A proper accounting

In the modern world, the extractives use the possibilities of technological innovation to justify their plunder. They depict the natural capital stock as super-abundant and therefore not something about which public policy need concern itself. They point to an unspecified and mythic application of technology that will get us out of the mess the extractives have gotten the world into; and since no-one owns the ecological system in the first place, the extractives who have exploited and wasted the ecological order can pretend to high social status despite the rapacity and the cunning they deployed in the process of acquiring their wealth and of achieving their positions of power. 

The extractives represent the natural capital stock as merely a reservoir of natural resources from which the extractive sector in their role of frontier entrepreneurs, by right, and for the putative good of society, supplies the economic order with the elementary factors of production. The extractives also represent the natural environment as a sink where the economic order is entitled to dump its waste without counting the price of replacing the factors nor the costs of the re-cycling the dumpings as being relevant to the accounting for the growth of the man-made side of the natural order. Put those two representations together and you have a recipe for hubris. 

Reverence here means recognizing and factoring in the "free" supply of natural resources into not only the cost of production but also into an understanding of Who it is that is contributing to the commonwealth, namely, not the strongman rulers but God. 

The adage 'there's no such thing as a free lunch' means: in a society ordered by a market economy, it is crucial for property rights to be assigned to every factor in the economic order, and that such assignment needs to be wise and durable. Before we can have a proper trade-off between two sides of an exchange we must be sure to assign property rights so as to allow for a fair process of transaction. Reverence means having a conscientious approach to the delineation of property rights, especially regarding the property rights of those who are not able to bring suit for themselves in the human system of courts – God, on the one hand, and the lower life forms, on the other. The repeated exhortations to shamor, to guard and keep the divine law, is the Bible's way of asking for the human social order to factor in the divine property rights so that it does not result in the abuse of God's little acre. 

The biblical emphasis on melakha is an emphasis on the extensions of Man that are the angels of his action. Melakha, in this formulation, would be the ancient world's version of the capital stock. God's sabbaticals are the Bible's way of accomplishing that wise and durable assignment of property rights which is crucial to a proper functioning of a free market where self-governance forms the basis of Man's covenant with God.