In Wilson’s day, associating “natural resource abundance with national industrial strength” was the norm. Today, we no longer believe that this association holds. Instead, we see our economies and societies potentially threatened by a wide variety of constraints caused by natural resource scarcity. Such problems range from concerns over the cost and availability of key natural resources, including fossil fuel supplies, fisheries, arable land and water, to the environmental consequences of increasing global resource use, degradation of key ecosystems, such as coral reefs, tropical forests, freshwater systems, mangroves and marine environments, and the rising carbon dependency of the world economy. Contemporary unease over natural resource scarcity, energy insecurity, global warming and other environmental consequences is to be expected, given the rapid rate of environmental change caused by the global economy and human populations over the twentieth century … At the beginning of the twenty-first century, therefore, we are more accustomed to viewing “the exceeding bounty of nature” to be running out, rather than providing unlimited supplies for “our genius for enterprise.” Rather than enjoying a new “Golden Age” of Resource-Based Development, we seem to be entering a different era, the “Age of Ecological Scarcity.”