DEPLETION AND RECOVERY

Natural resources are bring exhausted.  Some items, such as aluminum, can be recycled.  Other raw materials, particularly crude oil, cease to exist in their original form once they are extracted from the earth.  The substances utilized to produce goods of various sorts, as well as the products themselves, do not go away after they have outlived their usefulness.  If they cannot be recycled, or it is not economical to do so, they end up in dumps where they eventually disintegrate, often contaminating the land where they have been deposited.

When far fewer people inhabited the world, not much thought was given to the fact that the available quantities of all useable resources are finite.  As the world’s population has grown rapidly, the continued extraction of metals and minerals has increased commeasurably.  Invariably, after the deposits of metals or coal, or reservoirs of petroleum or natural gas closest to the surface are accessed, the production process becomes more and more expensive.  This intensifies the search for new finds, but the potential sites where this might occur are constantly diminishing.

In like manner, natural resources located above the ground have been subjected to increasing pressures.  It was once possible for tribes to sustain themselves by killing and eating wildlife located within hunting distance.  Now, almost all meat eaten on Earth derives from domesticated animals, which require land and feed to be made available.  Edible fish, which once seemed an inexhaustible source of food, now have been thinned out to the point where professional fishermen are finding it more and more difficult to eke out a living.  Lobsters, shrimp, and oysters all have had their ranks reduced and, in many cases, are now harvested from areas especially set aside for their man-generated production.

When consideration is given to the fact that millions of tons of seafood are consumed every day all around the globe, it is a wonder that any fish are left to haul in.  Due to the pollution of rivers and oceans on Earth, many species of marine life are beginning to die out, making commercial fishing even more difficult.  As catches diminish while populations increase, a logical outcome will be for this source of nutrition, which is considered one of the healthiest, to become more and more expensive.  At the same time, mercury buildups in many fish due to poisonous runoffs have made eating fish a somewhat dangerous activity.  In the future, if current trends continue, it may become necessary to rely on less delectable substitutes for fish in order to obtain adequate quantities of nutrition, such as soy beans or algae.