Agriculture is the basis for civilization and the method of agriculture establishes patterns that shape human activity and the relationship with the natural world. The places where people lived in agricultural settlements for the most time are generally the most depleted. In many cases, agriculture is more like a mining operation and method of resource extraction than an activity that takes place as a circular system. In some places, the natural world doesn't even recover after thousands of years. Even worse, today industrial agriculture is really more like a factory operation that uses plant DNA to convert petrochemicals into food instead of plastic chinese consumer doodads. The soil ends up being an inert medium for carrying chemical fertilizer to roots.
Modernity and the consumer/finance world is based on a delusion of infinite resources and infinite malleability of forms that bend to the whim of scientists, engineers, and oligarchs while nature really has her own plan and we're just a part of it. It might be a "long time" in human terms until the resources of North America are consumed, but without making a pretty radical change in how people live, the agricultural resources of north america actually will be.
A sustainable way of life means credit finance is totally unecessary and the hamster wheel of makework job activities comes to a screeching halt. Similarly, the whole structure of maximum extraction can't work, e.g. parceled up lots (
enclosures) take on a different meaning.
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