The great American industry that geared up for WWII was not about to gear down after the war. As a result

Consume, Consume, Consume
The Legacy of the 20th Century

Currently the world's population is growing at the rate of 1.25% per year, down significantly from the growth rate 30 years ago.

but, small differences in growth rates make big differences in the ultimate population that appears

• All resource usage and/or pollution will grow exponentially but with different couplings to the population growth this is extremely relevant to energy consumption and global climate change.

• In general, decision making is done at the self-interest level. With exponential resource usage, such decision making is extremely destructive. What we need is convergence on the least "bad" option.

  The ability to discern among the least bad alternatives is extremely difficult. Politics and pseudo-experts come into play. Science can help, but still the process is quite inexact.

The self-interest decision making is encouraged because we do a very bad job at "training" and educating people to look at the data.

That is, we do not approach life and decision making from using any kind of scientific methodology or recognization that indeed, we are all in the same boat, a finite earth

Instead, we are a nation and community of SPIN doctors that is quite reactive. Proactive problem solving collectively eludes us, scientific methodology is deemed to be either boring or irrelevant. In the end

This causes people to argue from a position of belief rather than a position of knowledge.

This is an essential point to ponder in this course.

So compose your thoughts in this essay worksheet on this basic question.

Is the relation between belief and knowledge and how people make decisions any different now than it was hundreds of even thousands of years ago. If so, why? If not, why not?






Some examples of consumption:

Aluminum:

Copper:

Cows and Chickens:

McDonalds Restauraunts:

Number of Shopping Centers:

Fertilizer:

Ultimately, too rapid of resource consumption takes the earth's natural systems out of equilibrium and that will lead to instability in the global natural system.

The best manifestation of this the human impact on the Nitrogen Cycle. In essence, humans, through fertilizer, have mined Atmospheric Nitrogen and dumped it directly into marine estuaries causing worldwide eutrophication (loss of dissolved oxygen in water).