How Much Should We Take from the Earth?

Most arguments about the planet are arguments about speed. How fast should we cut emissions? How quickly can we switch fuels? By what year? These are important questions. But they skip an earlier one: how much should we be taking at all?

Without an answer to that, every target is a compromise between “a lot” and “a bit less”. Madhyasth Darshan offers an answer. It isn’t a number. It is a rule, and once you see it, a great many of the numbers start to follow.

This may sound like asking everyone to give up modern comforts. It isn’t. Madhyasth Darshan expects people to keep electricity, transport and machines. It asks that they come from what the earth’s surface renews, rather than from what lies beneath it.

The rule

In Avartanshil Arthashastra (आवर्तनशील अर्थशास्त्र), in the section on our relationship with the material, plant and animal worlds, Shri A. Nagraj sets it out in three lines:

• Use nature’s wealth, minerals and plants, in proportion to what it produces, in the sense of keeping balance.
• Don’t obstruct nature’s production of that wealth.
• Help it produce.

And then a sentence that sums up the whole post: without keeping nature’s purity rich, human beings can’t themselves be prosperous.

Notice what the rule doesn’t say. It doesn’t say take nothing. It doesn’t say take as little as possible. It says take in proportion: the earth sets the pace, and we match it.

“The earth sets the pace, and we match it.”

Step 1: Ask whether it is produced or extracted

The book asks a pointed question about mineral oil, coal and other minerals. Do human beings produce these? Or do we exploit them, even seize them?

It is a useful question to ask of anything. Some things the earth produces every year: crops, fruit, wood from a well-kept forest, water from the rain, wind, sunlight. Others it made once, over a span of time we can hardly imagine: coal, oil, metal ores. The first kind can be taken in proportion to what renews. The second kind, by its nature, can’t. Every tonne taken is a tonne gone.

Sorting what we use into these two groups is the first honest picture of how much we are taking.

Step 2: Take renewing wealth no faster than it renews

For everything in the first group, the rule is straightforward. A forest can give as much wood each year as it grows. A field can give as much as the soil can rebuild. A well can give as much as the rain returns.

The book also warns about forests being destroyed out of all proportion. Take within the forest’s growth and you can take for centuries. Take beyond it and, however carefully you manage everything else, you will run out. We look at this from the side of relationship in How to Live in a Relationship with Nature.

Step 3: Help it renew

The rule asks for more than restraint. It asks us to help nature produce. That turns taking into a two-way relationship: plant more than you cut, feed the soil more than you harvest, save seed.

Water is a good example. In Manav Karm Darshan (मानव कर्म दर्शन), the darshan points out that water underground comes from water flowing on the surface. Drilling deeper for it, expecting more below than above, has done a great deal of harm. The way to secure the future, it says, is to spread water over as much of the land as possible and hold it there: ponds, tanks, bunds and channels that let rain soak in instead of running off.

Step 4: Leave what is inside the earth inside

This is the strongest part of the darshan’s answer. The book gives its own account of why: the earth became rich, able to carry plants, animals and people, while keeping its minerals at their own levels, and tearing open the earth unsettles that balance. That account of the earth’s balance differs from mainstream science, and the rule in this post doesn’t depend on it.

So, for what lies beneath, the darshan doesn’t ask for slower extraction. It asks us to stop, and to find what the surface offers instead. And it lists plenty: the force of flowing water turned into electricity, wind, sea waves, sunlight, biogas, and oils from plants and trees, grown along roads, in gardens and on the edges of farmers’ fields. As it puts it, the whole source of good fortune is on the earth’s surface.

The book anticipates the objection. Ask why we keep using coal and oil, and the answer is always that we have no choice: people need them, industry would stop, so many livelihoods depend on them. That is real, which is why this is a direction rather than an overnight change. But the darshan doesn’t accept it as a reason never to begin.

