s a consequence of our dependence upon nonrenewable natural resources (NNRs) – the finite and non-replenishing fossil fuels, metals, and nonmetallic minerals that enable our industrialized existence – we are both the hapless victims of our self-inflicted predicament and the tragic perpetrators of our self-inflicted demise.

Earth resources – natural habitats and natural resources – in conjunction with energy from the sun enable all life on Earth, including human life.

A habitat is the environment within which an organism lives, or the physical environment that surrounds – influences and is utilized by – a species population. Naturally-occurring freshwater, marine, and terrestrial habitats such as wetlands, oceans, timberlands, grasslands, deserts, and tundra are essential to humans as areas that we physically occupy, as providers of sustenance, and as regenerating repositories for our wastes.

Natural habitats experience degradation both from natural phenomena such as volcanoes, hurricanes, fires, and floods; and from human exploitation. Fortunately, natural habitats regenerate over time through various biogeochemical processes. Barring major disasters, an existing habitat will remain sufficiently robust to support life so long as degradation does not exceed regeneration on a persistent basis.

A natural resource is a biotic (living or once living) or abiotic (nonliving) entity that exists “naturally,” that is, independent of human action. Natural resources are typically classified as “renewable” and “nonrenewable.”

Renewable natural resources (RNRs) – i.e., air, water, soil, forests, and other naturally occurring biota – are the basic enablers of life on Earth. RNRs provide most or all of the life-supporting essentials – water, food, energy, shelter, and clothing – for pre-industrial hunter-gatherer and agrarian human populations.

RNR reserves are depleted by natural phenomena such as drought, erosion, disease, and predation; and by human exploitation. As is the case with natural habitats, RNR reserves replenish over time through various biogeochemical processes. Barring major disasters, RNR reserves will remain sufficient to support life so long as depletion does not exceed replenishment on a persistent basis.

Nonrenewable natural resources (NNRs) – fossil fuels, metals, and nonmetallic minerals – enable industrialized human life. (The term “industrialized” as used here includes all post-agrarian societal designations such as “advanced,” “modern,” “developed,” and “post-industrial,” all of which connote human populations that rely heavily upon nonrenewable natural resources.)

The three primary fossil fuels are coal, natural gas, and oil. Metals include aluminum, copper, chromium, iron ore, lead, manganese, molybdenum, nickel, tin, tungsten, vanadium, and zinc. Nonmetallic (construction and industrial) minerals include cement, clay, crushed stone, fluorspar, gypsum, iodine, lime, phosphate rock, potash, sand & gravel, sulfur, and vermiculite.

The historically unprecedented population levels and material living standards associated with our modern industrialized existence are enabled almost exclusively by our utilization of enormous and generally increasing quantities of NNRs.

NNRs serve as:

• The raw material inputs to our industrialized economies;
• The building blocks that comprise our industrialized infrastructure and support systems; and
• The primary energy sources that power our industrialized societies.

NNRs play three essential roles in enabling our industrialized way of life:

• NNRs enable RNRs to be used in ways and at levels that are necessary to support the extraordinary population levels and material living standards associated with industrialized human societies. Examples include water storage/distribution systems, food production/distribution systems, and energy generation/distribution systems, which would support only a negligible fraction of today’s global human population in the absence of NNRs.
• NNRs enable the production and provisioning of infrastructure, goods, and energy that are inconceivable through the exclusive utilization of RNRs. Examples include cars, airplanes, computers, skyscrapers, highway systems, gasoline stations, communication networks, wind turbines, and nuclear power plants.
• NNRs enable the creation of enormous real wealth surpluses, which are necessary to support the thriving middle class population segments that differentiate industrialized societies from pre-industrial, RNR-based, agrarian and hunter-gatherer societies.

In practical terms, NNRs enable our global economy and material wellbeing.

NNRs (Earth Resource Input)

GDP (Economic Output)

Societal Wellbeing (Population Level and Material Living Standards)

Examples of the critical role played by NNRs in enabling our industrialized existence:

• NNRs comprise approximately 95% of the raw material inputs to the US economy each year.
• During 2006, America used over 7.1 billion tons of newly mined NNRs, which equated to nearly 48,000 pounds per US citizen.

The tightly-linked causal relationship between NNR utilization (earth resource input) and GDP (economic output) is clearly demonstrated by America’s experience since the inception of its industrial revolution. (See Figure 1.)

Remarkably, the correlation between the increase in US NNR utilization and the increase in US economic output (GDP) during the past 200+ years is nearly one-to-one.

While NNRs are essentially ubiquitous within Earth’s crust, “economically viable” NNRs – i.e., those that are both profitable to produce and affordable to procure – are extremely rare in almost all cases.

