Hawken placed this line at the culmination of a devastating critique of modern economics. He noted that we are the only species on the planet without full employment, that we have an economy which says it is cheaper to destroy earth in real time than to renew, restore, and sustain it. 'You can print money to bail out a bank,' he said, 'but you can't print life to bail out a planet.' He pointed out that we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product — but we could just as easily have an economy based on healing the future instead of stealing it. Whenever we exploit the earth, he argued, we exploit people and cause untold suffering.