The anxiety and despair of the world’s humans — and other living beings — is intensifying by the day as the vast majority of us feel increasingly helpless to stop a dizzying array of acts that have disastrous effects on our dignity and every other aspect of our lives:

• Annihilating ancient biodiverse tropical forests and landscapes to make way for genetically modified monoculture crops that deplete and pollute groundwater, contaminate soils, and indebt already impoverished farmers so acutely that many opt for suicide 
• Freshwater-guzzling soft drink manufacturing plants and Artificial Intelligence (AI) data centers lapping up resources accessed freely or at heavily subsidized prices, while leaving communities with unemployment, water and energy scarcity, and unaffordably high utility costs 
• Governments of militarily powerful nation-states waging unilateral AI-dependent aerial wars on innocent civilians, wreaking havoc on the availability of global non-renewable commodities like oil and its derivatives, including fertilizers for industrial food production and synthetic clothing 
• Manipulating prices of essential commodities and services by gambling (in ‘legalized’ speculation markets), price gouging (by corporations-governments), and geopolitical machinations (e.g., through war-waging)  
• Large multinational companies undertaking open-pit coal mining operations in the backyards of marginalized and impoverished rural communities, lethally inundating their lungs with coal dust while devastating the ecological webs (ecowebs) they inhabit 
• Uncharacteristic drought or floods rendering rural lands unusable, forcing girls and women to leave their villages in search of toiling laborer work and often being subjected to sexual exploitation and violence as a result 
• Corporations and/or nation-state governments (mis-)appropriating the ancestral lands and resources of Indigenous/ tribal peoples through genocide, war, and/or economic extortion for the purpose of private, extractive, wealth-accumulating use

Corporate Extractivism: power over people and planet to exploit and deplete

What do all these acts have in common?

1. These acts are undertaken by a small number of extractivist actors, i.e., those in corporations and governments with immense economic and ‘legal’ power, whom the negatively impacted masses cannot generally challenge without being subjected to violence and silencing.
2. These acts serve the globally imposed economic-legal-political system, the contemporary form of European imperialism/ colonialism, that has the goal of enriching the small number of extractivist actors by depleting finite non-renewable environmental resources (e.g., oil, cadmium, metals, natural gas), unsustainably and callously using renewable resources (e.g., trees, livestock, soil, fresh water), and exploiting, violating, and killing humans.
3. These acts directly erode the dignity and wellbeing of the majority of humans because they are stripped of their autonomous power to control how and whether they meet all five types of their basic needs: (1) food, clothing, and shelter, (2) water and equitable resource access, (3) energy, (4) human-ecological wellbeing (encompassing human health and ecoweb health), and (5) identity-culture understanding and expression. In the current global system, most people are prevented from meeting all of their basic needs on a regular basis.

When extractivist actors are not declaring outright that their exploitation and depletion of resources (extractivism) is for wealth- and power-accumulating purposes, they tend to justify their acts on the basis of superiority (racial, religious, and/or gender) and/or patronizing charity.

A few examples of patronizing charity are:

• People in x nation-state cannot fend for themselves, so we are going to wage war on their behalf and they will be liberated (to become a part of the 'sanctioned' global trade-governance system).
• We (corporations-governments) need to provide employment for people because they do not have the intelligence and/or creativity to sustain themselves otherwise.
• People do not have the capability of meeting their basic needs themselves, so charitable interventions are necessary to 'help' them through a combination of government welfare programs and philanthropy by the wealthy.   

The fact is that at current industrial-urban production and consumption levels extractivist actors will have exhausted our planet’s stores of many non-renewable resources, including fossil fuels, in less than a century, making today’s extractivist trade-governance systems untenable in a few generations. Even if we could ignore this fact about the finiteness of non-renewable resources, a more important question must be posed: how do we ensure the dignity and wellbeing of all people and our planet not only now, in this moment, but for thousands of years from now?

