Life-taking systems compared to life-giving systems are the essential polarity of human civilization’s spiritual, economic, and ecological struggle. One paradigm consumes, extracts, commodifies, and alienates; the other nurtures, regenerates, harmonizes, and connects. These are the forces that either nourish or vampirize the living world.

A taking system is built on extraction. It is the foundation of empire which sees Earth not as a living web of relationships, but as a warehouse of resources to be plundered. It views human beings as units of labor, as consumers, as demographic segments to be manipulated. These systems — settler colonialism, unbalanced industrial capitalism, and technocratic surveillance states, are obsessed with control. They create scarcity in the midst of abundance to maintain leverage. They produce alienation by severing people from land, from each other, and from their own inner depths.

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