The lifestyles of the rich, the famous and the powerful as well as millions of other people, mostly in the overdeveloped world, are indeed wondrous. When we were children, who among us could have imagined living so well as we do now?

Last year, a college roommate from 40+ years ago flew into Chapel Hill. We had dinner together and talked over old times. When we were teenagers, he did not fly his own airplane or own a yacht and a half dozen homes as he does now. He and I had all we needed in our youth, but nothing like what we possess now. We had not heard of Dubai.

People may want to believe this Earth can indefinitely sustain people ravenously consuming its limited resources the way millions of fortunate people in the overdeveloped world are doing; but I fear these 'dreamers' have lost their reality-orientation with regard both to human biological limits and the limitations of the bounded physical world we inhabit. The Earth is relatively small, evidently finite and noticeably frangible; it is not a sort of ongoing provider like a mother's teat nor is it an endlessly overflowing cornucopia.

A finite planet with the make-up of Earth cannot realistically be expected to maintain increasing, profligate over-consumption and adamantine hoarding of resources as we see occurring ubiquitously on the surface of the Earth in these early years of Century XXI as a result of actions by those people who possess the wealth to behave in this way.

Conspicuous resource consumption by millions of people in the overdeveloped world could have something directly to do with deleterious effects on the Earth and its environs. Scarce resources are being recklessly dissipated and global ecosystems are being relentlessly degraded, at a much faster rate than the Earth can restore the resources and services for human benefit. Unintended, pernicious effects resulting from unrestrained increase of per capita over-consumption of Earth's finite resources appear to be threatening to ravage our planetary home.

Perhaps the current scale and growth of natural resources consumption could become unsustainable, even before the year 2050.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.php

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OL' GREEN EYES Adrian (Photo: Getty Images) Last we checked in on greasy Entourage star Adrian Grenier, he was attempting to convince a Republican paramour to escort him home for a nightcap with the rather eloquent line, "So how about we go home and I fuck the shit out of you?" (It didn't work.)
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Which I guess means Ol' Green Eyes is still single.  (And still in need of a bath?)

You have to hand it to the lad, he does seem sincerely interested in the green lifestyles business, even at the risk of letting the coolly ironic whateverist mask slip.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.