The Ecosystem Economy

1Sparks of Magic: The Road from Sectors to Earliest Ecosystems

Let's start by going all the way back to the beginning—to humanity's earliest days, thousands and thousands of years ago. Back then, humans were nomadic bands of hunter-gatherers striving for basic subsistence, only slightly more capable than the hominids from the opening scenes of 2001: A Space Odyssey who discover the use of tools. Life was, as Thomas Hobbes famously put it in his Leviathan, “nasty, brutish, and short.”¹

Think of everything that has happened since then. Humans developed agriculture and founded permanent settlements. We domesticated animals, learned to make metal, built cities, and developed sophisticated societies with thriving political and artistic cultures.² The human lifespan tripled. The difference between what life was for humans then and what it is now is staggering—it is incalculable. And yet, if we look closely, we will see that there is one thing that has remained relatively unchanged over all these years—from the very beginning of organized work until very recently: this whole time, humans have been organizing their work into discrete categories that essentially functioned as sectors of the economy.

As civilization grew more advanced and thus more complex, people needed work to be more organized and efficient. The result was that, over time, the boundaries between these categories gradually became more and more delineated. When humans were nomadic hunter-gatherers, it made sense for ...