So what do I mean by place? In only a very superficial sense it is this acre where I live and where I have “property rights”. Property rights give me the human authority to determine what activities will take place on this acre – whether we will allow activities that diminish life processes here – whether we will invest in enhancing life processes here. But this acre is not an island, and even if it were, the life process playing out here would still be directly connected to a much larger place.

Think of it instead as a focal point of a set of transactions. This place that I inhabit – in which I try to be aware of all the forces playing out around and through me – is the set of transactions that I can affect and that affect me.

We are aware that the wind blowing in over the mountains carries dust from as far as the Gobi Desert. The dust settles on the leaves of the trees here and the rain washes it into the soil – nutrient and pollutant. Where water flows it leaches nutrients/pollutants - where water stands the leached nutrients/pollutants settle out and become part of that place. In my place, we import water from the other side of the mountains, 'purify' it with chlorine and distribute it to millions of people who could not live here without it.

So, I think, that place is not so much that which we can locate on a map – it is this focal point I am trying to articulate. And, within any such set of focused transactions we can decide to simplify, and reduce the number of interactions or we can decide to add more and more kinds of transactions. The one approach deplete resources over time – the other approach accumulates resources over time.