You have put on "doom colored glasses" thus you see doom. In some sense you are correct. Nothing grows exponentially forever, thus we will not. No society lives forever thus we wont. Both are true. But they were both true 2,000 years ago, and 20,000 years ago too.
Nothing new here. Many imagine this is a magic turning point... we are right at the cusp of running out of everything. Bah! Of course we have proven ourselves quite capable of destroying a habitat or a species. We have done that for 500 years. But we have also rebuilt fisheries when we so choose.
We have had births that far exceeded deaths, thus generating exponential growth. But we also have births much lower than deaths too. leveling off or even lowering entire national populations. I see no evidence that we have no choice but to expand beyond capacity, nor evidence that we MUST consume more oil or calories next year than this year. None.
I don't mean to say all is well, nor to say, nothing to worry about here. We can royally F-things-up. and humans regularly do such things... sometimes we do it to the point of cratering the entire civilization. Yes we can (and eventually will) do this. But in the 70's we were all convinced that over population will kill us all. Now many nations worry that their economy will tank from UNDER population of the working class.
Sure you can deplete the minerals in soil, so it wont grow crops. The Egyptians did this along the nile. yet humanity still is here.
And technology continue to push the boundaries of what can be done with a square kilometer of earth, so while I agree the limits are finite. We don't know what they are, and we have not reach them. At the turn of the 1900s physicists believed we were close to knowing all there was to know. Boy were they wrong!
The one area that does give me pause is species loss. We don't really know how much is happening, but we know it is happening among the small critters. And it is plausible that some kind of catastrophic collapse could become inevitable AFTER we have already pass the point of no return. That IS freaking scary. But it is not KNOW to be happening. We don't know where we are at on that spectrum. At what point collapse of the ecosystem happens. it is just a scary thing we don't know. Rather than a scary CERTAINTY we are facing.
so of course indefinite expansion is unsustainable.
It has ALWAYS been unsustainable. Nothing has changed on this front... and our ability to shift course has been shown to operate on the scale of decades, while the limits for most things are nebulous but not so close. Or rather I challenge to identify a single resource that humanity cannot shift its consumption of, that IS mere decades from depletion. what is that one most dangerous resource that shows us there are probably others.
p.s. I am not a climate denier. We are causing real damage! it just the DOOM OF CIVILIZATION needs to be justified... not with the waving of hands at dozens of things, but by pointing at one most critical resource that we CANNOT naturally adjust our consumption of, as it reduces.
