After one has covered the landscape with concrete, steel, cow-filled pastures, rows of monocrop, and crawling lines of mechanized labor and transportation, it is very easy to forget the gifts of nature that have lent buoyancy to everything in the first place.
After the massive virgin reserves have dwindled, and diminishing marginal utility begins to bite, sapping at the many energy flows that keep society expanding and growing, it is already too late: the field of vision has been so thoroughly crowded with dazzling processes of production that it is difficult to make out the many dragging and flagging resource flows.
The clean water trickles away, the sweet crude oil is burned up, the vegetables become poisonous, and the soil is exhausted. Soon enough we are huffing and puffing without knowing why. And nervously we look at nature's gift horse in the mouth.
