Our economy is frequently defined as one of unpaid costs. (Think: Garret Hardin and the tragedy of the commons.) Nature or natural resources are considered either inexhaustible and/or the byproducts of their use, such as polluted air and degraded water quality, are externalized costs borne by society, i.e., no one. Our economic model perfectly well explains the climate crisis. Treating our atmosphere and our oceans as open sewers has resulted in both global warming and helps to explain the planet's ongoing and accelerating biological annihilation, or the sixth mass extinction. The field of ecological economics attempts to, in two words, internalize externalities.