Resources:

• Cape Town water crisis 
• Resilience and Resources
• Climate Change and Disability
• The greatest lesson you might ever learn in this life is this: It is not about you.
  Shannon L. Alder

The constant change that I mentioned in the last slide also applies to the resources necessary to our economic, personal, and social well-being. We are beginning to become used to the idea that something (a constantly changing something) will always be in short supply. We just don’t know what it will be until it is in short supply.

For example, there was a shortage of IV bags because the most important source of them was a factory in Puerto Rico and the factory stopped producing because of Hurricane Maria and our failure to respond to the devastation in a timely way. There are now chronic and ever-changing shortages of medical treatments of all kinds. And shortages aren’t restricted to healthcare.

There are many reasons for the unpredictability of resource stability, but the most important drivers of our inability to predict what will be in short supply is a combination of the increasing cost of extracting any resources from anywhere, increasing and unstable efforts to make production more efficient, and the unpredictability and size of disasters, political events like terrorism, and social/political upheavals of every conceivable kind.

The obvious answer is to steward resources and not waste them. But every pressure of social, political, and economic elites is to increase profits and to extract those profits for personal and family use rather than to conserve them to use when things go wrong with the system for the rest of us.

So, no matter how obvious it is that we need to practice stewardship, the short-term always seems to win out over the long view.