A letter from Triton Tunis-Mitchell.

I get frustrated when businesses (particularly big businesses) are given a free pass on moral responsibilities. In many ways the hollow box of a legal corporation is given more rights than a fleshy living human. Most businesses take more than they need, and give back less than they should. 

If your friend did that, you’d consider them an a***hole and tell them grow up.

Extracting resources from a closed system (a lovely planet that is melting) is not magical, it’s diabolical. There are deep structural problems with the concepts of profit, private ownership, and reliance on constant growth.

This system is going to fail within our lifetimes. That is not hyperbole or worst case scenario, that’s the path we’re on. It’s scary to confront. But it would be less scary if we started acknowledging it and move into the “what next?” phase – while we have capacity to build new ways (spoiler: old ways) of doing things. 

Commerce and trade existed well before capitalism, and will continue long after. Real commerce is anchored in mutually agreed value, respect, trusting relationships, and systems of interconnection and reciprocity. 

Businesses can only exist within the human ecosystem -not outside of it. If a business is considered a legal person (corporation is from corpus = latin for body) then it should play by the same rules as you and I. What’s its character? Is it a good friend? Does it contribute to community and environmental health, or steal from it?

Positive examples exist. There are social enterprises and not-for-profits and B-Corps that are genuinely great citizens. They are helping on multiple fronts and keeping resources inside the systems they exist in. 

Human.Kind is definitely not perfect but we do a bloody good job of redistributing the resources you share with us within this same community. Whether that’s subsidised memberships for those that need, fair living wages for staff, low profit margins, significant community grants and donations, or free events. If Human.Kind was a person, our hope is that they would be a good (yes, kind) human. But I’d be very interested in how you would describe it.

Our member Sara Cuellar helped us visualise the past year in this hand-drawn 2025 Ecosystem Report. It shows what you see above ground, our four guiding values, and some of the more important markers of community health below ground. 

Thanks for being part of it.