There is a practical difficulty the books did not face. Surface energy needs materials too. Wind turbines, solar panels, electricity networks and batteries are built with copper, lithium and other minerals, and most of these are mined today. So it helps to separate the cases. Fuels such as coal and oil are burned and gone, and the darshan’s direction to stop applies to them most clearly. Metals, once mined, can be kept in use, repaired and recycled, so the question becomes how little new mining we need beyond what can be recovered. Renewing wealth, such as wood and plant oils, follows step 2. Our reading of the darshan for today is: stop burning what lies beneath, mine as little new as we can, and keep what has been mined in use. That reading is ours.

Step 5: Set the amount by need, not by want

None of this works if the amount we want keeps growing. In Vyavaharatmak Janvad (व्यवहारात्मक जनवाद), the darshan observes that most of the digging serves the accumulation of comforts. And comforts, chased for their own sake, have no point at which they are enough.

Needs, on the other hand, are limited. The book says this plainly: understood clearly, every human need, for the body’s nourishment and protection and for life together, turns out to be finite. A family that has worked out its enough, as we describe in How to Calculate Enough for a Family, can finally set what it takes against what renews. A village can do the same, as in How to Organise a Village So Every Family Has Enough.

What this looks like in practice

At home: list what you use in a week and mark each item R (renews) or E (extracted). Then look for one E you can swap for an R: cooking gas for biogas, a bought thing for a mended one, a car trip for a walk.

On the land: measure what you take from soil, water and trees each year against what goes back. Hold rainwater on the surface before drilling deeper.

At work: ask of each material whether it renews, and whether it returns to nature at the end of its use. We set out how this shapes what a business makes in How to Decide What to Produce, and how pricing by scarcity rewards running the earth down in How Should Things Be Priced?

And our happiness?

Many of us carry a low, constant worry about the future: what will be left for our children? Taking in proportion to what renews answers that worry directly. What you take this year will be there again next year. There is a particular kind of ease in eating from a field you know will feed you again, and it doesn’t depend on having more. We set out why a happy life and a sustainable planet turn out to be one question in One question, not two.

A protocol to try

Pick one day. Write down everything your household used: food, water, fuel, power, things bought. Next to each, write R if the earth makes it again each year, or E if it was taken from inside the earth.

Count the two columns. Then choose one E and ask: what on the earth’s surface could do this job instead?

Limitations

• Shri A. Nagraj calls for stopping the use of coal and mineral oil altogether. We present this as a direction. We don’t give a timeline, and a fair transition for the people whose work depends on these fuels is a large question we don’t answer here.
• The books give their own explanations of how the earth keeps its balance. Some of these differ from mainstream science, and we have left them out. The rule itself, take in proportion to what renews, doesn’t depend on them.
• “In proportion to what it produces” is clear for a forest or a field, and much harder to measure for what a household buys from far away.
• One household’s choices are small next to how energy and industry are organised. This post starts with what a family or village can do. It doesn’t settle the larger question.

References

1. Shri A. Nagraj, Avartanshil Arthashastra (आवर्तनशील अर्थशास्त्र), p. 78 (do we produce oil and coal, or extract them; the earth kept its minerals at their levels), p. 79 (minerals and forests in proportion keep the seasons in balance), p. 114 (needs are limited), p. 142 (use natural wealth in proportion to its production; help it produce)
2. Shri A. Nagraj, Manav Karm Darshan (मानव कर्म दर्शन), p. 79 (alternatives: flowing water, wind, waves, sun, biogas, plant oils; the earth’s surface as the source), p. 80 (groundwater comes from surface water; spread water and hold it on the surface)
3. Shri A. Nagraj, Vyavaharatmak Janvad (व्यवहारात्मक जनवाद), p. 20 (most extraction serves the accumulation of comforts)
4. International Energy Agency, The Role of Critical Minerals in Clean Energy Transitions (2021): minerals in wind turbines, electricity networks and electric vehicles