When the heating bill arrives and the fridge is half-empty, talk of protecting nature can feel like a luxury — a problem for another day, when there are more pressing things to worry about. It’s an understandable reaction. But why are so many households struggling to make ends meet in the first place?
It’s a question that really needs answers. How you begin to answer it depends entirely on how you understand the way economies actually work — and not just the one that we hear about in the news every day, but the deeper systems underneath it.
For years I’d felt a growing unease about the way we talk about the economy — always as if it were a self-contained machine, a set of levers and dials, with nature mentioned only as an afterthought, if at all. The ecosystems that feed us, power us, and keep the weather predictable enough to plan a harvest are treated as background — nice to have, but not fundamental.
I recently came across an idea in John Michael Greer’s book, The Wealth of Nature. In his book Greer sets out the framework I’d been looking for, and I felt it was one that more people needed to see. He argues that what we casually call “the economy” is actually three nested systems, each dependent on the one outside it.
The outermost economy is nature itself. Soil that grows food. Rain that fills reservoirs. Stable weather that makes harvests predictable. Fisheries, forests, clean air. This isn’t background scenery — it’s the foundation on which everything else is built. Greer calls it the primary economy, and the name matters: it comes first, not last.
Inside that sits the secondary economy — the one we usually mean when we talk about work and wages. Farmers, builders, manufacturers, makers. People who take what nature provides and turn it into things we actually need. This economy is real and productive, but it can’t conjure something from nothing. It depends entirely on what the primary economy supplies. It also depends to an extent on the availability of finance and capital, which brings us to:
The tertiary economy: finance. Money, credit, investment, debt. This is the economy that fills the news — interest rates, stock markets, GDP figures. It’s important, but it’s also the most abstract of the three. Money isn’t wealth. It’s a token that’s supposed to represent wealth — a claim on real things, produced by real people, from real natural resources.
The problem is that somewhere along the way, we flipped the order. We started treating the financial economy as if it were the foundation, and nature as if it were just a resource to be converted into cash whenever convenient. And when you run an economy that way, the costs don’t disappear — they just get deferred, and they get paid by the people with the least ability to absorb them.
Think about energy bills. Fossil fuels — coal, oil, gas — are stored solar energy, accumulated over hundreds of millions of years. We’ve been spending that inheritance at extraordinary speed, and the easy reserves are largely gone. What remains is harder to reach, more expensive to extract, and more volatile in price. No single government policy created that underlying reality. The primary economy is simply sending its bill, and it’s arriving at ordinary households first.
Food tells the same story. Decades of industrial agriculture produced cheap food by mining the soil — stripping it of nutrients, treating it with chemicals, drawing down water tables. For a while, it looked like abundance. But you can’t borrow from the land indefinitely. Soil degradation, water stress, and increasingly erratic weather are now feeding directly into the price of a weekly shop. Again, the primary economy is collecting what it’s owed.
Meanwhile, that tertiary economy has been extraordinarily good at capturing the gains from all this activity — and equally good at distributing the losses elsewhere. Asset prices rise; wages stagnate. People profit from cheap energy and cheap food while it lasts; when it stops being cheap, it’s families at the kitchen table who feel it, not shareholder portfolios.
So when someone says, “Why should I worry about nature when I can’t afford to heat my home?” — the honest answer is that these aren’t separate problems. The unaffordable heating bill and the degraded ecosystem are symptoms of the same thing: an economy that has been systematically liquidating its natural foundations and booking the proceeds as profit, while ordinary people absorb the consequences.
Environmentalism has often done itself no favours here. Framed as personal sacrifice — fly less, eat less meat, consume less — it can sound like a demand that struggling people tighten their belts further for the sake of abstract future benefits. That framing deserves the scepticism it gets.
But Greer’s framework points somewhere different. It says that healthy ecosystems aren’t a luxury for the already-comfortable. They’re the material basis of affordable food, stable energy, and liveable conditions for everyone. Defending the primary economy isn’t an alternative to worrying about poverty — it’s one of the most direct things we can do about it.
For some, the choice between heating and eating is real, and it deserves to be taken seriously. What it doesn’t deserve is a false explanation. The pressure on household budgets and the degradation of the natural world aren’t competing concerns — they’re the same bill, arriving at the same door, and it’s getting harder to pay.
And yet none of this is new. I first encountered the Victorian writer John Ruskin not in a book, but in a museum — the Ruskin Museum in Coniston. An actor was voicing Ruskin’s words as part of an exhibit, and the passage I happened to catch was about wealth: how it concentrates, how it pools in fewer and fewer hands. It was written over 150 years ago and it could have been written yesterday. In Unto This Last — cited by Gandhi as one of the books that most influenced his life — Ruskin made a deceptively simple argument: that wealth piled up in the hands of a few is not really wealth at all. Wealth only means something if the people around you can share in it.
What we have built since Ruskin wrote is a system of extraordinary productive power that has become steadily more efficient at concentrating its rewards at the top, while those who actually do the work — who grow the food, build the houses, care for the sick — find themselves with less and less of the real wealth their labour helps create.
Ruskin knew it. Greer has shown us why it was always inevitable. The question now isn’t whether we understand what’s gone wrong. It’s whether we’re willing to demand something different — not just as consumers making better choices, but as people who can see that the foundations our economy has always depended on are being diminished, perhaps fatally.
The economist Kate Raworth argues that what we need is a regenerative economy — one that restores rather than extracts, that sets a floor below which no person should fall, and a ceiling above which we cannot push the natural world without consequence. It is not a utopian idea. It is simply a description of an economy that understands where it actually sits — inside nature, inside society — rather than floating above both, sending the bill downwards.