Berry believes that an energy-based economy might be more helpful than the existing industrial economy, which “is dependent upon much that it does not comprehend” and is not sufficiently comprehensive. His friend Wes Jackson argued that “the Kingdom of God” might be a better model: in the Kingdom of God, there is order, and everything relates to everything else. There is no issue with humans having limitations: the ancient Greeks, like the Jews of the Bible, believed in the necessity of this. The Israelites were supposed to understand their dependence on God.

For Berry, the Great Economy, then, is the ultimate condition of our experience: it is a practical exchange of values, powers, and necessities that understands humans but that humans do not fully understand.

Because we do not understand this economy, however, we also need a “little economy” that we ourselves can manage. While we should seek the Kingdom of God first, as Jesus argued, there is also a need for us to live in the world, in harmony with the Great Economy but also in a world where we need goods and money.

The Great Economy has no end, but there are also things it cannot do for humans. A good human economy, like the Great Economy, should be termless and endure in harmony with God’s world. A human economy can evaluate, distribute, use, and preserve things of value, but it cannot actually make value. Value comes from the natural things that we simply improve, artificially, through art and labor.

A human economy, then, is interested in secondary value for things, but it should also recognize its obligation to preserve what the Great Economy has provided. The topsoil is an excellent example: we cannot make topsoil, and we cannot substitute it. Topsoil is the critical quantity in agriculture, but it needs good care from humans to preserve it. A good farmer will see it not only as a quantity, but also as a quality; every other element of the farm must be focused around preserving the topsoil.

The industrial economy, unlike the little economy, sees itself as standing alone. It does not acknowledge the Great Economy: it categorizes things it cannot use as “waste” and does not consider the import of preserving topsoil or other arable land. It uses labor-saving devices instead to make work faster and does not consider that sometimes, topsoil and other natural assets are preserved better by limiting their use, rather than using them faster with the aid of devices.

We cannot do what the topsoil does; we cannot get rid of all toxic wastes. We cannot do what God can do, however many machines we use. Machines do not help us escape the human condition; they only help us to destroy our world.

The industrial economy defines potentiality as a “fund” and therefore accepts that impoverishment is a necessary part of the economy. Land is a resource that can be exhausted. But to struggle to control the forces of nature and dig out “assets” from what is otherwise “useless” is to fail to understand our obligation to care for the earth.

William Blake argued that humankind was beginning to relate differently to the rest of Creation in a negative way. The Industrial Revolution sped up this process: earth and humanity were set in opposition to each other. Although there are always natural disasters, by living “in opposition to nature,” we can cause more of these than there otherwise would have been.

Of course, a human economy can be ultimately “wrong,” but if we believe the human economy is the only one, we see...