“There is no wealth without land, no prosperity without water, and no economy without a living Earth.”
— Dr. Glen Barry
Ecology is the study of our shared home; economy is its management. An economy that destroys its ecology is a household destroying itself. I work in investment management, building backend AI systems, and I am also a long-time committed deep ecologist. Many see these as contradictory. I see them as two views of the same reality; one that must converge as ecological limits impose themselves on economic reality.
I am not an investment professional. What follows is not investment advice, but a statement of personal values and strategy.
The condition of our land, air, and water has reached a breaking point. These are not abstract environmental concerns or distant risks; they are the destruction of the elemental biological conditions that make human life possible. Without clean water, fertile soil, and breathable air, societies cannot function. In many regions, they already do not. What we are witnessing are not “environmental problems” separate from economics, but the steady erosion of the ecological foundations upon which all economies rest.
The End of the Extraction Illusion
For centuries, we have treated Earth’s ecosystems as infinite sources of raw material and endless sinks for waste. That fantasy is ending. We have exceeded the Earth’s carrying capacity, and the overshoot is now expressing itself as ecological breakdown across land, air, and water. Forests collapse, soils erode, rivers fail, and the atmosphere destabilizes, all at once. This unraveling of the environment is inseparable from the erosion of social cohesion, economic opportunity, and democratic political order. What appears as political instability or economic stress is, at root, a civilization colliding with biophysical limits.
This overshoot is driven not simply by population, but by obscene inequality layered onto sheer numbers. Billions survive on a few dollars a day, consuming little individually yet exerting immense collective pressure, while a tiny global elite lives in relentless excess, extracting, flying, building, and burning as if the planet were infinite. The richest pollute the most by orders of magnitude, yet the poorest suffer first and hardest. Any honest response must confront both realities at once: stabilizing population through the education and empowerment of girls and women, and dismantling extreme wealth concentration through taxation and accountability. There is no ecological future that permits limitless accumulation by the few on a finite planet already pushed beyond its carrying capacity.
The biosphere—the thin, fragile skin of life that makes civilization possible—is being torn apart in real time. Forests that took millennia to form are erased in hours. Rivers that sustained civilizations for thousands of years now run dry, are toxic, and become flashpoints of conflict. The atmosphere itself, stable throughout the entire span of human history, is being destabilized before our eyes. This is not a warning. It is already underway.
Deep ecology reminds us that nature has intrinsic value beyond human use, that we are members of ecological communities rather than rulers standing above other creatures. But even stripped of ethics and compassion, the arithmetic does not change. Physics and biology do not negotiate.
We are crossing into lethal territory. Climate change alone is already killing people, and it will kill many more. At the same time, we are dismantling soils, forests, and grasslands through desertification, erosion, and industrial abuse. These failures do not occur in isolation. They compound. They accelerate. Systems that once absorbed shock are failing together.
The most terrifying convergence is water, the lack of which is poised to cause dramatic global disruption. When climate disruption, land collapse, and atmospheric instability collide, potable water disappears. Aquifers are drained faster than they can recharge. Glaciers that supply billions are melting out of existence. Rivers fail. Reservoirs empty. Cities confront the unthinkable: taps that run dry. This is where the illusion finally shatters. Without water, people do not migrate, they die horribly in place. Not as statistics, but as bodies. In heat. In thirst. At scale.
No functioning ecosystems means no functioning economy. Jobs do not exist on a dead planet. Financial portfolios are meaningless without clean water to drink or food to eat or air to breathe.
There is no wealth without land, no prosperity without water, and no economy without a living Earth.
Capital as Leverage: Why ESG and Impact Investing Matter
This is where ESG and impact investing move from ethical preference to economic necessity. Capital is leverage. Where money flows, advancement is possible. If investment continues to favor fossil fuel extraction, soil-depleting industrial agriculture, and pollution-intensive manufacturing, we accelerate our own unraveling. Redirected toward regeneration, capital can slow damage, stabilize systems, and in some cases begin repair.
Water makes this plain. Watershed restoration does not merely secure drinking water for cities, it sustains agriculture, protects wildlife, and provides flood control worth billions. Investments in water purification, reuse, and sustainable management are not charity. They acknowledge that water scarcity is one of the defining constraints of this century. The Colorado River barely reaches the sea. The Ganges, Nile, and Yellow River are under severe stress. The investment opportunity lies in solutions, not denial and continued water-intensive overuse.
