How to Save the World
Last week I did a podcast with Amul Pandya on the Meeting People podcast. We talked about many things: beaver reintroduction, the Norman Conquest, carbon market fraud, and the likely collapse of Western civilisation. This essay sets out what I have learned from some of the world’s greatest thinkers over twenty-five years, and how they reveal how we can have a world fit for our children: a thriving economy, environmental restoration, and a world that tackles hunger, disease, and the challenges of AI and war. A must-read for anyone who values free markets, liberalism, and our environment. But it contains some home truths many will want to close their ears to. 
We can save our world from climate change and ecological collapse and have a thriving economy that eliminates poverty. But this knowledge is being suppressed, and no mainstream politician or environmental organisation is advocating it. Even the green parties of the world hide this policy, even though it is actually their official policy, and the only policy that makes sense to achieve their objectives. Why? Because it takes power away from the powerful, and the ill-gotten gains that fund war, oligarchy, privilege, and hierarchy. The central argument is this: the environmental crisis and the economic crisis are not separate problems. They are the same problem. And the solution has been known for over two centuries, deliberately buried by those who profit from our collective ignorance. This is not a modest proposal. It is a fundamental reframing of how we understand wealth, nature, and justice. But I believe it is also the only path forward that does not end in ecological collapse and political tyranny. The Environmental Movement Has Lost Its Way I hate most wildlife charities. Yes, they do good, they achieve things, but at a terrible cost when you see the inefficiency and their wilful ignorance in refusing to advocate for the policies that would actually achieve their objectives. I say this as someone who has spent his entire working life in service of nature. I trained in medical biochemistry and population genetics. I completed one of the first ever master’s programmes in conservation biology at the Durrell Institute back in 1993–94. I spent years as a practical conservationist, a campaigner, a fundraiser, and a political lobbyist for different wildlife trusts. I organised the first-ever beaver reintroduction to the UK in the late 1990s with the great John McAllister. That project took extraordinary effort to push through government opposition, and it has since created one of the most profoundly beautiful nature reserves in Britain. But that project was shunned by most of the wildlife organisations’ senior people, trustees, and leaders. They did not stop John and me as we pushed it through against all opposition and raised the funds they did not want to hand back, but many were terrified it might upset landowners. So when I criticise the environmental movement, I do so from the inside. I have earned the right. Here is my complaint. The movement has become dominated by high-status people seeking to signal their virtue rather than do the hard, unglamorous work of actually protecting nature. It has become a vehicle for luxury beliefs: ideas that cost nothing to hold and make the holder feel righteous while having no measurable overall positive impact on the natural world. And worst of all, it has embraced a set of financial mechanisms, mostly funding landowners but now even worse funding carbon markets, biodiversity offsets, and natural capital accounting, that are not merely ineffective but actively fraudulent. The carbon markets are so full of fraud that people should be in prison for what they are doing, and some thankfully are. I mean that literally. We have created an entire industry of what I call LinkedIn warriors: people who post inspiring content about sequestering carbon and saving the planet while accomplishing precisely nothing of the sort. In fact, their efforts often release carbon, because they are ignorant of the science. They fly to conferences, give TED talks, make beautiful TikTok videos, and the carbon keeps rising, the biodiversity keeps collapsing, the soil keeps washing away. The fundamental problem is that these market mechanisms do not work. They have never been proven to work anywhere in the world. They are attempts to financialise nature: to turn the living, breathing, complex reality of ecosystems into tradeable abstractions that can be bought and sold by people who have never set foot in a forest. And they fail because nature does not work that way. You cannot reduce the intricate web of soil microbes, mycorrhizal fungi, insect populations, and hydrological cycles to a number on a spreadsheet. Well, you can, with one slight change to this misguided project. Worse, these mechanisms create perverse incentives. They reward people for claiming to do good rather than actually doing it. They create opportunities for arbitrage and fraud. They allow corporations to continue destroying the environment in one place while paying lip service to protecting it in another. They are, in short, a scam: a way for the wealthy to feel good about themselves while continuing to extract and destroy. The rewilding movement has lost its way too, with bespoke elites rewilding small sections of land and wanting to be paid for it, forgetting what rewilding is really about: getting out of the way of nature, letting it be free, and taking a step back. Dominionist humans have captured rewilding and turned it back into glorified wildlife gardening, and don’t they want to be paid for their genius and the privilege of simply holding title to that land. All the income going into nature conservation is really just pushing up land values, not conserving nature. What Actually Saves Nature So what does work? The answer is embarrassingly simple. Leave nature alone. Get out of the way. Stop subsidising the destruction. Let me give you a concrete example. In Italy, during the 1950s and 1960s, something remarkable happened. Not through any conscious environmental policy, but through economic reality. The country underwent a massive economic transformation. People migrated from rural areas to cities, from agriculture to