The human, in the old story, is the only creature of importance. All other living and non-living things derive importance from the degree to which they serve the human. This outlook was especially reinforced, Thomas tells us, by the work of Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, Rene Descartes and others in the seventeenth and later centuries. This made Earth, instead of a sacred community of subjects, and the residence of the spirit world, into an impersonal object, available for exploitation, for mining and deforestation and a sink for all the poisons of industrial civilization. In the same period such students of government and politics and economics as John Locke and Adam Smith, and those who followed them, developed a way of understanding government and human rights and property rights that still prevail to this day.
Humans have the right to life and liberty and property.
It is permitted, encouraged, to amass wealth. Government must protect human and property rights and otherwise be as invisible as possible. Entrepreneurs must be free to develop their enterprises. Entrepreneurs have no obligations other than to seek success within the law, which must be absolutely minimized. Individuals have the right, even the duty, to sell their labor for a wage.