Kevin Kelly's intro to the Long Bets (Idea Futures) piece at Wired.. In 1980, biologist and ardent environmentalist Paul Ehrlich was so certain that natural resources would become scarce and expensive that he publicly bet iconoclast Julian Simon that the price of five mineral commodities (copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten) would rise in 10 years. In fact, by 1990 prices had plummeted by almost half, and Simon won the bet easily. Simon was a prolific skeptic of environmentalism, yet nothing that he ever wrote had as much impact on the course of culture as his wager with Ehrlich. That single, relatively small bet transformed the environmental movement by casting doubt on the notion of resource scarcity.

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