Crustal Occurrences: Vast quantities of nearly all NNRs exist in Earth’s undifferentiated crust, the outer rocky shell that ranges in thickness from approximately 3 miles to 30 miles. Unfortunately, NNR concentrations in Earth’s undifferentiated crust are too small in all cases to be economically viable.

Resources: Significantly greater NNR concentrations exist in mineral deposits classified by the US Geological Survey (USGS) as “resources.” Resources account for only very small subsets of total NNR occurrences, however; and most NNR resources are not economically viable.

Reserves: Economically viable subsets of resources – the NNR occurrences that enable us to perpetuate our industrial lifestyle paradigm – exist in proven deposits that the USGS classifies as “reserves.” Reserves represent the least abundant NNR occurrences on Earth.

To put global NNR occurrence into perspective, if the total quantity of an NNR in Earth’s crust were represented by the size of Disneyland (150 football fields), the potentially economically viable “resource” would be about the size of a cell phone, and the economically viable NNR “reserve” would be approximately the size of a postage stamp.

NNR reserves are depleted almost exclusively through human exploitation; and because, as their name implies, NNR deposits are not replenished, persistent NNR depletion will result in scarcity.

NNR scarcity typically occurs when inordinately high NNR prices associated with inordinately expensive, “marginal” NNR supplies suppress a population’s NNR demand to a level at which it cannot completely address the population’s NNR requirement.

Episodes of temporary NNR scarcity have occurred during the “boom” periods of commodity “boom/bust” cycles since the inception of our industrial revolution over 200 years ago.

Historically, these NNR scarcity episodes culminated when sufficient economically viable NNR supplies were brought online to depress NNR prices to more affordable levels, thereby re-stimulating NNR demand to levels that were sufficient to address our then-current NNR requirements.

Since the beginning of the 21st century, however, we have experienced an episode of global NNR scarcity that is unprecedented during our modern industrial era in terms of its scope, magnitude and duration.

Our persistent utilization of finite and non-replenishing NNRs, especially at levels required to perpetuate our industrial lifestyle paradigm, is unsustainable by definition. Epidemic global NNR scarcity was therefore inevitable.

The inevitable occurred in 2008 immediately prior to the Great Recession, when 63 of the 89 NNRs that enable our modern industrialized existence – including aluminum, chromium, coal, copper, gypsum, iron ore, magnesium, manganese, molybdenum, natural gas, oil, phosphate rock, potash, rare earth minerals, titanium, tungsten, uranium, vanadium, and zinc – were scarce globally.

Our quest for universal prosperity through global industrialization during the decades preceding the Great Recession had hastened the onset of epidemic global NNR scarcity by causing a fundamental shift in global NNR demand/supply dynamics:

The unfortunate consequence associated with these shifting global NNR demand/supply dynamics and the resulting episode of epidemic global NNR scarcity was the Great Recession.

Since 2009, the industrialized and industrializing nations of the world have attempted repeatedly to recover from the Great Recession through a seemingly endless barrage of fiscal stimulus (unrepayable debt) and monetary stimulus (money printing and interest rate suppression) programs.

Nascent economic recoveries failed in 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013, however, as global NNR demand/utilization was throttled by persistently high and/or increasing NNR prices. Faltering global prosperity has become our new reality.

Some analysts contend that our current episode of global NNR scarcity is simply the result of a temporary, albeit protracted, commodity “super cycle.” They expect substantial quantities of high quality/low cost NNRs to be brought online immediately and for the foreseeable future, which will suppress NNR prices and end our current episode of NNR scarcity.

Although it is unclear at this point whether our current episode of global NNR scarcity will prove to be temporary or permanent, it is clear that our early 21st century experience with NNR scarcity is a precursor of things to come.

While there will always be plenty of NNRs in the ground (we will never “run out” of any NNR); and over the near term there will likely be more NNRs of nearly every type supplied each year; in an increasing number of cases there are not enough economically viable NNRs to completely address our enormous and generally increasing global requirements.

Since the inception of our industrial revolution, we have been depleting – persistently and increasingly – the finite and non-replenishing NNRs upon which our industrialized way of life depends. Ironically, this natural resource utilization behavior, while enabling our industrialized “success,” simultaneously undermines our very existence – this is humanity’s “predicament.”

The irrefutable implication associated with our predicament is that neither our natural resource utilization behavior nor our resulting industrial lifestyle paradigm is sustainable.

Humanity’s fate was sealed in the 18th century with the advent of industrialism; the NNR genie had been let out of the bottle and could not be put back. We remained oblivious to our fate throughout the 19th and 20th centuries by misconstruing our windfall of temporary NNR abundance as permanent NNR sufficiency.

