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industrialization and productive advance it is thought to
have caused. At the same time, stores of natural wealth
have diminished until further advance may be limited at
least as much by resource scarcity as by sufficiency of
capital.
Now all that we have said about the natural
resources as a whole is doubly true when we narrow our
gaze to the mineral resources of the earth. Our machine
economy and our desire for ever greater progress have
combined to consume the mineral wealth of the earth at
a rate no longer feasible. There simply are not the
mineral resources available to allow the consumption
trends of the past exceptional century to continue.
The amount of bituminous coal taken out of the ground
in 1950 was two and a half times greater than the
amount taken out in 1900. For copper the figure was
three times more, for petroleum, thirty times more.
More metals and mineral fuels have been used since
I91U by the United States alone than the whole world
used in all of history prior to the First World War,
and that tremendous increase in materials demand has
begun to stretch the imaginations of those whose
business it is to find and take those raw materials
from the earth.
If stores of minerals were limitless there
would be no problem; nor would the question of their
employment in the productive process be one of interest