Productive capacity asks how much can we make or do? It is real and it matters — but it is only a subset of ecological capacity, which asks the larger question of how much differentiated life a field can viably sustain, develop, connect, correct, renew, and carry forward. Industrial civilization treats the two as near-synonyms; the framework refuses to.
Productive capacity is a subset of ecological capacity. Production supports it; it does not define it.
This distinction may be the whole post-AI problem in a sentence: AI can hand civilization astonishing productive capacity, and the civilizational task is converting it into ecological capacity rather than mistaking the one for the other. A society can raise production while standing, renewability, or aliveness fall — more output, less ecology. Keeping the terms apart is what lets the framework tell an abundance that circulates into life from one that merely accumulates. See The Compass Is Ecological Capacity.