The episode of epidemic NNR scarcity that has occurred during the early 21st century is a wake up call to the fact that the modern industrialized way of life that we consider “normal” – i.e., our historically unprecedented population level and material living standards – is anything but normal. Our industrial lifestyle paradigm is a one-time, NNR-enabled anomaly that is coming to an end.

As a species that has been conditioned over hundreds of years to expect “continuously more and more,” we Homo sapiens will not accept gracefully our new reality of “continuously less and less.”

Humanity’s transition to a sustainable lifestyle paradigm – a pre-industrial way of life within which a drastically reduced human population will experience subsistence level material living standards enabled exclusively by RNRs – is therefore inevitable. Our future is not about whether “we wish to be sustainable”; it is about the process by which “we will become sustainable.”

We can alter fundamentally our unsustainable natural resource utilization behavior and transition voluntarily to a sustainable lifestyle paradigm during the next several decades. In the process, humanity would cooperate globally in utilizing remaining accessible NNRs to orchestrate a relatively gradual – but horrifically painful nonetheless – transition, thereby optimizing our population level and material living standards both during our transition and at sustainability.

Alternatively, we can squander Earth’s increasingly scarce NNR supplies in a futile attempt to perpetuate our unsustainable industrial lifestyle paradigm, perhaps for a few decades at most. In the process, we would deplete remaining NNR reserves to levels at which globally available, economically viable supplies become insufficient to support our industrialized way of life, thereby causing an involuntary transition to sustainability through global societal collapse.

(Note that scenarios within which we would reduce our global NNR extraction/utilization levels through some combination of recycling, reuse, conservation, substitution, technological innovation, efficiency increases, productivity improvements, or any other means are merely extended versions of our involuntary transition alternative. By opting for any such scenario, we would simply deplete remaining NNR reserves more slowly and collapse at a slightly later time.)

We will not consider a voluntary transition to sustainability. Global humanity could not possibly agree upon methods by which to allocate equitably Earth’s increasingly scarce natural resources, and to reduce gracefully our global population level and material living standards during the course of a voluntary transition.

Rather, we will perpetuate our industrial lifestyle paradigm until we can no longer do so – despite the fact that such a course of action represents the more horrific of our two alternatives.

Going forward, global competition for increasingly scarce renewable and nonrenewable natural resources will devolve into resource wars, which will devolve into global societal collapse through an ecological/economic/societal chain of events that is being driven by ever-increasing, geologically-induced, global NNR scarcity:

Historically Unprecedented Global Requirements for Finite and Non-replenishing NNRs Within the Context of NNR Supplies of Continuously Decreasing Quality

Diminishing Returns on Investments in NNR Exploitation

Persistently High/Increasing NNR Cost/Price Levels

Stagnating/Decreasing NNR Demand/Utilization (Earth Resource Input) Levels

Stagnating/Decreasing GDP (Economic Output) Levels

Stagnating/Decreasing Material Living Standards

Increasing Economic, Political, and Social Instability/Unrest/Conflic

Collapsing National Economies followed by Global Societal Collapse

Through industrialism, humanity set out to accomplish great things; and we have accomplished great things. Unfortunately, we have obviated ourselves in the process.

It is certainly not the case that our incessant quest for universal prosperity through global industrialization and the natural resource utilization behavior that enables our quest are inherently evil. We have simply applied our boundless ingenuity – i.e., our resourcefulness, innovation, technical prowess, efficiency improvements, and productivity enhancements – over the past several centuries toward dramatically improving our level of societal wellbeing through ever-increasing NNR utilization.

It is the case, however, that despite our possibly justifiable naïveté during our meteoric rise to “exceptionalism,” and despite the fact that our predicament is undoubtedly an unintended consequence of our understandable efforts to continuously improve the material living standards enjoyed by our ever-expanding global population, globally available, economically viable NNR supplies are not sufficient to perpetuate our industrial lifestyle paradigm.

If we knew that our unraveling would commence in 1,000 years, or 500 years, or even 50 years, we could dismiss it as a concern for future generations and continue to enjoy our industrialized way of life in the meantime. Unfortunately, our unraveling is occurring now.

Going forward, increasing global NNR scarcity will exacerbate our economic malaise – i.e., our global economy will remain on its trajectory of slow starvation for lack of sufficient economically viable NNR inputs, a scenario that will be especially problematic for the NNR-deficient, but highly NNR-dependent, nations in the industrialized West.

The previously improving material living standards enjoyed by populations of industrializing nations will stagnate; and the previously stagnating material living standards associated with industrialized populations will degenerate toward those of industrializing populations.

