The principle of colonialism (extraction of all possible value) is probably more to the point that we all blame on "capitalism". This extraction process has been adopted and refined for capitalism's profits, but governments have gone along for the ride by treating the flow of capitalism's money as a place to extract power for selfish nationalist competitions. Democracy "by the people, for the people" has failed to force moderation and direction upon capitalism because the voting masses only see the extraction version of this societal structure when leaders stand for "more, better, bigger extraction" as the absolutely only option in all things.
If we simply put all of the overhead of civilization into sales taxes (including citizen health, education and welfare/UBI), and educate citizens and leaders alike to pay humans to care for places (whether or not they are directly connected to the land), then the whole capitalism process is reversed, but still remains as the functionality. It just puts the highest value on contribution to places instead of extraction from places.
We vote once every 4 years or so for someone who might not kill us in our beds, but we vote billions of times every day for those that do: because "always low prices" and "The Economy of Stupid".
It's not just that we let the greedy run things: it's that we don't even ask what the "things" are doing and what people are good for. Most anti-capitalist arguments are still fighting on the side of The Invisible Hand Job (unquestioned belief in human choices) because they are still arguing for the primacy of humans over places, just with different bosses in charge of humanity's selfish use of the planet.
"The opposite of consumption is not frugality; it is generosity." -Raj Patel
How is the human species going to become generous to the planet rather than only itself?
The contemporary debates about ecological footprints, energy sources, human rights, etc. are just shifting the deck chairs around on the ice caps. We aren't talking about any kind of collective contribution by our species to its environment: only reductions of its destruction and redistribution of the spoils of that destruction.
