Limited natural resources

Economics has always implied that useful and scarce resources are limited. But this limitation was conditional, an individual entrepreneur has always sought to overcome it, create and sell more goods, and use more resources in his activities. This has been and remains the goal of modern economies, even if they set themselves some environmental goals, such as the so-called sustainable development, the main economic activity is moving in the same direction of depleting natural resources, without adequate renewal. Any landfill, any garbage on our planet is a clear confirmation of our inability to manage the resources provided to us by nature.

hydrocarbons

Until now, most economic processes directly depend on the extraction of practically non-renewable hydrocarbons, oil and gas, first of all. At the same time, oil production itself has a negative impact on nature: forests are cut down for towers, the production itself often poisons the soil, the delivery of oil has the risk of spilling it, etc. I say this to the fact that even those existing oil reserves, which we focus on in order to preserve the environment, do not have to be developed. And if developed, then as far as possible without harm to the environment.

However, even such seemingly inexhaustible resources as clean water, land and even air are also exhausted in the sense that they are polluted and poisoned from landfills, chemical waste and other things, including due to spills of the same oil.

I see the solution to the problem of hydrocarbon depletion not only in new ways of creating it, but also in direct savings on transportation costs, packaging and other logistics. The international division of labor and cheap fuel has sprayed the production of goods around the world, and thus we are forced to spend many millions of tons of fuel for delivery and no less create plastic from the same hydrocarbons for packaging in order to sell the manufactured goods to buyers in different parts of the world. When, as in most cases, the same product could be produced near the place of consumption, without the need to pack it and transport it from afar. I am talking primarily about food production, but not only about them.

Useless activity

After all, the same applies to completely useless activities consisting in driving a car from job to job. Whereas most activities should be organized, either from home if it does not involve personal interaction, or directly next to it, so that the place of work can be reached on foot or by bicycle. In the vast majority of other cases, public transport powered by electricity can be used.

View with space

The view of the Earth from space is the most clear confirmation of the need reasonable restriction or at least, as far as possible, rational consumption of any kind of natural resources. From there it is clear that the Earth is our common home, in which it is impossible to achieve prosperity only in a certain place. And pollution of water, air and land spreads over time and affects everyone equally.