[Intro]   You’ve probably noticed by now -- in your years of being a human -- that human beings need a lot of stuff to live: food, water, shelter, YouTube.    Well, maybe not that last one.   So where does all of this stuff come from?   Why, it comes from our very own Earth! We live on a planet has all of the stuff we need to survive. There’s fresh water to drink, fruit on trees, and wood to build our houses.   Convenient, right?   We call this “stuff” resources.    Because humans need so many of these resources to live, it’s easier for us to form communities -- like cities or neighborhoods -- where these resources are plentiful, so we don’t have to travel long distances to find them on our own.   That’s why you don’t normally see big cities in the middle of deserts --where there’s no water -- or at the tops of freezing mountains --where there’s no food.    Think about your own town, and where it’s located. If it’s close to things like water and agriculture, that was probably no accident.    Humans, and other animals, tend to thrive in places that are near the resources they need to survive. Of course, the stuff we need to live doesn’t come ready-to-use right out of the Earth!   Although I would personally love it if there were, say, a lake full of pure hot fudge.   But, in order for us to use the resources around us, we have to transform them first. Because I’m kinda hungry right now, let’s use food as an example.   In fact, let’s make a cake!   Think about all the ingredients that you need to put together in order to bake one of these delicious treats. Let’s start with some water.   The water that comes out of your kitchen faucet most likely came from the rivers and lakes around your town. But before the water is safe to drink, it has to be cleaned and stored in places like reservoirs and water towers.    K, what next? Flour, eggs, sugar and milk.    These ingredients, and a lot of the other foods that we eat, have to be cultivated -- which means, grown on farms -- before they can be shipped to grocery stores. In order to do this, farms have to be where crops and livestock can live and grow.   Alright, now we need to mix these ingredients all together.   That means that our electric mixer needs power. The energy we use to power all of our gizmos can come from a lot of different places. Sometimes it comes from materials that we have to dig underground to find, like oil and natural gas.   Some houses get their energy from the sun, or by wind. Some towns that are close to large dams can even get their energy from moving water-- but more on that later.   Now, how do we bake this bad boy?   The same kinds of energy that powered our mixer also help do things like heat our homes and cook our food.   So from start to finish, everything we used to make our cake came from the transformation of the resources around us.    The effect the natural world has on our lives is immense, and something as simple as baking a cake shows that we wouldn’t be able to live the way we do without the abundance of natural resources on our planet.   And it doesn’t hurt that the end result of those resources can be a cake!