If all of life is a web, then to be an informed consumer is to see, everywhere, evidence of rips in that that web: burning forests, depleted ecosystems, and people in the streets protesting how they’ve been left behind by our capitalistic model. To understand how we got here, you’d have to review capitalism’s existing relationship between ecology and economy—the latter designed along a linear model of “take- make-waste,” as experts have put it.
A newer, waste-eliminating remedy is gaining momentum in the form of a circular economic model, one that reintegrates all those seemingly nonrenewable byproducts back into the production loop, creating new technologies, businesses, and essentially, purpose out of the extracted resources that gum up our works in the form of emissions and plastic sea sculptures. Importantly, a circular model demands that auxiliary industries—educational, social, and especially financial—take their environmental legacy into account.