ranprieur's this page is gold
https://www.ranprieur.com/archives/012.html
https://orionmagazine.org/article/the-ecology-of-work/
this essay seems to put in words exactly what I'm thinking - probably because i spent a lot of time reading such pieces, but
excerpt Capitalism as a system of ever-accelerating production and consumption is, as we environmentalists continually insist, not sustainable.
That is, it is a system intent on its own death.
Yet the capitalist will stoically look destruction in the face before he will stop what he’s doing, especially if he believes that it is somebody else whose destruction is in question.
Unlike most of the people living under him, the capitalist is a great risk-taker largely because he believes that his wealth insulates him from the consequences of risks gone bad.
Ever the optimistic gambler with other people’s money, the capitalist is willing to wager that, while there may be costs to pay, he won’t have to pay them.
Animals, plants, impoverished people near and far may have to pay, but he bets that he won’t. If called upon to defend his actions, he will of course argue that he has a constitutionally protected right to property and the pursuit of his own happiness. This is his “freedom.” At that point, we have the unfortunate habit of shutting up when we ought to reply, “Yes, but yours is a freedom without conscience.”
and the kicker
Environmentalists are, on the whole, educated and successful people, many of whom have prospered within corporate capitalism. They’re not against it. They simply seek to establish a balance between the needs of the economy (as they blandly put it) and the needs of the natural world. For both capitalism and environmentalism, there is a hard division between land set aside for nature and land devoted to production
.......
Ideally, the map of natural preservation and the map of economic activity would be one map.