industry. The marginal hill farms of the Apennines, land that was never particularly productive, that had been farmed for centuries out of necessity rather than profitability, were simply abandoned. The land rewilded itself. Without anyone planting a single tree, without any conservation charity raising millions of pounds, without a single government programme, the forests returned. Today, approximately 40 per cent of Italy is woodland. Bears have come back. Wolves have returned. The full ecosystem of herbivores and predators has re-established itself, creating the nutrient cycles and biodiversity that we spend billions trying to artificially manufacture elsewhere. The Italian example proves something profound. Nature does not need our help. It needs our absence. When we stop actively destroying ecosystems, when we stop farming land that is not worth farming, when we stop pumping chemicals into the soil, when we stop draining wetlands and cutting forests, nature recovers on its own. It is far more resilient and far more capable of healing itself than we give it credit for. Contrast this with the UK, where we have an army of conservation charities, government agencies, and well-meaning volunteers, all desperately trying to halt the decline of nature, and failing. Despite all our efforts, despite all the money we raise and the plans we make, British biodiversity continues to plummet. We are fighting a losing battle because we are treating the symptoms rather than the disease. The disease is our economic system. We have created a set of incentives that reward destruction and penalise preservation. We subsidise farmers to farm land that should not be farmed and provide a tiny fraction of the food we need. We allow landowners to hold land out of productive use while its value rises, extracting economic rent from the rest of us. We permit industries to externalise their costs onto society and the environment, privatising profits while socialising losses. Until we address these fundamental economic distortions, no amount of habitat management or carbon offsetting will save us. Yes, we can save islands of nature, but overall we are losing. All those hard-working volunteers and staff are doing their best. All the hundreds of millions in donations are, in effect, just increasing the wealth of idle landowners, and they have to work so hard, losing the battle, because the game is rigged, the cards are marked. It’s a scam, and if they knew the truth they would have a revolution. The Hidden History of Economic Rent To understand how we got here, we need to understand a concept that has been deliberately obscured from public discourse: economic rent. The classical economists, including Adam Smith, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, and their predecessors, the Physiocrats, understood that there are three factors of production: land, labour, and capital. They understood that these factors are fundamentally different in nature, and that treating them as equivalent leads to serious errors. Land is unique because it is fixed in supply. You cannot make more of it. And because it is fixed in supply, its value does not reflect productive effort. It reflects scarcity and the growth of the economy around it. When a city grows, land values rise. But the landowner did nothing to create that value. It was created by the community: by the workers, the entrepreneurs, the businesses, the infrastructure that everyone paid for collectively. Now that value is also created by conservation programmes, government support, and charitable donations, and because it is hidden, no one has realised its corrosive effect. This is what we call the unearned increment: the increase in land value that results not from any effort by the landowner, but from the growth and development of society as a whole. And this unearned increment is what economists call economic rent. Henry George, the great nineteenth-century American economist and social reformer, understood this better than anyone. His masterwork, Progress and Poverty, identified economic rent as the root cause of persistent poverty amid growing wealth for the few. His solution was elegant: tax the value of land, and only the value of land. Abolish all taxes on labour and capital, on the work people do and the things they build, and instead capture the unearned value that accrues to landowners simply by virtue of owning a monopoly on a fixed resource. This was not his idea alone; it was the idea of nearly every classical liberal thinker before him. George simply made it understandable to the common man. This became known as the single tax movement, though those who think deeply preferred to think of it as a comprehensive system for capturing all forms of economic rent, not just land, but also natural resources, intellectual property, and other forms of monopoly privilege. Let me explain how this works in practice. Imagine you own a thousand-acre farm. The most productive parts of that farm, the areas with the best soil and the most favourable location, generate significant profits. But the marginal land, the outer edges that yield poor crops, remains in production only because of government subsidies, tax breaks and rules and because you expect the land’s value to rise over time. Under a Georgist system, you would be taxed on the value of all that land regardless of whether you farm it or not. The marginal land would no longer be worth holding. The tax would exceed any potential gain from holding it for appreciation. So you would release it. And nature, as it did in Italy, would reclaim it. At this point, so many will automatically jump to the defence of farmers, but my proposals protect farmers - the overall taxes they pay will reduce, as the real government revenue will come from big urban areas, not farms or rural businesses. But here is the beauty of it. You would not be taxed on the improvements you make. If you build a more efficient farm, plant an orchard, or invest in sustainable irrigation, you keep the full benefit of those investments. The tax falls only on the land’s inherent value, the portion that reflects its location, natural qualities and any harm done, not your productive efforts, not your hard work or your skill and knowledge in farming. This