But the arc of progress is also a long series of unsustainable practices that eventually lead to more sustainable ones. Urbanization was a rolling health crisis until the advent of modern sanitation and medicine; artificial nitrogen fixation reached production scale just as the world was running out of its next-best fertilizer, millennia-old accumulations of guano on various small islands; coal averted deforestation in early industrial England. Every technology advancement couples finite natural resources with infinite human creativity, and pivots to a new finite input when the older one runs
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