ABSTRACT
The abundance of energy described in the earlier chapter represents a potential to generate abundance all ways downstream in the planet; therefore, it can drive abundance of water, abundance of nutrients (organic and technological), abundance of oxygen, abundance in nature accessibility and health and in humanity's quality of life. All this is possible if energy is managed judiciously.
The leading idea though of this chapter is to correlate abundance of energy to abundance of resources and illustrate how this occurs in the natural cycle and how this is affected by anthropogenic activities.
If there were no anthropogenic activities that introduce elements that are alien to the biosphere, it would be possible, in principle, to consider our planet as one immense biological and chemical reactor where the biological and chemical elements of the biosphere are constant but in continuous transformation from one form to another.
One of these elements is, for instance, oxygen, which is continuously changing from reduced form (O2) to various oxidized forms (CO2) in combination with other elements of the biosphere for instance carbon.
As it will be demonstrated in this chapter, the Earth is in constant evolution, and in the absence of anthropogenic activities, it would evolve to a state of a gradual accumulation of energy in the form of substances at higher chemical potential.
The sustainability challenge is, therefore, related not only to the elimination of fossil fuel dependence but also to the recovery and management of the exergy levels in the biosphere. Unfortunately, these have been gradually reduced because of the pollution caused by anthropogenic resources and as a result of the gradual shrinking of the biosphere volume.
