Theodore Roosevelt, avid environmental conservationist, once said, “The natural resources of our country are in danger of exhaustion if we permit the old wasteful methods of exploiting them longer to continue.” Hunt, 241. Roosevelt looked to bring back into the public eye an over-zealous consumption of resources by the average man. The Industrial Revolution caused a boom in consumption of goods and services that taxed the environment and the resources it contained, but our self-reflection did not keep up with our appetites. “With the rise of peoples from savagery to civilization,” Roosevelt said in a speech to The Conference on the Conservation of Natural Resources, “and with the consequent growth in the extent and variety of the needs of the average man, there comes a steadily increasing growth of the amount demanded by this average man from the actual resources of the country. Yet, rather curiously, at the same time the average man is apt to lose his realization of this dependence upon nature” (Hunt, 242). As our technologies become more and more complex, they appear to become more removed from their source: nature. We truly cannot proceed with any technological developments without the raw materials needed, and the only way to attain those materials is through nature. As a society, our blindness to the role of nature is apparent when one reflects on Moore’s Law: an ever increasing ability to put transistors on integrated circuits lulls us into a false security that our computers will become ever more powerful and miniature, yet we don’t think about how this practice is physically done. According to a well-informed friend of mine, in order to continue to increase the amount of transistors on one square inch of circuits, eventually the factories that produce these circuits will have to be suspended in the air in deep underground chambers in order to account for the revolution and movement of the Earth itself. Think about how much land and resources that would consume even to build the factory itself that can build these transistors. Clearly we are so removed from our environment that we cannot make decisions as a society that keep our best interests at heart. Consumption is king in a capitalist world, but we are eager to forget what we are consuming.

“Without such progressive knowledge and utilization of natural resources population could not grow, nor industries multiply, not the hidden wealth of the earth be developed for the benefit of mankind” (Hunt, 242). This being said, if we have run out of resources to use to grow and develop, where will the growth come from? But before this question even can be addressed, I think we need to take a step back and reflect on what our goal is at all. Are we truly seeking endless growth? Do we even need endless growth? I think we need to seek enough for all humankind, not more for a select few.