Image Via Flickr User Joi

Do you like your stuff? Do you want more? Do you feel being a fiscally responsible citizen entitles you to more when you are in the mood to buy that new flat screen plasma TV, or the shiny red car with all the works?

What if I told you that you couldn’t have that car (at a price you can afford) because somebody 10,000 km away wants it and there is only enough metal, glass and oil out there for one of you to have the vehicle? Sounds crazy, right?

Earlier this year, Klaus Toepfer, the head of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), made headlines around the globe when he explained that should China, Indonesia and India start buying cars like we do, that would be a staggering 200 million new cars to assemble. Toepfer said that China’s plan to quadruple their GDP by 2020 is simply impossible, unless developed countries, such as the US, dramatically alter their consumption habits and China adopts radically different consumption and production models.

While Toepfer attempted to backtrack on some of his remarks, they are clearly in line with the World Wildlife Fund’s Living Planet Report 2000,which states that if everyone on the planet consumed resources and emitted CO2 at the rate of Europeans or Americans, we would need at least two additional earths to compensate.

This isn’t the first time the alarm bells have rung. The millennium has turned without the doomsday predictions of Armageddon that environmentalists were making in the 70’s when Rachel Carson published Silent Spring.

The George Bushes don’t seem to be too alarmed. In 1992,George Sr. said "the American way of life is not up for negotiation." Recently, George Jr.’s spokesmen Ari Fleisher, repeated the same line.

Bushes aside, we are now reluctantly waking to a reality in which we are using up our natural resources at a dramatic rate. It is these resources that have allowed us to maintain and grow both our society and our economy.

Case in point: There is no substance more vital to human life than water. With water a constant issue in Middle-East peace negotiations, with typically rainy Vancouver going bone dry over the summer, and with social groups fighting tooth and nail against the privatization of water in the arena of the UN and WTO, we now have real experiences to examine potential fuel for conflicts.