Capitalism as the fundamental culprit is a pervasive figure when discussing the climate crisis (see Jason Hickel and Yanis Varoufakis as one of thousands of examples).

In a book just published, Capitalism: A Global History (2026), Sven Beckett says that capitalism is a ‘process’. It is ‘not a discrete historical event with a beginning and an end’. He tracks the process back to the port of Aden in 1150 and the lively trade hub between Asia and the Middle East which formed part of a ‘capitalist archipelago’. Inventing new trades like accountancy and insurance. But their accumulation of profit for its own sake was regarded with suspicion by rulers, religions and ordinary people alike. They enjoyed wealth without power or prestige. They needed the state’s collaboration which developed between 1450 and 1650, when the discovery of the Americas. From that point, trade routes grew, territory was appropriated, land was destroyed, people enslaved, conflict and war arose.

All this sounds plausible, but do the roots reach a deeper level? Did the use of intensive plantations, the production of cash crops, the use of slave labour, and the erosion by deforestation, deep ploughing and irrigation begin with capitalism? No, as described by Daniel Voskoboynik, all this was rife in ancient Egypt. And in ancient Greece, hundreds of thousands of slaves are estimated to have died from lead poisoning from work in mines. Lead mining started about 4000 BCE but reached its height in the Roman era with wide-spread illnesses through poisoning. Was wealth, profit, territory, trade built on these abusive practices affecting people and the earth? Here a minority sought wealth along with power and prestige. There was not insurance, banking, corporations, or state collaboration as in the ‘modern era’. But everything was run by and for the minority and not the majority. No exploitation of the ‘working class’ as such but common slaves were exploited across Egypt, Greece, Rome and the Americas. The earth is used as a resource in much the same way.

Prompted by Michel Serres, I would go much further back in finding the roots of capitalist practice, but here I offer the thoughts of Daniel R Wildcat, a professor at Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kansas. He writes that we ‘must begin to understand our lives as essentially not about us’ but our place in the totality of living things. Humankind is not the ‘ultimate measure of value’.

When did humans start to think that living is essentially about us?

Daniel Voskoboynik 2018 The Memory We Could Be. Oxford: New Internationalist.

Daniel R. Wildcat 2009 Red Alert! Colorado: Fulcrum