I don’t believe that capital is a concept created by the Judaeo-Christian culture. Capital I.m.o. is a fundamental quantification of anything and giving it a value as a thing-in-itself. Value in turn is a function of scarcity. Abundant water in rainfall for example is less valued than rare water in a desert to users. A primitive tribe might regard itself as part of nature and not be wrong about that, and if it had abundant resources no particular value system might arise to a level at all resembling anything structured, yet if any disturbance to the force of nature occurs that makes living a challenge, the response of a tribe would be a function of the increase in value of the resource disturbed or reduced in quantity. Scarcity is the cause for the origin of capital even if it is manufactured as a novel product that becomes desired-with implicit scarcity before mass production.
Why can’t public goods be traded in the market? In the United States some public goods are owned by the government (i.e. land, water, oil, minerals etc.) and can easily be given a price and sold in the market. Maybe in some nations they cannot be traded.
If ecosystem service are worth more than 150 trillion dollars annually and setting aside ecosystems because the value particular ecosystems have are annually worth more than 100 times what it costs to buy them in dollars, and the loss of income to particular users of ecosystems not conserved is about 1/100th what the loss would be to public users of the ecosystems if they aren’t conserved, why can’t either major U.S. political party move to set aside and restore more ecosystems at a progressive pace of perhaps a trillion worth of acquisitions each year (maybe through taxes on the rich and a decrease in the military budget)?
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