ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the type of reconciliation that is closest to my heart: reconciliation between humanity and nature, between the species and the rest of the world. The key elements of natural capital, that is, everything that underlies the market economy, including earth's arable land, our ground water, forests, marine fisheries, petroleum, and so forth, are finite. With population and consumption continuing to increase, the per capita amounts of resources left to be harvested are falling and destined to do so at an increasingly faster pace in the future. The immediate future is usefully conceived as a bottleneck. There are two collateral effects for the bottleneck phenomenon worth keeping in mind, and congruent to the subject of reconciliation. The first is that the rich grow richer and the poor grow poorer. The second collateral effect, the one to which the chapter paid a lot of attention in the work, is the acceleration of the natural environment in leading to the mass extinction of ecosystems and species.