The answer lies outside of the paradigm of corporate extractivism, which is predicated on a multitude of dogmas that together result in the beliefs underlying superiority and patronizing charity: 

• segregation (e.g., humans from their ecologies, humans from each other, siloed knowledge areas), 
• individualism, commodification, and othering, 
• fragmentation, reductionism, and control, 
• the right of dominion (e.g., the right to exclusionary private property), and 
• a scarcity mindset.

Collaborative Regeneration: power Inherent in people and planet to thrive

Justifications of corporate extractivism based on superiority and patronizing charity are flawed, not merely from an ethics perspective but, more importantly, from a first principles^[1] perspective.

First Principles of healthy ecological webs (ecowebs)

A number of first principles apply to a healthy ecoweb^[2], i.e., an ecological web comprising abiotic components (e.g., water, minerals) and many types of biodiverse organisms — including humans — existing ecosymbiotically:

1. Every living being is governed by the evolutionary imperative of survival and propagation, which it is able to achieve due to its inherent intelligence and creativity. To maximize the chances of survival and propagation, living beings organize and integrate themselves into at least two levels of interdependent, interconnected systems: (a) a community of many of the same (sub-)species, and (b) a network of communities of diverse living beings that are mutually beneficial (ecoweb). As a result of this intelligent and creative network-building (self-organizing), living beings within a particular ecoweb are ecosymbiotically self-reliant, meaning they are collaboratively able to meet their basic needs regeneratively (i.e., by replenishing and nurturing each other within the ecoweb).
2. Living beings are adaptively resilient^[3], meaning they have an inherent ability to recover from and adapt to change (e.g., water shortages, temperature fluctuations, floods) as an interconnected, interdependent, intelligent, creative network of biodiverse organisms and abiotic components.
3. Members of each human community evolved both physiologically (through biochemical and genetic adaptation) and culturally (through the intelligent and creative development of their identity and Knowledge-Technologies-Practices (Knowtep^[4])) to optimally adapt themselves to the ecoweb they ancestrally inhabited/ inhabit, giving rise to jīvadiversity^[5] (diversity in living). In other words, each human community still inhabiting the ecoweb in which it evolved is different in physiology and culture because it is optimally adapted to its particular ecoweb, enabling it to be ecosymbiotically self-reliant^[6] (i.e., meet all five types of basic needs through the community's own efforts locally and regeneratively).   

Thus, coming back to the question of how we can ensure the dignity and wellbeing of people and planet now and for thousands of years from now, the answer is simple: we must create the conditions to strengthen the EcoResilience of each community and the ecoweb it inhabits.

Continued... (scroll to below the bibliography to access next part)

[1] First principles are those that can be discerned and/or deduced from observation. Some examples are that the sun rises in the east, plants produce oxygen, humans inhale oxygen, and that atmospheric nitrogen is converted into usable (by plants) forms of nitrogen by nitrogen-fixing organisms in healthy soil.

[2] K. Mitra, Ecological Webs (Ecowebs): Collaborative Creativity Through Adaptation Feedback Loops, Ecosymbionts all Regenerate Together (EaRTh): DOI-EaRTh092025-006 (3 Sep., 2025).

[3] K. Mitra, Ecosymbiosis: the Basis of Adaptive Resilience Involving Biodiversity (Ecosymbiotic Resilience), Ecosymbionts all Regenerate Together (EaRTh): DOI-EaRTh092025-007 (3 Sep., 2025).

[4] K. Mitra, Ādi-Knowtep and Their Importance in Ecosymbiotic Resilience of Human Communities, Ecosymbionts all Regenerate Together (EaRTh): DOI-EaRTh092025-008 (4 Sep., 2025).

[5] K. Mitra, Beyond Biodiversity: Jīvadiversity — Diversity in Living, Ecosymbionts all Regenerate Together (EaRTh): DOI-EaRTh082025-003 (21 Aug., 2025).

[6] S. Mukherjee & K. Mitra, Ecosymbiotic Self-Reliance: Fulfilling Basic Needs from Ecowebs, Ecosymbionts all Regenerate Together (EaRTh): DOI-EaRTh092025-010 (11 Sep., 2025).