Articles
An article in New Scientist from 24 May 2007 called "Earth's nature wealth: an audit", by David Cohen contains some alarming details about just how long before we will start to see the depletion of various rare earth metals which will have a serious impact on the global population.
Items that we take for granted will become impossible/overwhelmingly expensive to produce within the next 20-30 years. These include Computer chips, Fluorescent light bulbs, LCD monitors, to name a few.
This is an older article, however it appears to be the source of other more recent articles.
