The monetary individual is what separates environmental preservation and the economy. The result is existential climate change.

The three characteristics that defined people as monetary individuals also marked them as a distinct race: First, they had demonstrated superior intelligence by tacitly consenting to money, enabling them to produce more than they could use, and creating conditions under which they could multiply the stock of wealth available to humans. Second, they took part in social wealth creation as acquisitive and rational people who attempted to enrich themselves.24 And finally, they embraced whatever inequality emerged from monetary dynamics, and considered it just. These three characteristics set monetary individuals ontologically apart from those who remained in a state of nature, and gave them a sense of social cohesion through racial belonging.

Locke contrasted what he considered monetized spaces with those that remained in a state of nature: in Europe, where “people under government . . . have money and commerce,” it was no longer justified to claim land by working it. But where current inhabitants had not consented to money, Europeans could “mix” their labor with “uncultivated” land, for instance, in the “vacant places of America,” whose “inhabitants haven’t joined with the rest of mankind in the consent of the use of their common money.” The alleged absence of money from Native societies meant that “wild Indian[s]” had not yet developed their productive capacities: the “wild woods and uncultivated waste of America . . . left to nature, without any improvement, tillage or husbandry,” were available for Europeans to take. It is in this context that Locke wrote a famous sentence in which he defined a new era by inventing a past in which, he claimed, Native societies were still trapped: “In the beginning all the world was America . . . for no such thing as money was any where known.”25