The Worst Ecological Disaster is... Debt!

Imagine you are standing before a large forest of 1000 trees.  You see a lumberjack standing tall with a large ax, he has a burly beard, flannel shirt and strong posture.  Lets call him Paul B.  Paul owns this plot of land which he bought after he saved enough from his hard years of labor.  You want to build a house or log cabin, but to do that you need the lumber from Paul.  You haven't saved like Paul did.  You only have enough money to build one wall of the house, so you go to the bank and secure a loan for that house.  Now, the bank decides to give you an unlimited amount because they think your credit is that good.  Instead of building a modest house you decide that you want a giant house, and with your loan the size of the house can be as big as you want.  

So originally you could have only given Paul enough to cut down a few trees.  Now, you can give him enough to cut down all the trees.  So he does, all the trees can be cut down because there is no limit to the amount of money Paul needs to do the work.  And this is the disaster.  Without anything stopping Paul from cutting down all the trees he will, and he will take the money he received to go buy another plot of 1000 trees and start it all over again.  But wait, cant we plant more trees?  Yes, but that has a cost, and if you are going into debt to cut down the trees, the likely hood of going into more debt to plant trees that take 100 years to grow back is extremely low.   

This is happening in every aspect of the commodities market; Oil, Coal, Fishing, Farming, and much more.  With no stopping the debt we can and are extracting more resources than we can afford.  It will then take more and more debt to extract these nonrenewable resources as they become harder and harder to get.  The fishing, while it is regulated, it too will start to diminish as the debt grows.  

The farmland has been sucked dry of all the natural minerals and nutrients from the soil, we now are forced to add synthetically created nutrients to the soil just to get things to grow and push for more yield.  Those agrochemicals are also bought with debt, which come from non-replenishing resources.

So you see how pushing all this debt can quickly become unsustainable, especially for future generations because they will one day be stuck with the bill and have no resources left to pay it off.  They will be left standing in a baron wasteland that grows and produces nothing.