature as a resource to treating it as a relationship?
Explore The Nature Relationship Spectrum tool
