ABSTRACT
Americans currently consume more than a third of the world’s oil, and must import nearly 100 percent of many essential materials. Such patterns of resource use cannot be continued either physically or politically, as other countries require more of their own resources and realize the absurdity of allowing us to consume their irreplaceable source of wealth to support an unnecessarily wasteful way of life. The energy and material resources that have supported our wealth are being rapidly exhausted, and remaining world reserves are requiring increasing amounts of work to obtain. Global population is still increasing beyond the earth’s capability to sustain the greater demands for increasingly limited resources. Plentiful resources have, until recently, freed us from having to say, “This will not be good for us”.
