Industrial civilization is new, but interest is not.
Since our civilization (and any human civilization) is agrarian-based, we are no threat to all life on earth. Human civilizations crash when it gets cold and therefore dry. The next glaciation will take out human civilization, and then it will gradually start all over again as new arable land emerges down near what is now Indonesia.
That could be a thousand years away, or ten thousand years away. But long before then, if we degrade the general environment enough to crash crop yields human population will also crash. It's not surprising that the farming villages in China are staging revolts at all.
I would suggest that "interest" and lending, which seems to be ubiquitous in human cultures, derives from lending seed and asking for a percentage of the gain on harvest.
http://www.e-classics.com/solon.htm
Solon was a great reformer because although Greece did not have electronic money, it did have mortgages and it did produce a funding boom and a foreclosure round. He devalued money and freed most of the Athenians who had been enslaved, plus banned being taken into slavery on non-repayment of mortgages. Why? Because Athens had to defend itself, and for that they needed an army of free men.
http://spiritofjubilee.com/history/athenian-democracy-began-with-shaking-off-debt-burdens
Draco's laws could not last a century - they were destructive.
When you look at what Solon did in Greece and the financial system of ancient Israel, the parallels are obvious. However the ancient Jews gave their justification for debt laws as originating in Egypt (in the story of Joseph) and the famine, so this is very, very old.
The Japanese had a rice lending system - during the Shogun era, at least, every so often the debts would build up too much and the current power would cancel out all debts in order to maintain the allegiances of the fighting families.
What has really changed about our world? Nothing except that with the introduction of machines, slavery could be abolished.
= new reply since forum marked as read
