Sustainability: Inside the box

If your property were surrounded by a four-sided box that let in sunlight but little else, how long could you last?
Would you run out of food when your cupboard became bare of store-bought food or do you grow vegetables in your yard?
Would you carefully conserve your remaining water and put out containers to harvest rain water, realizing what a valuable commodity water is?
Would you decide not to use what was left of the gas to mow the lawn since you'd have to keep breathing in the fumes?
Could you make do with no electricity?
Would you hesitate to put out pesticides and herbicides since the poisons would stay in your air and water?
How many items that you would have "thrown away" before would you now find ways to reuse?

What if the box were around your town?
Would there be enough farmers to provide you with food and meat or do the strip malls rule the land?
Could you get around on bikes and by walking when the gas ran out?
Would the town ban landscaping that needs more water than the sky provides?
Would composting, reusing and recycling become law so your entire boxed-in town wasn't a landfill within two or three years?

What if the box were around the state?
Would we insist that Lake Michigan's water be doled out more carefully so we didn't run out so soon?
Would we stop people from burning the remaining coal so we didn't fill what was left of our remaining airspace with smoke?
Would our farmers provide enough variety that we could still get our needed nutrition? Or have they already given up on growing items that can be imported more cheaply?

What if there were a box around our planet?
Would we pollute the land, water and air?
Would we use water with abandon to support non-native plants in deserts? Would we become a throw-away society that tosses things into the landfill with no thought?
Would we genetically modify our foods and spray them with poisons?

When is it too late for us to realize our planet is in a box, its own atmosphere, and that we can't drive to the next planet and start over? The decisions you made for your boxed-in yard need to be replicated in every home in every country. We can't rely on the neighbors to be responsible, another country to be responsible. We're in this box together.