Nature’s role in an economy

The economy seems to be based on one fundamental question that each participant should continuously be evaluating for themselves:

“What can I contribute to this nature that people will appreciate?”, where ‘people’ includes ourself.

It’s all about contributing, it’s all about people, and it’s all about appreciation. It can be easy to overlook, however, that in this equation nature is not a wild, deep-rooted pasture, it is a field we groom and outline for playing the game of striving to make people appreciate things enough to exchange for them.

If we instead wanted to incentivize ourselves to grow an economy influenced more heavily by the question: “What can I contribute to this nature that this nature will appreciate?”, our only option seems to be to make contagious among us people a sincere feeling of appreciation for this nature.

‘Instead’ doesn’t seem like the right word though. I have a hard time imagining a wholesome awe of nature that doesn’t include as a modest subset a will to let people pursue goods and services they cherish.