Daily Inspiration Quote by Susan George

Susan George reaches for the language of balance sheets because it’s one of the few dialects that can still interrupt business-as-usual. Calling ecosystems "natural capital" is a strategic concession to an economic worldview that treats everything as a line item; then she flips the premise. Capital isn’t meant to be casually spent. It’s the productive base you protect if you plan to have a future. By insisting that nature is capital rather than income, she reframes environmental damage from a sad externality into a solvency crisis.

The bite is in the phrase "as if". George isn’t describing ignorance; she’s diagnosing a cultivated fantasy: that extraction is self-correcting, that forests, fisheries, soils, and aquifers behave like quarterly revenue streams. The subtext is moral as much as economic: modern growth depends on laundering depletion into prosperity, counting liquidation as profit. We don’t just overuse; we misclassify, which makes the overuse look rational.

Her final clause widens the time horizon into something almost accusatory. “Next year” is the tempo of politics and corporate reporting; “hundreds of years” is the tempo of repair. That mismatch is the real villain here, a structural incentive to borrow from deep time while paying nothing back. Coming from an activist steeped in development and globalization debates, the context is also distributive: the benefits of spending this “capital” concentrate quickly, while the costs land later, elsewhere, and on people with the least power to refuse the terms. George’s intent is to make environmental collapse legible as an accounting fraud we’re committing against the future.