A more populous, closer trading world makes connections across distant spaces more necessary. As trading distances shrink and ties strengthen, however, resources - air, land, minerals, water - all become more available while growth in population is making them daily more scarce.

Paying nature's costs is becoming vital. At a time like Earth Day especially, we need to assess the role of government and business in this evolving environmental age. The situation as it is cannot continue.

Any new era of expected business growth cannot remain an empty vessel of progress, divorced from the public good. Government today holds business at bay. Its "guardian state" function, for example, largely exempts corporations from having to internalize costs with planetary assets.

Keeping business "off bounds" is poor stewardship, a negative role which is not, itself, sustainable. Business, on the other hand, as part of the "commercial state" in our time, brilliantly fulfills many of our dreams but has failed at times to align its goals to the broader interests of civilization as well as it could.

A new paradigm for government and business, each operating from strength rather than from weakness, can heal this divide. Government and business both must grow into new roles.

They must learn to face energetically and ruggedly the truth of environmental costs together. Only more responsibility ahead by each party can let them move from realms of failure to a partnership of success.

In such a collaboration, the mechanism of price would not be ignored as now, but become a vital tool for valuing nature's precious assets. Why is price so essential?

1. Price is a magical instrument. Through prices, we do many things: create choice; determine value; buy one good over another; rule some things in, others out. Price creates a system that verifies choice, thus priority.

2. Price forces change. As resources become precious, we do without or find substitutes. Price affects the flow of funds across society, arbitrates how they move, then are combined, spent, or saved.

3. Price is a lubricator - a point of passage which guides changing habits from past to future behaviors. Price, for people, the market, and earth's goods, mirrors humanity's very opinion of itself.

4. Price often is the best means for showing trust and sparing conflict. It sharpens rather than dulls the power of concentration - or compromise. Through price, we efficiently trade and negotiate. As price settles transaction values, we sort differences, then make a deal.

5. Price by nature spurs transactions and drives innovation. Rather than the guardian and commercial cultures of society warring, price lets us take responsibility as a people for the earth's future.

6. Price, then, is a colossal mediator. By people working across vast layers and patterns of daily activities embedded in the marketplace, price moves the environment straight onto our collective shoulders. Our education into morality, as a public, then prevails.

7. Price as a principle has pushed us forward as a civilization. But it has not yet included nature yet within its orbit. Until that happens Nature, as a free good, is demeaned.

The pressure on resources means business must not get them free in the future but pay for all its needs. Companies may soon have to move from utility discounting ("a polite expression for rapacity and the conquest of reason by passion," Roy Harrod) to consumption dis-counting, which puts the higher value on the goods of tomorrow over those consumed today.

The orbit of capitalism ahead should not be smaller, but larger. Without a more integrated path for capitalism, nature's assets will only further constrict.

The future will become a downward funnel - and the answer is to end the slide, and build a fount. The way to do this is to put equity back into nature. Nature, we know, is abundant. The air we breathe, and the water we use is there for all of us. By ending a default price of nature of zero and what it says about us, can we not use the tools of price, transaction, negotiation, contracts, and, yes, profit can accomplish for nature's assets?

If businesses use capitalistic forms or resource enhancement, ranging from new forms of product "dematerialization" to embracing resource substitutions, they can widen the productive use, cost, spread, and reach of a more equitable distribution of goods across the planet.

Once government and business account for nature's abundance correctly, we can make a new sphere of prosperity more available than only a finitely captured one does now.

A fusion rather than separateness would unite the spirit of capitalism to more liberal principles. The Public Square believes expanding the orbit of capitalism will bring greater dispersals of abundance, and organization of supply, and a culture of equity to the future and, yes, therefore, value. They will do more than today's financial climate is prepared to do or a governing culture allows.

The vigor of price would energize a currently static, or punitive at best, bureaucratic inertia. We would create a partnership of ecological price sensitivity, built on a more expansive law of public supply and demand - where future economic growth would carry a purpose beyond consumer expansion goals alone.