Quote Originally Posted by bae View Post
Let me provide another example.

Lovely trees grow all over my land. They grow fast, they grow tall, and they grow strong. If I "extract" the resource of the wood, I have huge supplies of firewood, and marketable timber for producing wood to build other peoples' homes. If I don't "extract" the resource, the high winds here will eventually topple the nearby trees and crush my house and outbuildings, assuming a wildfire doesn't sweep through first and burn everything down. If I do "extract" the resource, it grows back quite swiftly - it is a never-ending struggle not to be overrun by trees here.

The same line of thinking goes for the deer on the land here.

And pretty much every drop of water that lands here from the sky.
Yes, but you are a member of the society in which you live--a small community that seems to be interdependent with a vested interest in maintaining the quality of life there. Good stewardship of your property is what motivates you.

That's different than someone coming in and deciding that your trees will make them lots of money if they log them all and take them to the mainland and sell the logs to Lumber Liquidator for the benefit of strangers and stockholders with big profits as the only raison d'être.