We all like our pickup trucks. They are fund to play with off-road, use them around the farm, tow our boats, and so forth. They are built strong and are pretty reliable. Yet, like most things in life they have limitations and we must be careful how we use them and avoid serious damage. It seems like a similar analogy can be used for mother earth. Our planet is tough and resilient, but with the pressures of 6 billion people on it we can damage it seriously if we aren’t careful.

On a truck we can do some pretty serious damage. We can run it into a tree, blow the engine by allowing it to overheat, grind up the transmission by accidentally shifting into reverse while driving, or rolling it over while driving on snow covered roads. We can do same thing with earth by carelessly allowing massive amounts of toxic escape into the air without control, dumping massive amounts of chemicals into our waterways, or consuming all of our fresh water for frivolous uses.

We aren’t just talking about minor things that while annoying don’t actually do that much damage unless massive aggregated together. A minor dent or ding in your truck might be annoying, but it’s not going to make the truck less useful. A campfire might release some smoke into the atmosphere, or a cow may leave some dung in a pasture, but that to our environment.