One of the main factors muddying the waters seems to be that humans consume resources at different rates.
My definition of sustainability is development that does not consume resources but uses and reuses them, ideally endlessly.
Large American families consume resources and produce waste in glaring disproportion to most other families of the world.
Flashy rail systems frequently consume resources that could serve far more people if devoted to improving bus travel.
* Six will attend some form of religious service at least occasionally, but all 10 will agree with this, from Horace: "We are just statistics, born to consume resources".
Determining some sort of final number that the human race can comfortably survive at is virtually impossible without considering the differing way we consume resources.
At the moment, we're spending too much on things that consume resources — like the military and earmarks — and not enough on things that create them.
Directed by Steven Spielberg PG-13 140 minutes In a warmer world flooded and shrunk by ecological disaster, robots, called mechas, make efficient helpmates (and they don't eat or otherwise consume resources).
If, he wrote, "there were thousands of people around who were, say, hundreds of times taller than the average person, and whose ability to consume resources were accordingly disparate, perhaps we'd try to find some way of rectifying the situation".
The average rates at which people consume resources like oil and metals, and produce wastes like plastics and greenhouse gases, are about 32 times higher in North America, Western Europe, Japan and Australia than they are in the developing world.
