Anarchy?

I was sitting in class today, participating in a discussion (basically) about deforestation, and I couldn't help thinking that people spend hours, days, weeks, years, decades debating rhetorical questions about societal problems that seem to have no answer, or at least not an easy one. But the reason they have no answer is absolutely knowable, if we're open to it.

They have no answer because capitalism, personal wealth, and all the other ideas that the conflicts spring from have a false value, a constructed value. For example, people say we should save the rainforest (the topic from today's class), and that it is a valuable resource. Yet, we want to buy lumber. Why? To make things out of wood, paper and furniture and everything in excess. And people with rainforests, Africans and South Americans et al, want to sell their valuable resource. Why? Because they need to pay off their national debt, the debt they often owe to the very people they sell their wood to. But if we as a society, as capitalists, are creating the need for lumber and the debt that prompts the willing sale, why do we then turn around and say that we should save the rainforest? Few of our actions agree with what we lament. We are concerned with the price of lumber, the price of the forest, not its true value.

It is difficult to say that the solution is to "overthrow the system," because those terms are worn out. But I don't think the meaning is. We don't need the system to get along, it needs us and our cooperation in order to sustain itself. Something to think about, anyway.