Water plays an integral role in most other resources, including, of course, life. The distribution of water is quite asymmetrical. Indeed, all our natural resources are distributed that way. The pattern is universal and underlies the Resource Buffer Theory (RBT), which implies that the large proportion of the asymmetrically distributed resource is a buffer on which we depend for the conditions that both have enabled life and ensure its—our—sustainability. Water's unique properties and universality mean that it is civilization's canary in the coal mine: if the water and associated environmental conditions are having problems, humans are having problems. Humans violate the universal pattern of carbon distribution by our numbers and by the conversion of insignificant proportions of the huge inorganic carbon buffer into the relatively miniscule carbon dioxide buffer with enormous impact. Like drought, which creeps up on us and has no apparent beginning, the current environmental changes are harbingers of a future wherein the most endangered species on the planet is us, the most invasive of species. We are exacerbating—and in particularly important cases, causing—those threats. A 400-year-old dictum by Sir Francis Bacon includes an urgent message for us in understanding how we adversely impact Earth's support systems. It also provides a strategy for how to deal with the challenges currently facing humanity. Two examples of how we can emulate the natural distribution of resources are presented. Hopefully, the time to act is not beyond our reach; there are some identifiable policy and management implications of these observations about the universal pattern of resource distribution, strategies, and practices, which we can and must exercise to have a chance at human sustainability.

Environmental Practice 9:128–135 (2007)