Something I have been trying to communicate for a long time is simple, but I need to make it too impactful to ignore. The problem is this. In our accountings of ‘cost’ — the accountings we use to make decisions about profit, cost, loss, etc. — there is no value for living beings or the environment. The ‘value’ is ‘whatever you can get them for’. So if you can buy 6 square miles of pristine, untouched forest somewhere for $400.00 US. That becomes it’s value in the cost/benefit equation. Living places have no value. Living beings have no value. The oceans? No value. The forests? No value. The air? No value. Silence? No value. Nontoxic living environments? No value.

So, if you want to transform a nontoxic environment into a toxic environment (to make a rapid, gigantic profit), all you have to do is spend whatever money is necessary to quiet (or kill, or discredit) any effective objectors. That’s the cost of that ‘property’ which you may now dispose of as you please.

The actual value of these assets is this: priceless. Infinite. But, for commerce and business, this form of value is equal to this: zero. Since it is priceless, they simply take it, pay whatever penalties must be paid, and then the people, the living places, and our future dies for a ‘profit’ of $200/acre. The actual value of those acres was billions of dollars. But that value will never be extracted, because when it was (effectively) sold for $200.00, it was scatter-burned and transformed into a soy farm. It’s value now? Not much. Billions and eternities… converted into not much, a little momentary profit, and a loss that grows more catastrophic with each passing year that the land and organisms there are =permanently and forever missing from our lives and world=.

Here’s another example. No one knows how many beings must die to transmit a photograph on the internet. No one is checking. Common people believe that the ‘cost’ of using the internet is: none. They are wrong. The actual environmental costs, the real costs in the lives of animals, insects, living places, and human beings is… actually rather severe. But no one examines this. In fact, they may post photographs of what the internet is destroying and not realize that those photographs, in being posted, are destroying what they contain: to photograph something is, indeed, to threaten or kill… but to transmit this into the internet is definitely not ‘cost free’. Not by a long shot. I suspect that, if we were to carefully account -all- of the costs of the lifespan of a single moderately popular electronic image (12,000,000 views, 5 years), we would discover that the costs were unthinkably catastrophic. Even when averaged.

Our ideas about commerce and information are wrong. We are not equipped to correctly evaluate the costs of our commercial, corporate, national, social, and technological choices. At all. And so, what is happening, is this: rapists and pirates are stealing the future because ‘it doesn’t cost anything to do so and anyone is welcome to whatever they can steal’.

We need, as a species, to -understand cost in a new way-. Entirely. A way that doesn’t fit easily into modern balance sheets, which were, in fact, invented by ignoring the costs of the products, in living beings, places, and environments, that were done to extract, brand, package, and sell those products to the world.

Living beings and ecologies… the future of life on earth… are more than nations or corporations can ‘account’ for, and thus they must -never- be allowed to dispose of our land, our natural resources, our bodies, or our future. Any and all intelligent means must be used to stop them. Now. And forever.