(Charles Platt is a guest blogger)
A friend of mine built this cabin by hand, using raw wood from a local saw mill and loose stone gathered on the 40 acres where the cabin is located at the end of a 10-mile dirt road. He lived here for a couple of years, mostly on canned food, before selling the place at a good profit during the real-estate bubble.
Since the water table is too deep to enable a well, water is mostly collected from the roof, into several buried barrels. A wood-burning stove is fuelled with juniper logs. The satellite TV is powered from one car battery through a small inverter.
Today my friend is prospecting for mineral deposits in an arid wasteland just south of the Hoover Dam. As an expert on mining and minerals, he likes to remind me that almost every single product around us is derived ultimately from raw materials that were dug out of the ground, or from things that grew in the ground. Our civilization depends entirely on activities such as mining, drilling, and logging, and will continue to do so for the indefinite future.