Drawing down the wealth of the world and calling it “income”:

this is a massive tragedy of the commons issue.… The seas are a classic example. Most large fish are now gone from the ocean due to what has effectively been a free for all, despite there often being such things as treaties and quotas. Fishermen typically consider themselves good stewards of the resource, but assume their competitors are plunderers — and foreign competitors are the worst. They feel compelled to increase their takes until overcapitalized fleets are competing for the last fish, and when the fishery is no longer viable, they blame it on the foreign fleets.

But every fleet is someone’s foreign fleet. That is the tragedy. And I think this fishing example can be extrapolated to our broader ecological global economic superorganism situation. “Every fleet is someone else’s fleet” is the same dynamic that we face with more and more financial claims on an underlying biophysical reality.