The same logic applies to regenerative agriculture and reforestation. Industrial farming has stripped immense quantities of topsoil in a single century. Regenerative practices rebuild soil, sequester carbon, increase long-term productivity, and restore resilience. Ecosystem restoration restores biodiversity, moderates local climate, and delivers ecosystem services whose value far exceeds what current balance sheets capture. These are not soft returns. When honestly accounted for, they are foundational to both surviving and thriving.
Air quality investments matter just as much. Renewable energy replaces fossil fuel combustion that both destabilizes the climate and poisons human lungs. Millions die each year from air pollution. Beyond the moral imperative, the economics are decisive. Renewables are increasingly cheaper than fossil fuels, storage is advancing rapidly, and the transition is structural, not ideological. Renewable energy markets continue to hold up, and clearly will win, despite opposition from entrenched interests.
Pricing True Costs
Traditional finance has priced nature at zero. Forests are valuable when cut. Rivers when dammed. Ecosystems when converted into commodities. This accounting is suicidal. Environmental economists have long understood that we systematically fail to internalize external costs into prices, privatizing profits while socializing ecological damage. When a river is polluted, downstream communities pay. When the climate destabilizes, future generations pay. This is not a market failure; it is how the system was built.
The power to change this unsustainable economic system lies not in abstract markets, but in the decisions of policymakers, investors, fiduciaries, pension funds, and insurers who determine what is financed, priced, and insured—and what is not.
Capitalism has generated extraordinary prosperity and lifted billions from poverty. It may be the worst economic system we have, except for all the others we have tried, but it was never designed to respect ecological limits, or to know when is enough. Having treated the biosphere as expendable, we are now colliding with the consequences of that worldview. If capitalism is to survive its own success, it must evolve.
Pollution, habitat destruction, and resource depletion can no longer be free. The costs must be internalized and natural assets properly accounted for. Carbon must have a price. Ecosystem destruction must have a price. Clean water, breathable air, and fertile soil must be recognized as the finite, irreplaceable assets they are. And show up on the balance sheet. Until we account for the nature we are losing and the condition of what still remains, we will keep losing it, paying far more later to survive the damage.
Going further, a viable economic system must do more than price destruction; it must reward restoration. Those who invest in ending habitat loss, repairing degraded ecosystems, and rebuilding natural capital must have a legitimate means to earn returns. A regenerative economy does not merely internalize externalities; it captures ecological rent on behalf of society while directing profit toward activities that restore soils, forests, watersheds, and climate stability.
When capital flows toward regeneration rather than extraction, markets begin to align with biophysical reality. The alternative is to continue subsidizing collapse—socializing ecological damage while privatizing short-term gain—until the costs overwhelm any remaining capacity to adapt.
An economy is only legitimate if it serves the biosphere that makes it possible.
Aligning Capital with Ecological Reality
My investment strategy follows directly from this ecological reality. I focus primarily on renewable energy and water, while seeking opportunities in sustainable agriculture. (And yes, AI - but that's a subject for another day.) These sectors address the most basic requirements of any functioning economy: a stable climate, drinkable water, and fertile land.
I am currently underperforming the broader market, and I accept that this may persist as capital continues to chase short-lived narratives and extractive returns. Over the medium to long term, however, I believe these investments offer the most credible path to durable value because they align with physical reality rather than financial abstraction. Economies do not exist apart from energy, water, food, and stable ecosystems; they are built on them.
The biophysical reality that deep ecology recognizes will eventually force itself into economic accounting. When externalities are properly accounted for, when pollution, habitat destruction, and resource depletion carry their true costs, regenerative ecological investments will outperform extractive ones. Not as moral preference, but as reflection of actual costs and returns. Physical reality does not negotiate with financial abstractions. The costs we've been hiding will become visible, and capital allocated according to ecological reality will win.
Or both the global biosphere and economy collapse.
If I were to lose substantial money on these investments, it will be because of societal collapse and a functionally dead planet. We’ve all lost everything that matters and markets no longer exist. There is no scenario where ignoring ecological breakdown preserves wealth. But if these investments succeed, we’ve helped build an economy that can actually sustain itself, earning returns while ensuring basic needs are met widely and comfortable, dignified lives become achievable for all.
Few investments are more rational than those that protect land, water, and air. Not because it is virtuous to care about nature (though it is) but because everything else depends on it. Every meal, every breath, all love, every community exists within living systems. Investing in their protection and restoration is not idealism. It is realism.
The question is not whether we should prioritize ecological investment. The question is whether we will do it in time.
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The views expressed are personal and not those of my employer or any other affiliates.