Our circumstances will continue to deteriorate despite our incessant attempts to “fix” our geologically induced predicament with irrelevant economic policies, political edicts, social reforms, and environmentalist initiatives – none of which will work because such expedients cannot create additional economically viable NNRs.

NNR scarcity will devolve into increasingly severe temporary NNR supply shortages, as globally available, economically viable NNR supplies fail by increasingly wide margins to completely address our global requirements.

Through our ignorance, we will exacerbate our deteriorating situation by failing to understand that “we” are the problem. We – all of us, but especially those of us in the industrialized West – have been the all-too-willing beneficiaries of the extraordinary material living standards temporarily afforded by our unsustainable industrial lifestyle paradigm.

So “we” will blame “them” – politicians, corporations, foreigners, capitalists, communists, Christians, Muslims, the rich, the poor, the left, the right, anybody who is not “us” – for our deteriorating circumstances. And we will resort increasingly to conflict at the global, national, and ultimately local levels to obtain the NNRs and derived goods and services necessary to perpetuate the lifestyles to which we feel entitled.

Escalating natural resource wars will further reduce our declining economic output (GDP) levels and material living standards, as war-related destruction disrupts our critical natural resource supplies and our critical societal support systems such as water storage/distribution, food production/distribution, energy generation/distribution, NNR exploration/extraction, sanitation, healthcare, transportation, communications, defence, and law enforcement.

As global NNR supply shortages become increasingly acute, NNR-dependent industrialized nations will no longer be able to generate the economic output levels necessary to fund their ballooning debt service, social entitlement, and social services obligations; nor will they be able to obtain sufficient credit to offset their declining real wealth generation capabilities. The world’s interconnected and interdependent national economies will experience cascading defaults.

As global NNR supply shortages become permanent, our bankrupt and war-ravaged global industrial mosaic will be unable to provide societal essentials – clean water, food, energy, and infrastructure – at levels sufficient to support our increasingly angry, confused, and desperate populations. Escalating social unrest will devolve into chaos.

It will become universally understood that the only way to “stay even” within a continuously contracting operating environment – much less to improve one’s lot – is to take from someone else. Life will become a “negative sum game” within the “shrinking pie” of “continuously less and less.”

All industrialized and industrializing nations, irrespective of their economic systems and political orientations, will collapse, taking the aid-dependent, non-industrialized nations with them.

Despite (and paradoxically, owing to) unparalleled human ingenuity during our modern industrial era, Earth’s NNR supply mix is shifting from “high-quality/low-cost” to “low-quality/high-cost.” Decreasing NNR quality in conjunction with our historically unprecedented and ever-increasing NNR requirements are causing increasingly prevalent global NNR scarcity and faltering global prosperity – i.e., diminishing global economic growth and material living standard improvement.

Over the past 50 years, as global NNR scarcity has displaced relative NNR abundance, global GDP growth has plunged from a relatively robust 4 - 6% per annum during the 1960s to approximately 2% in 2013; and annual global per capita GDP growth has decreased from a relatively strong 3 - 4% per annum during the 1960s to approximately 1.0% in 2013. (See Figure 2.)

Should currently decreasing global prosperity growth trajectories persist going forward, both global economic output and global material living standards will peak and enter terminal decline prior to the year 2050. It is very likely, however, that increasingly severe civil unrest will cause our global economy and global society to completely unravel long before midcentury, in the event that these trends continue.

That is to say, absent continuous and enormous high quality/low cost NNR discoveries, and continuous and extraordinary increases in our NNR utilization efficiencies – which would merely grant us a temporary reprieve in the extremely unlikely event that they were to occur – we will almost certainly bring about our global societal collapse by 2050.

Under the best case scenario, a surviving global human population of a few million will remain to scavenge among the remnants of decimated natural resource reserves and severely degraded natural habitats. Under the worst case scenario, we will annihilate ourselves through global warfare.

Ironically, the more vigorously we strive to perpetuate our unsustainable industrialized way of life through ever-increasing NNR exploitation, the more quickly and thoroughly we will deplete nonrenewable and renewable natural resource reserves and degrade natural habitats, thereby hastening and exacerbating our global societal collapse.

“The ‘developed’ nations have been widely regarded as previews of the future condition of the ‘underdeveloped’ countries. It would have been more accurate to reverse the picture…”
–William R. Catton Jr., “Overshoot”

Author note: This article is a call to action. Perhaps a reader will devise an intelligent response to our predicament, a course of action that has thus far eluded me.

NNR scarcity is the most daunting challenge ever to confront humanity. If we Homo sapiens sapiens are truly an exceptional species, now is the time to prove it.