By CECIL BOTHWELL

We are in a pickle. 

The natural resources that undergird our economic and social systems are being used up at an accelerating rate due to the combined pressure of population growth and global industrialization.

We’re all aware of the problem in regard to oil — with a reminder every time we fill our tanks. But the shortages of other critical materials are less obvious to the average citizen.

Governments and industrial corporations are more aware, however, and their outlook is increasingly grim.

The United States, for example, has pretty much exhausted it’s readily available iron ore stock, the principal ingredient of steel and an absolute necessity for most of what we think of as “modern” life. U.S. copper mines are in the same dire straits. (There’s a reason why thieves strip ground wires from utility poles, and gut vacant homes for copper pipe. Scarce supplies are driving the price of copper scrap.)

Nickel, molybdenum, cobalt, uranium ... in fact, pretty much any ore you are likely to be able to name, are all in diminishing supply. Then there are all those rare earth minerals you probably don’t even know exist. Lithium has become somewhat familiar, due to the widespread use of lithium-ion batteries and the medical treatment of bi-polar disorder.

But scandium, yttrium, lanthanum, cerium, praeseodymium, neodymium, prometheum, samarium, europium, gadolinium, terbium, dysprosium, holmium, erbium, thulium, ytterbium and lutetium are all in very short supply that is getting shorter. All but the last of these are critical to one or another of our modern technologies, and chances are that lutetium has some yet undiscovered use. (The rare earth elements, in addition to being naturally extremely scarce, all have nearly magical and nearly irreplaceable properties.)

Rare earths are in your cell phone, your stainless steel appliances, your laptop computer, every hybrid car, the entire communications system, and in medical tools. 

They were rare to begin with, are hard to mine and refine, and are located in very few places on the planet. China controls a substantial majority of the current world supply, and while there are untapped reserves in other places, getting to them is increasingly expensive, and the refinery of the ore is particularly toxic. It involves a lot of acid and generates a flood of highly poisonous waste water.

There are enormous political implications in our resource dearth as well. Many of us recall the OPEC oil embargo that triggered the first major ratcheting of gas prices in the last century (and arguably brought down the Carter administration in the U.S.)

And there is little doubt that the G.W. Bush invasion of Iraq had everything to do with Iraqi oil reserves. China has already demonstrated that it’s willing to cut off delivery of its rare earth stores in response to international tension, as it did with Japan in 2010. Meanwhile China and India are forging new alliances with African nations to secure access to industrial feedstock.

More immediately, on a personal level at least, we are facing a major crunch in arable land. Here in the U.S. we aren’t likely to see famine in the very short term, but the global food supply is extremely precarious. It’s led China, in particular, to buy hundreds of thousands of acres of farm land in Africa and South America, principally for raising grains and nutritional oil crops. There is no economically viable substitute for rich topsoil and the reliable water supplies necessary to farming. The so-called “green revolution” has reached its apex with new varieties of high-yield plants heavily dependant on petroleum-based fertilizers and diminishing water resources.

What to do? Clearly there are no easy answers, but if we want our heirs to live comfortable lives there will have to be fewer of them. As we are sometimes reminded, if everyone on earth lived as we do in America, we’d need several more earths to fill the shelves.

Unfortunately, earth-like planets are even rarer than rare earths, at least in our immediate cosmic neighborhood.

We are going to need to adjust to new limits, whether we like it or not, and doing so intentionally and with good planning has it all over famine and war.

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Cecil Bothwell is a member of Asheville’s City Council and does not own a gun.