Green Junction - Living Within Our Limits: Rethinking How We Use Earth’s Resources

Everything that people consume, use and create comes from the earth’s resources. In the course I teach on sustainability, we often reflect on the human technological advancements of the past 100 years and the strain on the earth’s resources. For example, less than 20% of homes in rural America had indoor plumbing in 1920, according to the US Census records. The 1920s were the decade when car ownership increased, and by 1929, 60% of families owned cars. All technological advances require lots of materials.

By the 1970s, scholars realized our knowledge and capacity to mine resources and make stuff had likely overshot humanity’s attention to the consequences. A group of experts from 10 countries studied the prospects of depleted resources, industrial output, population growth, agriculture requirements/practices and pollution generation. Their conclusions were that humans are mining resources and functioning beyond the earth’s capacity to support future generations. The work was published as a book called “The Limits to Growth.”

The analysis found that “only a small fraction of the world's population is actively concerned with understanding these problems or seeking their solutions.” The first diagram (figure) in the book is called Human Perspectives and shows the time view concern for most people falls in the realm of either next week or the next few years, as opposed to their lifetime and their children’s lifetime. Most people’s context of concern is with family or neighborhood and less view their space of concern to be the nation or world. 

This beautiful earth that is shared by 8.3 billion people depends on leaders and people clued into sustainable lifestyles, those that do honor natural resources, limit pollution - show care for the earth.  “Decisions are being made every day, in every part of the world, that will affect the physical, economic, and social conditions of the world system for decades to come.”