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To some folks at Warm Hearth retirement community in Blacksburg, John Cairns is "Dr. Doom."

A retired Virginia Tech university distinguished professor of environmental biology, the 83-year-old Cairns is the embodiment of the word prolific. During an amazing 56-year career, he's nearing a prodigious 1,500 published papers; including 60 books. His curriculum vitae, the resume of academic scholars, is 107 pages long.

When I called on him recently, he mentioned about belonging to a writer's club at Warm Hearth. He joked, "Other people are writing about baking or making dresses. I'm writing about things like ecotoxicology and sustainability."

"I've been working on environmental problems since 1948," he told me. "Much of my writing is about ecological overshoot, which is a term for using more resources than the earth can regenerate."

Many resources are renewable, but he explained we need to let them renew. "Ask yourself, 'How many fish can you take out of a fishery, say the Grand Banks, and still have it keep coming back every year?' We know that some of the fisheries have been overfished and the brood stock has been diminished.

"Think of it as having a bank account that draws interest you can draw from. The regeneration is the interest and the brood stock is the capital."

I remembered reading, for instance, that over-fishing, pollution, disease, and siltation have reduced the oyster catch in the Chesapeake Bay to 1 percent of historic highs.

"Of course, this affects humans because it affects carrying capacity. We now have about a 24 percent ecological overshoot. What this means is that we're consuming all of the annual interest and we're dipping into the earth's capital. The overshoot is increasing about 1 percent per year.

"Up until about 1980 we'd been living on the interest on our bank account of the planet's resources. If you dip into the capital, the interest diminishes. We can't keep doing that forever."

He paused for a moment and said, "This sounds like doom to lots of people, but I try to write as an unimpassioned observer. I just report what is going on."

He continued, "The reason we get away with this is, say you had a neighbor who was living a bit higher on the hog than his bank account would allow, you wouldn't necessarily know about it. I don't think most people realize the extent to which we are digging into the capital.

"Old growth forests, topsoils, and aquifers are disappearing, and fisheries are diminishing. That's all natural capital. Nature is generous, so when everything is going well, we get pretty good interest. But when the regeneration rate is decreased, then you don't have as much carrying capacity. So it's definitely already having a serious effect. And it will get worse.

"What enables us to tap into resources so quickly is cheap energy. Cheap energy is gone now, forever.

"That's how we get so much of our food products now in America. Big agribusiness produces corn cheaply by using lots of cheap energy. Global warming will reduce yields by changing growing conditions and altering rainfall patterns. Rising energy costs will increase the operational expenses of the big pieces of machinery that now plant, fertilize, and harvest all this stuff. So our foodstuffs are not going to flow the way they've done before.

"What I find so discouraging and many people find so surprising is that our gluttony isn't buying us much in the way of happiness. A report called the Happy Planet Index was issued by a group of economists, of all things, called 'NEF,' the New Economics Foundation. They found no correlation between consumption and happiness."

"So what's the John Cairns guide to life?" I asked.

"The problem we're in," he said, "is caused by a collective group of individual decisions. To solve the problem will take individual decisions. It's a big lesson that material goods are not going to provide happiness.

"We could all live more simply and still be happy."

"John," I said, "most folks your age aren't working any more. What are you trying to get done?"

He chuckled and said, "This is a fascinating thing we're seeing. As long as I'm capable, I want to help people understand the relationship between the earth and all its living things and how we can sustain ourselves as long as possible."

Cairns' work can be seen online at www.johncairns.net

Michael Abraham lives in Blacksburg. He owns three businesses and works four jobs. He never learned how to relax.