Today the population of the world reached 7 billion people. During my lifetime alone, the population of the world will triple. These are staggering statistics, but it gets worse. Not only is the population increasing exponentially, but individually people are consuming more and more of the earth's resources each year. According to the United Nations, between 1900 and 2005 the population of the world increased by a factor of 4, but the extraction and consumption of the earth's resources increased by a factor of 8. Although the world population growth rate is slowing down, globalization is fueling new consumer demand in previously poorer countries like China and India, and our total consumption of resources continues to climb.

Exactly how long we can continue this way is unknown. If the still rapidly growing populations of Africa, India and China adopt the modern lifestyles of North America, then the depletion of at least some of the natural resources that are essential to sustain "life as we have known it" will occur within a single generation. Not in some distant future, but during the lifetime of your own children (or grand children, if you are older).

There is also an alarming danger that many of our needed resources will quickly become unavailable due to environmental factors. Clean water and food supplies are two of our biggest worries. Global fish stocks are disappearing rapidly and the supply of fertile arable land is becoming exhausted both by urban development and by chronic overuse and artificial stimulation using chemical pesticides and fertilizers. We have almost totally disregarded the early warning signs that our planet has been giving us as thousands of species of living things go extinct and weather patterns become more extreme.

Clearly we are on the threshold of a major resource and environmental collapse. But instead of using the resources that remain to our best advantage, to aid us in a transition to a more sustainable way of life for all, we continue to squander them recklessly on war, planned obsolescence, trivial consumerism, and excessive luxury items. There seems to be no limit to the selfish, irresponsibility built into the culture of our generation.

One of the main obstacles to an effective solution is that our current economic system can't deal with the reality of this. The very foundation our economic value system is flawed. Every tangible item of value that exists today, our buildings, machines, infrastructure, vehicles, etc., are really nothing more than a unique combination of natural resources and human resources that have been stored in a particular shape or form that endures beyond the time that it took to make it. It is curious then that no country in the world lists either its human or natural resources as items on their national balance sheets. If they did, each nation would become poorer as its natural resources were depleted. Likewise, each nation would become poorer if a portion of its population was left idle and unable to contribute their natural gifts to the society around them. Only the natural resources that we have already used, and are on their way to the trash, are valued in our current economic system. How ridiculous is this, to value the creation of trash but to ignore the true source of this wealth?

Also, under our current economic system, money is deliberately not tied to any fixed, universal constant, so that all values can be subjectively defined. A belief in subjective value (the "law" of supply & demand) is essential in order to justify the theft of wealth, using speculation, usury and profit. We have been tricked into believing the false ideology of conventional economics that uses complex pseudoscientific deceptions to conceal its immorality. We have been bamboozled by the pedantic meanderings of a band of pirates who don't give a damn about true wealth or morality or anything else that gets in the way of their own insatiable desire for unlimited wealth and power. As our resources continue to dwindle, prices will rise to ridiculous levels, preventing billions of people from accessing the bare necessities of life. No significant additional labour costs will be involved in the price increases and the resources themselves will continue to be freely provided by nature. Those who control the rights to the resources, however, will grow fantastically rich as prices soar. A drastic reduction in the world's population will occur and many of those who remain alive may wish they hadn't been so lucky.

Now, as the world's economic and ecological systems continue to crumble, is the time to recognize that we have been duped for hundreds of years into believing a false ideology. Our economic system, and entire value system, is a scam. It cannot be fixed, for it was designed to steal wealth away from us. We must abandon the ideology of subjective value completely and design a new system that is based entirely upon the true wealth of our human and natural resources before either are depleted beyond repair.

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