British researchers report more than 60,000 injuries from wrap rage, people who injur themselves taking knives and scissors to adult-proof packaging.

Packaging is a fine example of what once once a helpful thing becomes a negative, even as it continues to become increasingly expensive in terms of wasted resources. Packaging is also a good example of how our economy, while optimizing for scale and consistency, has failed to take note of important shifts like (a) the rise of e-commerce and (b) the increasing scarcity of finite resources like oil, clean water, and arable land.

Excessive packaging often exists to sell a product or to prevent shoplifting. Neither of these arguments apply in the case of e-commerce, yet still we get things wrapped in layers and layers of clam shells, boxes, plastic, and foam– all of that surrounded by bubble wrap and boxes. This contributes not only to wrap rage but higher shipping and storage costs. If resources were infinite maybe this wouldn’t matter, but all that plastic is made of oil which is guaranteed one day to be exhausted. Yet somehow we fail to adapt.

As we grow world-wide to ever increasing resource usage, and we one day reach the end of oil, are we going to have a soft-landing and conversion to alternative resources, or a crash landing of war and chaos?

These thoughts are all spurred in part by my recent reading Jared Diamond’s book Collapse, which describes a number of cases of societal collapse due to environmental damage, climate change, hostile neighbors, reduced help from friendly neighbors, and the inability of societies to adapt their behaviors to the changes around them. In more than case, societies collapsed after reaching the peak of their power, population, and ability to consume. The bigger and more successful the society, the easier it is to overreach the sustaining capacity of the environment.

With globalization we’re able to tap into a much wider variety of environments and mask the problem longer, but when we tap out resources on a global scale, where do we go then?

I’m sure someone must have written on this problem– how do you design a free market to take a long view on finite resources? It seems that markets have short attention spans and short views into the future. If a finite resource is not in imminent danger of being exhausted, it won’t be properly value from a global perspective. A time traveler from a future in which oil was almost exhausted would certainly pay a lot more than our current market rate for oil, to give just one example, and would be surprised by the way we waste oil in ways that don’t even contribute to our happiness.