system would transform agriculture. The vast factory farms that dominate modern food production exist largely because they can externalise their costs. They can pollute waterways, deplete aquifers, destroy soil carbon, and drive small farmers out of business, all while paying nothing for these harms. Under a Georgist system, they would have to pay for the land they use and the damage they cause. Suddenly, small-scale, regenerative, labour-intensive farming would become competitive again. Food security, I hear the lobbyists scream. But here is a truth many will not know: small family farms often produce more food per area than giant factory farms. They do it more efficiently and with fewer inputs; only the rigged rules, the rigged supply chains, and the taxes on their work stop them from outcompeting the agribusiness giants. The current food system favours giant producers because it allows them to externalise costs, and because land values are so inflated that small farmers cannot afford to enter the market. We have lost the smallholdings, the market gardens, the family farms that characterised agriculture for centuries. We have become dependent on vast supply chains controlled by a handful of corporations that extract value from farmers and consumers alike. A Georgist system would reverse all of this. It would make land affordable for people who want to work it. It would make destructive practices expensive and sustainable practices profitable. It would allow a new generation of small farmers to emerge, growing food for local markets using methods that build soil rather than destroy it. But land is only one form of economic rent. The same principles apply to all natural resources: to oil, minerals, water, and the atmosphere itself. Consider pollution. When a factory dumps waste into a river, it is imposing a cost on everyone downstream. When a power plant emits carbon dioxide, it is contributing to climate change that will harm people around the world. When an almond farmer in California pumps groundwater to irrigate his trees, he is depleting an aquifer that his neighbours depend on, a fact thrown into sharp relief when local fire services had no water to put out fires. Poor people have to pay in higher water bills and more costly public services, or go without. These are all examples of what economists call negative externalities: costs that are imposed on others without compensation. And they are all forms of economic rent, because the polluter is effectively taking something from the community without paying for it. A truly Georgist system would tax these externalities at their full cost. Is it a tax? Not really. A tax is only when you take something from someone who has earned it; no one earns economic rent, they extract it from others, so it is not a tax at all. It would make pollution expensive and prevention profitable. It would align private incentives with public goods. And it would generate enormous revenue that could replace all the taxes we currently impose on work and investment. The revenue potential is staggering. If we reclaimed land values, natural resource extraction, pollution, and intellectual property monopolies at their true economic value, we would have more than enough to fund all government operations and to provide a citizen’s dividends to every person, with less need for welfare. We could abolish income tax, national insurance, value-added tax, corporation tax, capital gains tax, and inheritance tax: every tax that currently penalises productive activity. This is not a dream. It is simple arithmetic. The Norman Conquest and the Roots of British Inequality To understand why this system has not been implemented, we need to understand something about power. Who has it, how they got it, and how they maintain it. I want to take you back to 1066. The Norman Conquest was not just a change of regime. It was a permanent transfer of the national surplus into private hands. It established a system of land tenure that put us on the road to what we have today: a system in which a small elite extracts economic rent from the rest of the population while contributing nothing productive in return. Before the Normans, England had a remarkably sophisticated system of land taxation. The Saxons had developed something called the hideage system, in which taxes were based on the productivity of land rather than its mere ownership. This created incentives for efficient land use and generated revenue that funded public goods: education, infrastructure, and defence. The result was a flourishing civilisation. Saxon England had higher rates of literacy than almost anywhere else in Europe. It had a vibrant culture of learning and art. It had a system of governance that, while far from democratic by modern standards, at least ensured that the burdens of society were shared somewhat equitably. Then came the Normans, essentially a group of mercenaries from across Europe who saw a rich, soft target and decided to take it. William the Conqueror and his followers systematically dispossessed the Saxon nobility and redistributed their lands to themselves. The Domesday Book, which we are taught to think of as a great administrative achievement, was in reality a catalogue of what could be stolen: a list of every piece of land and its value, compiled so that the new owners would know exactly how much they could extract. Since that time, the fundamental structure of British society has remained remarkably consistent. The descendants of those Norman invaders, and the nouveaux riches who have since been allowed to join their ranks, still own most of the land. They still extract economic rent from the rest of us. They still use their political power to maintain the system that enriches them at everyone else’s expense. This is not ancient history. It is the living reality of modern Britain. When you pay rent to your landlord, a significant portion of that money goes to someone who did nothing to earn it, who simply happens to own the land under your home. When property prices rise, the gains accrue to landowners, not to the community that created the value. When developers are blocked from building new housing, it is because existing landowners want to protect the value of their holdings. The entire