“A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play” – James Carse.

Dear Climate Healers,

The purpose of players in a finite game is to win the game. The purpose of players in an infinite game is to continue the game forever. In his seminal work on games, James Carse showed that while one can conceive of infinitely many finite games, there is only one infinite game.

The quest for sustainability is the quest to play this infinite game. Is it Life or is it Money? Which is the one and only infinite game?

The primary game being played by human beings on Planet A is to extract and hoard. This is the money game that humans have been playing for thousands of years. In its modern incarnation, the game sets the stage by issuing currency in the form of debt that must be returned to the lender (usually, a banker) with interest. Currency is basically hoarding material, typically numbers in a bank ledger, which can be converted into the physical form of bars of gold or pieces of paper with pictures of ex-Presidents on them. The debtor is expected to extract from the planet, convert it into more currency than the value of the debt and then hoard the excess.

The purpose of every common participant in this extract and hoard game is to become a millionaire. Once this is achieved, the purpose of the millionaire is to become a billionaire, and the purpose of the billionaire is to become a trillionaire. After the first trillionaire pops champagne corks, which is likely to be Mr. Musk, he is expected to strive and become a quadrillionaire.

And so on, ad nauseam.

According to Forbes, there are 3428 billionaires in the world and their net worth is estimated to exceed $20 trillion. In addition, there are 57 million millionaires in the world and their total net worth tops $150 trillion. A disproportionate fraction of these millionaires, about 42%, are Americans, because the extract and hoard game in its current form, with its deadly dietary deceptions and ritualistic consumerism, was primarily conceived in America.

Farmed animals are unwitting participants in this extract and hoard game. They are birthed into existence and deployed as slaves that turn otherwise human-inedible substances like grass into cash. They graze on grass, grow big and their body parts and secretions are then sold in exchange for currency to human beings who, in turn, were deceived into believing that these animal body parts and secretions constitute nutritious food. The education system itself instills in children the falsehoods that protein is only found in animal foods and calcium is only found in dairy foods so that there is a steady stream of gullible consumers for these grisly wares.

There is little doubt that this extract and hoard game of Planet A is causing our planet to die. We have identified 26 different component crises of the PolyCrisis that stems from this game. About half of these component crises can be primarily attributed to the farmed animal sector alone. Sixteen of these crises are capable of causing civilization collapse or human extinction on their own. Apocalyptic fires are raging in Canada, the Pacific Northwest of the United States, Southern Europe and Indonesia, while glacier outburst floods are killing thousands of people in the Himalayas and yet, there is a strange reluctance to deploy any significant portion of the $20 trillion hoarded by the billionaire class, or the $150 trillion hoarded by the millionaire class, to solve these crises. Indeed, there is no serious attempt to solve the PolyCrisis by the people of the world.

Please don’t get me wrong. There are plenty of institutions tasked with solving some of the component crises and they are making all the right pronouncements at annual UN meetings. But clearly, every one of these crises are getting worse and worse, year after year, and therefore, either these institutions are incompetent at solving crises, or they are unable to solve these crises because they cannot bring themselves to admit that the money game we are playing now is well past its expiration date. This is because extract and hoard is a finite game, not an infinite game. We are pretending it is an infinite game by insisting on playing this money game of Planet A forever, regardless of the consequences.

Any major technological advancement is a logical inflection point for making the switch to the true infinite game, which is Life. With the advent of the AI era and the prospect of new AI philanthropic money being pumped into the animal rights movement, the familiar welfarist refrain is now being trotted out, just as it was at the dawn of the internet era:
1) the Animal Rights movement is not winning because the number of animals being killed has risen from 10 billion to 90 billion in a few decades;
2) the Animal Rights movement should admit that it can never turn this tide around and accept defeat; and
3) the Animal Rights movement should deploy the expected AI philanthropic windfall to help create “Happy Meat” Factory Farming 2.0 facilities in which animal suffering is minimized with sophisticated genetic and AI technologies.

Such narratives are par for the course. It is the “winners” in the Planet A money game effectively saying: keep civilization’s basic architecture and goals, but improve its components – renewable electricity instead of fossil electricity, electric cars instead of gasoline cars, happy beef instead of conventional beef, green growth instead of ordinary growth.

But Planet B asks deeper questions: what if the goals of the Planet A systems are just plain wrong? What if its constraint set is misaligned with reality?

That’s an important distinction. Optimizing systems whose goals are poorly chosen can make the wrong systems extraordinarily efficient at killing us all off. The rapid progression of the planetary PolyCrisis is proof of that.

The Planet A/Planet B contrast is stark conceptually:

Planet A: extraction → consumption → competition → domination → endless growth → unlimited hoarding.

Planet B: regeneration → sufficiency → cooperation → compassion → well-being→ sustainability.

The Planet B formulation extends that logic into food, economics, governance, health and education rather than treating environmental degradation as an isolated problem.

In this formulation, veganism isn’t the destination, but an enabling transformation. Ending animal agriculture could release enormous amounts of land for ecological restoration. Planet B then asks the next question: What do humans do with that opportunity? Rewild, restore ecosystems, reorganize economic activity and redefine our relationship with other species and with technology.

That is much richer than simply saying “replace hamburgers with plant burgers.” Planet A + AI is a lethal mixture, dead certain to lead to near-term human extinction. Planet B + AI can lead to a thriving planet. AI itself is a tool for amplifying the processes of whichever system it is deployed in.

At the Vegan Camp-Out, Jane Velez-Mitchell appealed to people to wake up and end the animal agriculture industry. But the institutions of Planet A rest on the backs of animals who are providing a gusher of free cash to fuel the extract and hoard money game while sacrificing their bodies. Ending the animal agriculture industry would end that gusher of free cash and likely end the game.

And so we wait. Our house is on fire and the garage is fully ablaze. The people in the kitchen have a big water hose, but they refuse to turn it on until the fire reaches the kitchen. The people in the bedroom have an even bigger fire hydrant, but they won’t use it until the fire reaches the bedroom. Meanwhile the people in the hallway are screaming at the people in the kitchen and the bedroom for help, pleading with them that the time to put out the fire is now, not when it has engulfed the whole house.

What do you think? Would you agree that Life, not Money, is the one and only infinite game?

The Emergence of Planet B will be the theme of the upcoming hybrid in-person/virtual Vegan Convergence Of the Peoples #27 (V-COP27), which will be hosted in Sadhana Forest, Auroville, TN, India, from Friday, Nov 6, 2026 through Sunday, Nov 8, 2026. Please plan to join us, especially if you are already in India.

With much love,