É«ÏãÊÓƵ

Future world prosperity requires an ever-expanding supply of vital raw materials - oil and natural gas, copper and iron, food and water, and many others. At present, we rely for our supplies of these materials on sources that were discovered and developed in past decades and centuries; however, many of these reserves are now facing depletion at a rapid pace, and so future growth requires the development of new reserves. With most of the world's known resource reserves already in production, this is producing a desperate search for new deposits in those few areas that have hitherto escaped full exploitation - the Arctic, the deep oceans, inner Africa, and war zones like Iraq and Afghanistan. This search will itself prove dangerous, given the desperate need for supplies and fragility of many of the target habitats, but also raises an even more frightening peril - the eventual depletion of all readily accessible natural resources. Unless steps are taken now to develop a new industrial paradigm based on renewables, conservation, and efficiency, we could witness the wholesale collapse of industrial civilization.