"When you think about the world as made up of gifts given to you by plants and animals and land, you have an ethical dilemma on your hands, because if these are gifts from your relatives, you are talking about eating your relatives. You have to figure out a way that life can be sustained while honoring the lives that are given to you. Western capitalism has no such parallel; why is that? Because we don’t view the world as gifts. We view it as our possessions, natural resources, commodities, so there’s no need for ethical restraint in consumption because it’s all stuff. It’s just objects, not subjects, so we can consume it however we want, which is mostly dishonorably. But the world creates ethical requirements."