ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book is an exploration of a topic that is of great importance in the world: how can the use of resources by humans continue in a sustainable way when the overall emphasis appears to be on increased production and consumption and potentially therefore on the unsustainable depletion of resources? It shows that increases in the scale of social units and contexts that have emerged as a result of industrial and post-industrial development make the analysis of sustainability more complex. A truly balanced ecological approach would therefore be one that minimized such a zero-sum situation. The human capacity for fuel extraction has been driven over time by technology, and notably by industrial development and its complex and elaborate machinery.
