The Treadmill
The treadmill is the operation symbol of what constitutes “the central institution of society” in the modern world: the capitalist economic system. This system involves everyone from the top down to the bottom and while those at the top cannot get off for fear of losing everything they have accumulated, they can at least job while those at the bottom must continually run faster and faster merely to avoid thrown against the wall by inertia.
King Midas
The figure of King Midas is a legend about a man whose wish for everything he touched to turn to gold came true, but who got burned in the end when he touched his daughter and she turned to gold. The story has become symbolic for the manner in which capitalist economics has turned ecological decision into monetary transactions. In the effort to either protect every penny or wring out every dollar out regulatory changes and investment opportunities to “go green” capitalism has put itself on a path toward making money with short-term vision that ultimately will backfire in the long run at a cost more dear than it seems many can imagine possible.
Wonderland
When Alice goes down the rabbit hole into Wonderland she enters a world which seems topsy-turvy in which everything she knows to be true or familiar is turned on its head and presented in opposition to expectations. From Lewis Carroll’s adventures, the authors have co-opted the concept of a place where only those living free from reality and faithfully committed to their fantasy worldview accept that no rift exists between capitalist ideology and repairing ecological damage. Or, as the authors put more straightforwardly:
“it is only in Wonderland that environmental problems either do not really exist or can be solved by capitalism”
The Metabolic System
The fundamental underlying symbol on which the premise of the book’s argument is based is that of metabolic system of living organisms. This organic system of metabolic balance is situated inorganically as the “social metabolic order” which is constructed from the interrelationship between an economic system and the natural world which provides the resources necessary to sustain that system.
Thorstein Veblen
Although Karl Marx is mentioned, referenced, quoted or alluded to about fifty times more often in the text, it is the radical turn of the 20th century American economic Thorstein Veblen who eventually becomes situated as the symbolic figure of prescience in the book. Veblen essentially single-handed originated the study of consumer capitalism and created the concept of conspicuous consumption and the economic model of “keeping up with the Joneses” which he termed pecuniary emulation. While the entire structure of capitalism comes under critique from the authors, eventually the real culprit relative to global environmental degradation is narrowed down to the expansion of consumer culture and identity consumption which all trace back to the revolutionary works of Veblen.
