ABSTRACT
Modern economies are, from a natural resource perspective, mining economies. Because mining is the permanent and irreversible removal of a resource it cannot be sustained, not over the long term. In fact, mining practices supersede and crowd out sustaining practices in the short term. A mining economy thus consumes its resource base, both those resources which can only be mined (minerals, petroleum, coal, fossil water) and that which can, with non-mining practices, be sustained. Value accrues to extraction resulting in “easy wealth.” As a result, modern economies chronically experience booms and busts at a variety of spatial and temporal scales, are logically unsustainable, and are inherently unjust. The mining dilemma arises when a collectivity intends to sustain itself for a long time and yet has organised its resource use to make it hard to distinguish mining and sustaining: it’s all growth, all wealth formation, all progress. Thus, while all societies mine, only societies that block mining practices from being applied to renewable resources can be truly sustainable.
