Wealth & Money Quote by Peter Coyote

Coyote flips the usual power fantasy of capitalism on its head: the economy isn’t the container and nature the backdrop; nature is the container, and everything else is rent-paying. The line “subset of the environment” is doing more than offering a neat metaphor. It’s a framing weapon, meant to puncture the everyday language of “balancing” jobs against the planet, as if ecological stability were a special interest instead of the operating system.

As an actor and longtime activist, Coyote’s authority isn’t technocratic; it’s cultural. He’s speaking to the common civic story we keep telling ourselves: that growth is a master switch, and whatever it breaks can be fixed later with money and ingenuity. His repetition - “you can’t have a healthy economy, you can’t have a healthy anything” - sounds almost conversational, but it’s structured like a tightening noose. The point is not that environmental damage is bad; it’s that degradation is an upstream condition that poisons every downstream debate, from inflation to public health to national security. “Anything” refuses carve-outs. No industry, no ideology gets an exemption.

The subtext is a warning about category error. Treating the environment as one sector among many lets business externalize costs and politicians sell “trade-offs” that aren’t real trade-offs, because there’s no alternative biosphere waiting in reserve. In a moment when ESG can feel like branding and climate policy gets negotiated like a budget line, Coyote insists on first principles: you can’t out-earn physics.