The only resource we humans get from outside the bounds of Earth is an abundance of free sunlight, coming in from 93 million miles away. No one is making a killer line of shoes made from asteroids. Not a single company is designing handbags made from the soils of Mars. Everything we humans make is made right here from stuff found on Earth, and we’re simply using up everything.
Recently, scientists from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel reported that the weight of all the human-made stuff (things we’ve produced) outweighs the weight of all living things on Earth. Apparently, all the buildings, cars, toys, avocado slicers, and every other item we’ve made now weighs more than the remaining life on the planet.
Many of the resources typically extracted are materials that have a finite amount, such as coal, natural gas, oil, sand, iron ore, stone and minerals. As supplies of these resources begin to dwindle, humans have been forced into recycling them, to make new products.
Other natural resources we harvest can be replenished but often aren’t, such as trees, plants, fish, and animals. The demand for these items has increased so much that the source is often destroyed in order to reach them — forests are clear-cut, animals go extinct, or the entire ecosystem is damaged. Humans are just starting to look at sustainable management practices for forests, waterways, fisheries, and habitats.
All this fishing, hunting, gathering, drilling, mining, farming, chopping, excavating, digging, and harvesting has finally brought us to one inescapable conclusion: Earth is the only planet we have, and we have to better manage how we use it.
Scientists estimate that it would take five Planet Earths to support humans if everyone consumed the same as a typical American. Let’s look at two simple examples of US consumption — the typical soda can and the typical plastic bag:
Soda can: That soft drink you’re holding in your hand seems like the perfect container. It’s cool to the touch, easy to open, easily stackable, and easy to hold. But that can is made from aluminum, which is made from mining clay-ore bauxite out of the ground — a nonrenewable resource. Bauxite is typically mined in Australia and Brazil and ships all over the world, where it’s manufactured into aluminum. That process is toxic and produces a significant amount of waste — about five tons for every ton produced. The can has only a 1-in-3 chance of getting recycled. Plus, it’s lined with plastic, which makes it harder to recycle, and that plastic leaches toxic chemicals into the soda you drink. The saddest part: That soda can you're holding had a useful life of only six months from the time it was packaged to the time you drank it.
Plastic bag: That plastic bag the cashier just handed you is made from oil, which means it’s a nonrenewable material and difficult to recycle. It’s one of 500 plastic bags you’ll use this year, and it has a useful life of about ten minutes from the time you leave the store to when you get home and throw it away. Fewer than 10 percent of these bags get recycled, and most end up polluting our waterways instead.
Everyone keeps having kids
Though the resources on the planet are finite and limited, the population keeps increasing, which is driving demand for more and more stuff. As a result, there’s a direct link between population growth and the size of our human impact on the environment.
In a study from Oregon State University, they found that not having an extra child in your family is the most effective thing you can do to reduce your environmental footprint. This choice was 20 times more impactful than any other green action you take in your life, including becoming a vegan or driving an electric car or using solar power in your home. (See Figure 2-2.)
FIGURE 2-2: Having one fewer child, which saves 65 tons of carbon emissions per year, is the greenest thing you can do, compared with other lifestyle choices.
Now, don't start telling your neighbors that “those mean authors” are telling you to not have kids — that's not it at all. Kids are wonderful. In fact, we were kids once, too. If you want to have kids, please do. The point is that as long as humans continue to rely on the linear economic system of take-make-waste, every additional person brought into the world will increase the amount of waste and carbon emissions generated. (See Figure 2-3.) A linear economy cannot scale with population.
Source: The United Nations
FIGURE 2-3: If you compare population growth to carbon emissions, you see a direct correlation.
Despite all that bad news, another 225,000 new people joined us on Earth today. (That’s more than 150 people per minute!) Each of our new neighbors will only increase demand and strain on our linear economic system. Simply not having any more children isn’t really an option here, so we have to change the economic system from linear to circular.
We don’t have as much as we thought
In addition to having a finite number of planetary resources and a growing demand from an ever-increasing population, it turns out that what we thought was an endless supply isn’t endless at all.
Our global natural resources are depleting by 45 percent every year. The United Nations reports that soil degradation was proceeding so quickly that only 60 harvests might remain until food supplies severely decline. Our water supplies are constrained; most of the water is in the oceans or undrinkable, and another 2 percent is frozen in the polar ice caps, leaving only 1 percent left for people to drink as a freshwater supply. Unfortunately, 70 percent of that supply is polluted.
Look at the planet’s dwindling resources:
Water: By 2025, 1.8 billion people won’t have access to clean drinking water.
Coal: Though the planet has a large enough supply of coal reserves to last until the year 2200, if we burn that supply, it will release so much in carbon emissions that it will radically transform the climate. In the next decade, scientists expect that the earth will hit peak coal — or the point at which coal production reaches its maximum rate and drops every year afterward.
Oil: The earth hit peak oil back around 2003 or so, and scientists estimate that we have only enough oil in the ground to last another 45 years (at the current level of demand).
Natural gas: Known reserves will last only until 2075 or so, and supplies of new gas sources are growing scarce.
Wood: Deforestation causes around 8.2 million acres to be lost every year, contributing 15 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. (Trees absorb carbon dioxide, in case you forgot.) An area of forest the size of Italy disappeared in 2020.
The pressures on our natural resources, combined with population growth, are driving the need to change our linear economic models.
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