“Modern man does not experience himself as a part of nature but as an outside force destined to dominate it. He even talks of a battle with nature, forgetting that, if he won the battle, he would find himself on the losing side…” – E.F. Schumacher, 1973, ‘Small is Beautiful: Economics as if people mattered.’
The same dualist economic worldview dominates today, but just more sophisticated and ‘greenwashed’.
We aren’t just inextricably part of nature, we are nature. Living interdependently within an intelligent earth, animate with life force connecting and organising us all. The evidence is all around us. We know. Mainstream science knows. Why then does a Cartesian dualistic economic system still persist, where the only rule is profit and the price is nature and our spirit.
In the 60s Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock demonstrated that our earth is intelligent, living, and symbiotic in a number of respected scientific publications (Gaia hypothesis) discrediting the neo-Darwinian idea that new species only arise through the death of others or survival from competition.
Margulis showed that new life depended on cooperation with other species and their symbiosis at the microbial level (The Origin of Mitosing Cells, 1967), all the way to macro life.
Ancient civilisations knew this forever. The emergence of life through cooperation is accepted. Not that we need scientists to tell us; we just need look around, at a tree, within, to know this to be true.. An economic system (system for allocating earth’s resources for wellbeing of society) should reflect this nature.
But capitalist markets atomise; separating spirit from matter, and humans from non-human nature. The result is a grabby-get-what-you-can mentality, no matter how sophisticated it looks.
Life science shifted to a systems thinking to recognise the emergent properties of life (see Fritjof Capra) studying the whole. So economics must do the same of nature.
Unfortunately, across the world one of the first things that secondary school students learn in economics is that nature is ‘land’ and land is a factor of production – nature, life, a living earth is entirely reduced to a means of production.
The dogma arose in 17th century from Descartes’ dualistic world view that spirit and matter, nature and man are separate and the latter has dominion over the former. It has shaped a mechanistic science that studies discrete events like nuts and bolts of a machine not nature as a living whole. This lead to an economic system that separates and extracts: it’s internal logic being to accumulate at any cost.
Schumacher understood the need to build a new economics, then.
System change may take time. We can question why we do what do what we do, buy what we buy: what do we consider authentic wholesome needs vs artificial ones (the price being extraction from nature and spirit).
Elevate Economics 
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