Cause And Effect

A Discussion

Abstract

This piece examines the folk saying, "when the last tree has fallen and the last river poisoned, you will find you cannot eat money," through the lens of the Hermetic principle of Cause and Effect, the axiom that every effect has a cause, and every cause produces an effect, with nothing occurring outside this chain. It argues that the saying is conventionally read as a moral warning issued from an external, nature-as-victim position. Reframed through Hermetic logic, with nature positioned as Cause and humanity as Effect, the saying instead functions as a category statement: money is an artifact of the effect-layer with no jurisdiction over the cause-layer it presumes to control. The paper considers the implications of this reversal for how ecological collapse is narrated, and for what kind of correction , moral or structural, the saying actually demands.

1. Introduction

The saying in question circulates widely, usually attributed to Cree tradition, and is most often deployed as an environmental appeal: a warning that unchecked extraction will eventually strip the earth of what sustains life, leaving wealth with nothing left to purchase. This reading positions the saying as a moral argument , a call to conscience aimed at correcting human greed.

This paper proposes an alternate reading. Rather than treating the saying as a moral warning issued by an aggrieved nature to a culpable humanity, it treats the saying as a structural observation about causal order , specifically, through the Hermetic principle articulated in the Kybalion: "Every Cause has its Effect; every Effect has its Cause; everything happens according to Law." Applied here, nature occupies the position of Cause; humanity, along with everything humanity produces, including money, occupies the position of Effect. Under this framing, the saying is not primarily an ethical claim. It is closer to a description of what happens when an effect mistakes itself for a cause.

2. The Conventional Frame: Nature as Object, Humanity as Agent

Prevailing environmental discourse, including most conservation rhetoric, treats humanity as the acting subject and nature as the acted-upon object. Humans deforest; nature is deforested. Humans pollute; rivers are polluted. This subject-object structure, while useful for assigning responsibility, tends to imply a separation that may itself be inaccurate: it frames humanity as standing outside natural systems, intervening upon them from a position of independent agency.

This framing has a further consequence: it implies that nature's "response" to human action constitutes retaliation, a reactive stance requiring something like will or intent. But retaliation presumes two independent agents in conflict. If humanity is not independent of nature but derivative of it, the retaliation model becomes conceptually unstable.

3. The Reversal: Nature as Cause, Humanity as Effect

The principle of Cause and Effect does not require intention, will, or consciousness on the part of the cause. Gravity does not intend to pull; it simply is a cause, and falling is its effect. Applying this same logic, nature, understood as the total set of physical, chemical, and biological laws governing the planet, functions as Cause in the most literal sense: it is the precondition without which humanity, or any of humanity's institutions, could not exist.

Under this reading, humanity is not an agent acting upon an external nature. Humanity is an effect that nature's causal chain produced, a highly complex, self-referential effect, capable of modeling itself and its surroundings, but an effect nonetheless. This includes every institution humans have built: language, agriculture, cities, law, and money.

Money, in this frame, is not simply a human invention alongside other inventions. It is an effect several orders removed from cause: an agreement, made by effects (humans), about the relative value of other effects (goods, labor, land), which is then mistakenly treated as though it possesses causal power over the layer that produced it. Money can move markets. It cannot move rainfall. It has never once been a variable in the equations governing soil formation, aquifer recharge, or species reproduction, because it was never generated at that level of the causal chain.

4. Reinterpreting the Saying

Read through this reversal, "you cannot eat money" ceases to be primarily a warning about greed and becomes a statement about category error. The saying does not claim that money is insufficient because humans were foolish or immoral in valuing it. It claims that money was never the kind of thing that could be exchanged for what cause provides, because it exists on the wrong level of the causal hierarchy entirely. One cannot pay a cause with its own effect and expect the transaction to register.

This reframing also changes the status of ecological collapse itself. Under the conventional model, environmental collapse is read as nature's punishment for human wrongdoing, call it a moral consequence. Under the Hermetic model, it is read as cause completing itself, indifferent to human intention or culpability, the way an unpaid structural load eventually produces a collapse regardless of whether anyone intended harm. The flood following deforestation is not retribution; it is arithmetic. The saying's warning, then, is not "nature will punish you for your greed" but "you were never the level at which value is ultimately settled, and continuing to act as though you were will not change that."

5. The Feedback Complication

A complication arises when effect begins acting causally upon its own cause which is precisely what large-scale human activity now does. Deforestation, industrial emissions, and aquifer depletion which are human action, are effects that generate new causal input into natural systems, which then produce further effects like climate instability and biodiversity loss that loop back to constrain the humans who generated them. This is not a violation of cause and effect but an extension of it: an effect can absolutely become a cause within its own local chain, while remaining, at the largest scale, still an effect of the system that first produced it. Humanity's danger lies in mistaking its local causal power, which although real, and increasingly significant, for the kind of foundational causal authority that only the larger system it emerged from actually holds.

6. Conclusion

From this perspective, the saying is less a moral rebuke than a jurisdictional clarification. Nature, as Cause, operates according to law that does not require human belief, compliance, or even awareness to continue functioning. Humanity, and the economic systems it has built, remain Effects, powerful, self-modifying, capable of altering their own local conditions, but never sovereign over the causal order that produced them. The correction the saying calls for, then, is not primarily an ethical one but a structural one: a demand to stop mistaking the currency of the effect-layer for a claim on the cause-layer, before the causal order, entirely unmoved by the mistake, finishes completing itself regardless.