2.1 Limiting Pressures

Because renewable ecosystem resources have always been limited to some degree in their availability, reliability, and quality, over time nearly all human communities learned to push against such limits through the use of techniques and technologies. With the development of agriculture and water management, human communities learned to cooperate with each other to form vast societies that allowed for the more efficient and effective utilization and distribution of resources.

Still, the limits of renewable ecosystem resources remained. Even more challenging, the techniques and technologies used to increase resource efficiency, effectiveness, and distribution were limited in their power by the limited availability of the fuels used to power them. Initially, we human beings addressed such limitations by domesticating animals that were more powerful than ourselves and by coercing and enslaving ourselves. Eventually, our desire for ever more power impelled us to learn how to power our communities using the fossil fuels we were able to extract from our Mother Earth.

These fossil fuels are a concentrated form of energy that is naturally derived, over millions of years, from previously living beings. This process is equivalent to how your body, over a span of days, naturally derives concentrated energy in the form of body fat from the previously living food you ate. By using fossil fuels to power our communities, our reliance on renewable ecosystem resources was greatly reduced. By reducing our reliance on renewable ecosystem resources, the use of fossil fuels reduced the first limiting pressure on the growth of human communities, allowing them to grow quickly and to use a lot more energy.

Over the past two centuries, almost all human communities have come to rely extensively on the use of fossil fuels as their primary source of energy. Unfortunately, without understanding the consequences of such extensive consumption, our choice to consume our Mother Earth’s body fat has resulted in global illness due to pollution, contamination, and climate destabilization.

This harmful outcome of using fossil fuels is the second limiting pressure on our communities.

Regardless of how much fossil fuel remains available to be consumed, the harmful consequences of consuming fossil fuels requires us to stop using them as soon as possible in order for our world to achieve global restabilization. Of course, this puts us in a tight squeeze.

On the one hand, given how our societies currently function, our prevalent technologies (combined with our large populations) are using more energy than is readily accessible from renewable ecosystem resources. On the other hand, consuming the body fat of our Mother Earth to fulfill our needs and wants results in so much global illness that continuing to do so is effectively suicidal.

→ 2.2 Healing Our Infection