Sustainability

If the human race is expecting to continue to flourish on this planet with an increasing population, doing things in a sustainable way is going to need to be of utmost importance. But first lets lay out what sustainability is. The Earth can provide a set amount of resources while also dealing with the byproducts of our civilization. These resources can be put into two basic groups. One group is finite resources. These are things like oil or rare metals. Since our consumption is much greater than what is available on the planet, once these are gone they are gone. The other group is renewable or infinite resources. These entail the trees, wind, or sun light. They are available to us at either fixed or variable rates and can be assumed to be available to us for the foreseeable future, pending some major change.

We as a society use these resources at a certain rate to build our civilization. With finite resources the faster we use them the faster they run out. This is not sustainable. Renewable resources are general assumed to be sustainable, and they are, as long as the rate at which we use them does not exceed the rate of which the Earth can provide or replenish them. Our society can therefore only be sustainable in the long term if we switch our resource use from finite sources to renewable or infinite resources.

Sources:
http://www.epa.gov/sustainability/basicinfo.htm#sustainability