Natural Commodities in Vekllei

Part of the bulletin series of articles

Summary

• With islands across most of the Atlantic, Vekllei has a huge exclusive economic zone and tremendous natural commodities.
• Vekllei minimises their use and export of these resources for reasons outside of simple environmentalism.
• The Vekllei position is that resources are a source of capital, not income, and consequently their expense should be minimised.
• This complements a broader view of natural and physical landscapes in the country, as a distinct sovereign entity seperate from civilisation.
• Nonetheless, Vekllei exploits resources as any other country does, since it is necessary to service any kind of production. The difference is mostly in its perspective of natural commodities and minimisation of their use.

Nature in Vekllei is not simply a place or vista undeveloped by civilisation, but a constant, unconscious and legitimate valuation of things not made by people. This means that nature and its sovereignty apply equally to the tropical paradises and stark volcanic landscapes of its island communities as it does to its buried and lifeless commodities, like resource deposits and soil. This bulletin focuses on the Vekllei approach to its natural commodities.

A Vekllei economic valuation of nature recognises the money-value of crude oil and pristine white beaches, in the same way they recognise the store of value of dollars in a bank. This, and the labour of people, is the real wealth wealth of the world and its transformation into useful commodities makes up the majority of production. The distance between raw natural resource and shelf product is so great that the connection might seem abstract, or that its value derives mostly man-made techniques and machines shaping an otherwise valueless resource, but this is not fundamentally true – the majority of money-value in a product originates with the natural commodity and survives its transformation intact.

The inversion here is capital and income. Where raw resources are treated as income overseas, they are treated as capital in Vekllei, and so their exploitation is seen as an expense. This is a philosophical difference as much as it is an economic one – Vekllei, like many countries, has just started to exploit asteroids in space for their metals and mineral deposits, which in the scale of the universe would seem to be an unlimited resource. But even in the face of this escape route from the rapidly depleting terrestrial resources on Earth, the Vekllei instinct is to understand natural commodities as a store of capital, not income, which in its logic is undoubtedly true – crude oil cannot be found on asteroids, and is depleting rapidly here.

Of course, resources are necessary to service a quality of life, and so they are exploited in Vekllei as they are anywhere else – indeed, Vekllei is one of the major exporters of oil in the world thanks to its huge undersea deposits in the Arctic. The difference here is in its minimisation, and government anxiety, over their use as one would spending from their bank account. Expending capital is a necessary function to lubricate the economy and can generate income, but spending capital and treating is as income in itself is no way to run a business or an economy.