Anyone paying any kind of attention has a deep-gut feeling that things aren't going well for Earth. No matter how fancy or technologically advanced we get, everything humans make and break is fashioned from the resources at hand water, air, petroleum, minerals, soil and its nutrients, and plants and trees and their fruit. Your MacBook may look space age, but it didn't fall from the sky. "Nearly everything you use every day is based on minerals mined somewhere, often leaving behind disfigured land and a toxic mess," Howard G. Wilshire, Jane E. Nielson, and Richard W. Read more »