Can We Sustain Ourselves?

848: Miles of Pipe
15: Vacuum Trucks Deployed
33: Temporary Storage Tanks
45: Minutes of Leakage
10,000: Barrels of Exxon Oil Spilled in Mayflower, Arkansas

When news broke of the colossal environmental blunder in Arkansas, many saw the spill as merely another in a seemingly endless series of human error and destruction. Exxon, as a reputable company should, quickly dispatched clean-up crews to the area and started to rebuild both the afflicted community and their own reputation.

Considering the spill is lesser in scope than BP's or the Gulf War's monstrous disasters, it will be talked about for a few days and then largely forgotten by a vast majority of Americans who are not directly facing the consequences of the accident. There probably exists a large sector of the population completely unaware of this mishap ever taking place.

The question we as a populace are beginning to face has shifted from the prior "Will we deplete our supply of natural resources?" to "When will we deplete our supply of natural resources?"

But this is only the case because of a severe case of complacency among the American people. Wasteful behavior and errant consumption have continued their upward trend despite the staggering amount of research done on the subject.

5: Species Facing Extinction Every Day
35,000: Barrels of Oil Consumed Every Minute
10: Tons of Nuclear Waste Generated Daily
1,692: Acres of Arable Land Transformed into Desert Hourly

At some point this issue becomes less about sustaining the environment and more about the aforementioned pure and utter  complacency that will compound over time to create a situation with no rewind button. Nature was designed as a sustainable system. Were humans?