Merriam-Webster defines "sustainable" as 1. capable of being sustained and 2. of, relating to, or being a method of harvesting or using a resource so that the resource is not depleted or permanently damaged. Former Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland succinctly summed up the sustainable use or exploitation of nature's resources as a process that "meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."

Today, the concept of sustainably using the Earth and its finite resources on land and in the oceans is taking hold at multiple levels of society, thanks in large part to the incessant demands by environmental and animal rights groups alike. Those groups gained legitimacy by humankind's checkered, and often brutal, history of natural resource consumption.

Despite the rhetoric of conservationists, that tradition of environmental abuse is not new, nor is it a characteristic that can or should be laid exclusively at the feet of corporate capitalism. The ancient world's hunger for wild animals as pets in Ptolemy's Egypt or fodder for Rome's insatiable entertainment appetite at Circus Maximus or the Coliseum stripped them from the forests of Europe, Asia Minor and North Africa.

Contrary to Rousseau's belief in primitive man's innate harmony with nature, scholars now portray many First People as less than conservation conscious with villages uprooted in search of game after local wildlife was consumed to depletion and campsites were befouled beyond habitability. Stampeding bison by the herd over steep cliffs is hardly an example of wise resource use. In North America newcomers from across the Atlantic treated the land, river, and ocean resources no better.

Six billion hectares of the planet's virgin forests shrank precipitously thanks to the needs of man. The Sahara, once lush, animal-inhabited woodland, became the world's great sandbox. The Middle Ages saw Europe's transition from 80 percent forest-covered land to barely 20. Stripping a thousand or two trees for a single 18th Century ship-of-the-line sporting 80 to 100 cannons and 800-plus men makes fast work of denuding any European country of hardwood particularly during an era where nations regard war and vast Navies the way they cheer World Cup soccer today.

Two centuries ago, scientists viewed the Earth as a cornucopia of limitless resources. Trees could be cut, fish caught, ducks and deer shot, oysters tonged, fur harvested, and crabs trapped without the first thought as to how many and for how long. The end of the 19th and advent of the 20th Centuries began to prove the fallacy of that unfounded theory as the United States in particular soon found itself on the verge of being sans bison, deer, turkey, river otter, etc. The last half century marked a new and increasingly important way of looking at the world and what was left of Nature's resources.

It took 10,000 years for humans to top a million in number. Our global population doubled over the next 150 years. It only took 40 more years to double again. Now barely 20 years later there are 6.6 billion of us. That's a lot of mouths to feed, homes to build, and energy to use. Plus there's more wealth now spread among hundreds of millions of that 6.6 billion to fuel human purchasing power and increasing the demand for food, particularly meat and seafood, energy, and every other consumable squeezed from an aging, warming planet.

Insightful professors at Colorado State University in the essay "Food for Thought" put part of the dilemma facing Earth's human inhabitants in perspective. Assume a juicy red apple is earth. Slice it into quarters and toss away three that represent the planet's surface covered by the oceans and other bodies of water. Now slice the remaining quarter in half. One half equals the landmass uninhabitable for humans: the Arctic, Antarctic, deserts, swamps, and high mountains. What's left is one-eighth of the total apple/Earth that is human-friendly habitat. Continue cutting the eighth-size slice into four more sections. Three are areas where the soil cannot be farmed because it is too rocky, too steep, too cold, too wet, or covered by cities, homes, parks, and roads that bar its use for agriculture. The thin skin of the remaining sliver illustrates the top five feet of the earth's crust where the world's non-marine food and fiber are produced. That's hardly the portrait of endless bounty theorized by the 19th Century's intelligentsia. It also represents the habitable, fecund wild lands that are our forests and meadows outside parks and preserves. It is indeed a fragile world we live in.

The dynamic at play in the eco-melodrama over how we use or abuse that thin sliver of fertile land, the three quarters that are covered with water, our non-agricultural lands, the frigid north and south lands and our mountains is what sustainability is about.

Righteously indignant eco-activists point accusatory fingers at corporations. Global trading corporate giants and their smaller wannabe fellow-travelers are easy to portray as environmental boogie men. After all perceptually, any entity that is brusque and impersonal in the treatment of employees can't possibly be tender towards the Earth. Plus there is history to consider.

Tales of rampant environmental carnage fill volumes on abuses considered business as usual in mining for precious metals, iron ore, minerals, petroleum, blasting sides of mountains to build roads and rails, vistas of clear cut tree stumps, wholesale slaughter of feathered and fur creatures during the age of the Robber Barons and the Industrial Revolution. Twentieth Century warfare did its part in destroying wild lands and wild life along with its toll of human lives and habitat. After the second global war, vast tracts of suburban housing replaced verdant fields. Now beaches that once saw great numbers of sea turtles lumber ashore to nest are sites for multi-story resorts and playgrounds for those with considerable disposable income.

With our numbers pushing towards ten billion, consumer demands on the Earth are growing far beyond its capacity to provide. Environmental groups stand poised as the thin line of resistance to Earth's demise. After nearly a half Century of sounding the alarm, gaining credibility, supporters, and funds, and developing expertise in mass communications, legal action and political pressure, they are advancing with confidence against aquaculture in general and salmon farms in specific, genetically engineered crops, corporate farming, farm animal abuse, and more.

Global traders and nations reveling in newly minted wealth appear the polar opposite of the environmental and animal rights advocates. They are portrayed as the exploiters of the Earth. They seek new tracts of resource treasure to plunder and put on the world market. They send buyers to purchase lobster pulled from poisoned coral reefs, armadas of fishing vessels to vacuum deep- ocean and undeveloped nations' coastal waters. Rainforest timber is looted or burned for exportable agricultural crops. Third world sites of the rush for resources are paid pennies on the dollar for their marine, timber, mineral, and energy wealth. Their people risk their lives and health helping extract these resources for far less. At least that's the portrait painted by those who defend the Earth.

The traders don't see themselves that way. Their rationale for what they do is as compelling as the eco-warriors'. "We feed, clothe, heal, and provide shelter and warmth for the world," they say. And to furless, fangless, urban and suburban-dwelling humans they do provide key life services.

Ironically, history's vision of the dividing line between the environmentalists and traders tends to blur. Perhaps the best known and oldest of the former began life as the resource protection arm of the latter. WWF and IUCN (now the World Conservation Union) were the brain children of the big game hunters who enjoyed prolonged safaris in pursuit of the wild game of Africa. They were the elder statesmen of the colonial powers who partitioned Africa and who wanted to protect their sport and the exotic animals they pursued for themselves and future generations. The story of colonial Africa then and independent Africa now goes to the heart of what sustainability is and must be.

To Be Continued.