structure of our economy is designed to funnel wealth upward, to those who own land and natural resources, and to extract value from those who actually work. This is not a bug. It is a feature. It is the system the Normans established, and it has never been fundamentally reformed. The Corruption of Economics Given this history, you might think that economists would be at the forefront of efforts to reform the land system. You would be wrong. Modern economics has largely abandoned the insights of the classical tradition. The distinction between land and capital, between unearned rent and productive profit, has been deliberately obscured. Economists now treat land as just another form of capital, which means they miss the crucial point that land is fixed in supply while capital is not. This did not happen by accident. Fred Harrison and Mason Gaffney, in their book The Corruption of Economics, documented how the economics profession was deliberately reshaped in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by wealthy interests who wanted to suppress the radical implications of George’s ideas. They funded university chairs, endowed institutes, and promoted a version of economics that treated land as unproblematic, focusing instead on marginal reforms that would not threaten existing power structures. The result is that generations of economists have been trained in a framework that cannot even see the problem: the extraction of economic rent by a privileged class. When I talk to people in the free-market think-tank world, people who consider themselves advocates of liberty and opponents of privilege, I find them strangely resistant to the Georgist critique. They understand that government regulation can create monopoly privileges. They understand that taxes on income and capital are harmful. But they seem unable to grasp that monopoly is just as harmful, that the ability to extract economic rent from others without producing anything is a form of theft that should be abolished. Why? I think it is because many of them are themselves beneficiaries of the system. They own property. They benefit from rising land values. The free market they advocate is not a truly free market. It is a market rigged in favour of landowners and rentiers. It is a system that allows them to capture value created by others while paying nothing in return. In universities, government, business and charities, if you mention this, your career and job will be threatened by powerful interests that occupy their positions of governance and leadership and ultimately fund these institutions and businesses. A truly free market, one without monopoly or externality, would require land value capture and the capture of all economic rent. Without these, the market is not free at all. It is a system of privilege masquerading as liberty. The Coming Crisis: Where Will We Be in Ten Years? I am not optimistic. I believe we are about to enter a period of severe economic and political instability, driven by the unresolved contradictions of the rent-seeking economy. Fred Harrison has documented an eighteen-year property cycle that has reliably predicted major economic downturns. We are currently at the peak of that cycle, which means we are about to enter a severe depression. This will be accompanied by geopolitical instability, rising conflict, and the further immiseration of ordinary people. This is not a prediction, really, as we see the effects all around us of the economic downturn as it appears before us as a train wreck in slow motion. The deeper problem is that we have reached the limits of the current system. For most of the past century, the economic stresses created by rent extraction were partially absorbed by growth, a growth at the expense of our environment and the poroperity of client countries. As the economy expanded, there was enough new wealth being created that most people could see their living standards improve, even as the wealthy captured an ever larger share. This papered over the underlying problems. But we have now reached the limits of that strategy. Growth is slowing. The planet’s resources are being depleted. The financial system is saturated with debt that can never be repaid. The wealthy are extracting so much rent that they are crushing the productive economy, creating a situation in which it is becoming impossible for ordinary people to earn a decent living through genuine work. The result is what we see all around us: rising inequality, declining social mobility, political polarisation, falling life expectancy and the rise of extremist movements on both left and right. People know something is wrong, but they do not understand what. They blame immigrants, or globalisation, or some other scapegoat, when the real problem is the economic system that allows a few to extract wealth from the many without contributing anything in return. I worry that this will lead to the rise of authoritarian movements, what I call proto-fascist or hard-left movements, that promise to overthrow the system but end up simply installing new elites. The history of revolutions is not encouraging. When you try to seize the means of production and redistribute them by force, you inevitably create new forms of oppression. The revolutionaries become as bad as the people they overthrew. The Georgist solution is different. It is peaceful. It is democratic. It does not require seizing anyone’s real property. It simply changes the tax system to capture the value that should belong to the community anyway. It does not require a revolution. It can be implemented through ordinary legislation. And it does not create new monopolies. It dissolves existing ones. The Case for Hope So is there any reason for hope? I believe there is, but it requires us to be clear-eyed about the challenges we face. The first source of hope is that the Georgist solution is simply true. It is not an ideology or a utopian fantasy. It is a description of how a rational economic system would work. It is supported by the great economists of the classical tradition, by philosophers and statesmen from Adam Smith to Leo Tolstoy to Winston Churchill. It has been tried and tested in various forms throughout history, from ancient Athens to Meiji Japan to the early British