I think you are right. I also believe we can have our cake, and eat it, even a materialistic cake, by re-connecting technology with its natural origins.
Aligning our technology with nature, and recognising where that is, and can be done, is key, it seems to me. I would never aspire to be an elder, but I can see the much lower task of how to align technology with nature, as clear as day.
If the right people could see this also, we will very quickly have solar power infrastructure which functions like trees, supplying all of humanity with limitless free yet incredibly valuable hydrogen fuel, and limitless free yet incredibly valuable proof-of-work money, as well as to not only maintain and grow itself, but to replicate, all without pollution, all from nothing more than sunlight.
Terms like "cost", "efficiency", "Profit", "Value", and "Debt" all take entirely new meanings in that new collaboratively engineered environment, where one of the main collaborators is nature.
Is any debt of the old world still a debt, if it can be paid by the free money of the new world?