The Earth is full of tremendous resources, and everything that we consume — our food, our cars, our houses, our toys — comes from it. I don’t need to remind you that houses are built from trees, cars are built from iron ore, and even the device you are reading this on was made mostly from materials mined from the ground.

The earth may seem to have infinite resources, but it doesn’t. The earth can provide unfathomable amounts of raw materials to us, we just have to let them replenish. But we don’t.

Instead, we are blowing through our proverbial piggy bank like James blew through his trust fund. $5,000,000 seems like it can buy an awful lot of expensive things until it can’t anymore. The seemingly bottomless pit isn’t so bottomless. It has a hard floor, and it really hurts when you hit it.

If the Earth is our bank account, we are pulling out cash like a trust fund baby hooked on cocaine, with a shopping addiction, who has an ATM right across the street.

We are chipping away at our resource base at an alarming rate. In the past twelve months we have consumed the resources that it took the planet about eighteen months to produce. Every forest we clear cut, every oil field we drill, every ocean we overfish, we are setting ourselves up for disaster. The more that we pull out, the less that can be replenished.

If all of the world’s 7 billion people consumed as much as an average American, it would take the resources of between 5–8 Earths to sustainably support it all. Even at the current global rate of consumption, we need between 2 -3 Earths to keep the party going.

It’s not only the consumption that’s a problem, it’s the destruction. We are burning the candle on both ends. We put a tremendous strain on our Earth while simultaneously expecting it to provide more for us. Since we’ve polluted our air, water, and land, the Earth does not replenish resources at the same rate it did two hundred years ago. It’s like we are expecting our horse to win the Kentucky Derby after we have starved it for 2 weeks.

We are feverishly swiping our debit cards while simultaneously throwing molotov cocktails at the bank’s front door.

California is famous for movie stars, tech startups, and beautiful beaches. Recently, the Golden State has also become famous for something not quite as glamourous — epic drought. We’ve placed huge burdens on the water resources of the region, and with abnormally lower rainfall to replenish our reservoirs, we turn to our aquifers.

Aquifers have a particular recharge rate — the rate at which new, fresh water flows in. If we pump out water at or below the recharge rate, we can continue to tap into the resource indefinitely.

Perhaps due to lack of accountability, or convenience, or even macroeconomics, we continue to consume more of this resource each and every year. We’ve pulled so much water out of the ground that one part of the San Joaquin Valley has even sunk by 28 feet over the last century. While our initial consumption rate was probably less than the recharge rate, it crept up year after year and now far exceeds it. At some point, an adjustment is inevitable. When the wells dry up, we can only use what falls from the sky. Right now, that isn’t much. California has seen record low rainfall totals over the last few seasons.