THE STEWARDSHIP SPECIES

. What the Main Text Described

The book you have just finished was written under a discipline I set for myself at the start and kept to the last page. It describes. It does not accuse. It traces the living systems on which every human economy rests (soil, water, carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, climate, the slow work of biodiversity) and asks why a civilisation that depends on them completely keeps degrading them. The answer it gives is structural rather than moral. I called the condition *structural blindness*: an accounting system that registers extraction and ignores the processes that make extraction possible, institutions whose time horizons (the fiscal year, the electoral cycle, the quarterly earnings report) are far shorter than the cycles of soil and forest, and a political arrangement in which, as Chapter 4 put it, the benefits of conversion are concentrated while the costs are dispersed.