Natural capital is the wealth of the living world — the earth's land, water, soil, and ecosystems — everything of value not created by human beings.
Natural capital is nature itself: minerals, land, soil, oceans, fresh water, and the genome — everything not made by human beings, including human beings. In 📝The Ascent of Humanity, 📝Charles Eisenstein describes how this living wholeness is subjugated through a conceptual move: objectified into "resources," then property, then 📝Financial Capital. To name it as capital is itself double-edged — it makes nature legible to an economy, at the risk of treating it as inventory.
📝One Inc gave natural capital a deliberately specific meaning within its 📝Types of Capital framework: time. The physical, intellectual, and creative labor a member contributed was treated as natural capital — the living energy a person spends being the most immediate nature any of us stewards. Like financial capital, time was quantified in 📝One Ledger at the moment of contribution and adjusted for longevity.
This reframe is the framework's most distinctive: it places a member's hours in the same column as the earth's gifts, insisting both are natural wealth — drawn down or replenished, never merely "spent."