Empire, and it has always produced prosperity and justice. The second source of hope is that people are increasingly open to these ideas. The failures of both laissez-faire capitalism and state socialism have left people hungry for alternatives. The growing awareness of the environmental crisis is creating pressure for new approaches. And the sheer absurdity of our current situation, the fact that we pay people to destroy nature while taxing people for saving it, or even just for working, is becoming harder to ignore. The third source of hope is that the Georgist solution offers something to everyone. It would benefit workers by eliminating taxes on labour. It would benefit entrepreneurs by eliminating taxes on capital and removing obstacles to productive investment. It would benefit the poor by reducing land and living costs and providing enough for everyone's needs in education, health care and public services. It would benefit nature by making destruction expensive and preservation profitable. It would benefit everyone by creating a more efficient, more prosperous, more just society. But we cannot be naive about the opposition. The forces that benefit from the current system are powerful and will not give up their privileges without a fight. They will use every tool at their disposal: political influence, media manipulation, academic obfuscation, to maintain the status quo. They have been doing this for over a century, since Henry George first proposed the single tax, and they will continue to do it. The only way to overcome them is through education and organisation. We need to build a movement that can explain these ideas clearly and compellingly to ordinary people. We need to create institutions that can develop and disseminate Georgist analysis. We need to support politicians brave enough to challenge the rent-seeking interests. And we need to be patient. This will be a long struggle, measured in decades rather than years. What You Can Do If you are convinced by what I have written here, you might be wondering what you can do to help. First, educate yourself. Read Henry George’s Progress and Poverty. Read Fred Harrison’s books, especially The Power in the Land and Boom Bust. Read Mason Gaffney’s collected works. Read the articles I and others have written on these themes. The ideas are not complicated. They can be understood by anyone willing to put in the effort. Second, talk to people. Not in a preachy way, but in a conversational way. When someone complains about the cost of housing, explain how land value capture would help. When someone worries about environmental destruction, explain how taxing externalities would make conservation profitable. When someone complains about having to work hard while others get rich doing nothing, explain the concept of economic rent. These conversations are how movements grow. Third, support organisations working on these issues. The IU, the Henry George Foundation, and similar groups in other countries are fighting the good fight. They need volunteers, donors, and supporters. If you can contribute, please do. Fourth, push for change at the local level. Land value capture can be implemented at the municipal or regional level, as it has been in places like Pennsylvania, Australia, and Denmark. Find out what your local government is doing and pressure them to consider Georgist reforms. We know the current British Prime Minister supports this reform, but he is being lobbied hard to abandon the idea; send an email to your MP saying just how much you like it. Even link to my essay. The World We Could Build Let me end by describing the world we could build if we had the courage to implement the Georgist solution. It is a world of abundance, not scarcity. A world where we do not have to choose between economic prosperity and environmental protection, because the same policies achieve both. A world where ordinary people can afford decent housing because land speculation has been eliminated. A world where farmers can make a living on small plots of land because they do not have to compete with subsidised factory farms. A world where entrepreneurs can create new businesses without being crushed by taxes and regulations designed to protect existing monopolies. A world where nature flourishes because we have stopped subsidising its destruction. It is a world of freedom, not coercion. A world where people keep the full fruits of their labour. A world where no one is forced to pay rent to a landlord who did nothing to earn it. A world where you can use your land as you see fit, as long as you pay the community for the privilege of excluding others from it or harming the world. A world where markets are genuinely free: free of monopoly, free of externality, free of the distortions that currently make them instruments of exploitation rather than liberation. It is a world of peace, not conflict. A world where the competition for resources that drives war and oppression has been replaced by cooperation. A world where no nation needs to invade another to seize its oil or minerals, because those resources are taxed at their true value and the revenue shared among the people. A world where the economic pressures that drive terrorism and political extremism have been eliminated. This is the world that Henry George envisioned. It is the world that the classical economists pointed toward. It is the world that is possible if we have the wisdom and the courage to build it. I do not know if we will succeed. The forces arrayed against us are powerful, and the habits of thought they have instilled are deeply entrenched. But I know that the alternative, continuing on our current path, leads only to ecological collapse and political tyranny. And I know that the Georgist solution is correct: it is the only system that can simultaneously achieve prosperity, justice, and sustainability. So I will keep fighting. I will keep writing, keep speaking, keep organising. I will keep working to build a movement that can challenge the rent-seeking interests and create a better world. I hope you will join me. You're currently a free subscriber to Peter Smith Rewilding. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription.
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