Unsustainable

UNEP released its 4th Global Environmental Outlook today, and the news is bad. Almost every environmental indicator is heading in the wrong direction, and while we've achied significant progress on some minor problems, the larger ones appear intractable. While the world has become richer, we are now living well beyond our ecological means,effectively strip-mining our ecosystem and endangering long-term sustainability in favour of short-term, unsustainable growth. And it simply can't go on forever. Either we adapt our economies to be ecologically sustainable, or we will find ourselves having to deal with the problems of unsustainability: resource shortages, famine, war, and death. And that's a future I'd like to avoid.