Take Notice of the Sustainability Factor and the Disposable Economy of the World, Part II

Friday, November 27, 2009 by: Aaron Turpen
Tags: disposable economy, sustainability, health news

(NewsTarget) As we drown the planet in garbage, pollute the waterways with industrial agricultural runoff, and extract the last of the easy-to-acquire oil, minerals, and other resources, we rush blindly forward into our own doom.

At very best, we have reached Peak Oil extraction right now. It's likely we've already passed by the peak and are on the downhill. We're about to reach Peak Water, Peak Potassium, Peak Copper, Peak... well, Peak Everything.

We don't exist in an economy or on a planet where resources stand alone to rise or fall on their own. We live in an existence in which every resource is part of a larger web. This web of resources encompasses metals, minerals, petroleum, water, food, and more. Every resource we use is part of that web.

When one part of the web falters or collapses, the others take the strain and often can pull it into recovery. When it became harder to mine for coal, for instance, new technology utilizing oil-burning machinery stepped in to take up the slack. This, of course, required more oil to make up the difference. When food began to fall behind the population's need, industrial agriculture was born and the use of oil-burning machines to facilitate and transport that agriculture made up the difference.

You can see from those two examples that the most important component to our current web of resources is oil. Petroleum is the basis for most of our other technologies today. We're running out of the cheap stuff and something else will have to make up for it.

Except there isn't anything else.

Every commodity is strung together in this synergistic web and too many of these commodities are stretched thin.

Industrial agriculture requires huge amounts of artificial fertilizers (nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorous) as well as huge amounts of water and oil to operate. We're running out of three of those commodities and another of them is a cause for other destructive forces that are causing still more resources to fail.

So what do we do? Our farming methods must become sustainable. This needs to happen within the next generation, or we will begin to starve on a scale never before seen.

Governments can't do this; only people can make it happen. Starting with you.

Resources:
Municipal Solid Waste in the United States, Facts and Figures, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

Landfill Data From China: Addressing Information Needs for Methane Recovery, A. Robinson U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, et al.

The Sustainability Factor: What Sustainability Means and Why You Need to Know, by Aaron Turpen

Minerals Scarcity: A Call for Managed Austerity and the Elements of Hope, by Dr. Andre M. Diederen, Msc.

About the author

Aaron Turpen is a professional writer living in Wyoming in the USA. His blogs cover organic/sustainable living and environmental considerations (AaronsEnvironMental.com) and the science debunking mainstream medical and proving alternatives (HiddenHealthScience.com).