The media has been littered with so many critiques of modern
resource consumption that it would not be surprising if the
Earth had run out of a natural resource by now. Even in 1798,
Thomas Malthus, already predicted that famine would be an
unavoidable consequence of our exponential population growth. In
1972, the global think tank, the Club of Rome, asserted that the
world’s gold, mercury, tin, copper, and oil reserves would last
less than twenty years in their book Limits to Growth. However,
despite what doomsday predictions may suggest, the Earth has not
run out of any resources nor is it likely that it will run out
of any in the near future. In fact, resources are becoming more
abundant. Though this may seem puzzling, it does not mean that
the actual quantity of resources in the Earth’s crust is
increasing but rather that the amount available for our use is
constantly growing due to technological innovations. According
to the U.S. Geological Survey, the only resource we have
exhausted is cryolite, a miner