Since I study the earth sciences and many of you have touched on sustainability , let me bring in some of my thoughts from that discipline. Luckily for us, the earth takes our waste and converts it to to resources for us, but humans are now taking resources and converting them to waste faster than the earth can regenerate. In one model, as humans we are demanding an average of 5.5 acres but have only 4.5 acres per person (globalfootprintnetwork.com). Invasive species are characterized by decreasing the biodiversity of an ecosystem - humans are doing just that in nearly every ecosystem on earth. Most biologists now agree that we are headed for a mass extinction - that other species are being driven off our planet en mass. Certainly this is because we have limited resources and a growing population, but is it also driven by a limit on how many species can exist given the negatropy we are given by the sun? Lack of resources could certainly lead to world works like we've never seen and a post-industrial society, as Jesse suggests. But if we are able to collaborate and come up with a solution, the ultimate sustainable society would be extremely organized with fantastic public transportation, compact living situations, etc. Perhaps human order in society would further decrease the negatropy available on earth for other species?
One more thought: how are we directing our own evolution? Globalization means that we are not separating out populations and allowing for speciation ; doctors are actually creating population problems by increasing life expectancy and are also proliferating disease rather than allowing Darwinism to eliminate it; genetic engineering creates possibilities for the future. This seems to imply that we are mainly disrupting the natural emergent systems of evolution, perhaps destroying some of the order that would help us progress beyond homo sapiens.
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On one level it does seem like medicine and so forth would slow evolution, because I know my allergies wouldn't get me too far out in the wild and I probably wouldn't do too well hunting in the winter, either, when I get sick a lot. But in the last 1000 years or so, settling down into big societies might have actually accelerated evolution in certain ways:
http://www3.cnn.com/2007/TECH/science/12/13/evolution.speedup/index.html
How does this possibility fit into your concept of how we are directing our evolution?
On a practical note, while more food is leading to more population, advanced medicine may slow that in the places that are still growing (the rich world is getting older, not younger). If you're not familiar with it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition
Finally, I'm interested in the possibility you mention that increasing scarcity of some resources will lead us to develop an even more organized sustainable society. I think this is a more likely outcome than the doom and gloom we sometimes hear about running out of oil, land, food, etc. Technology changes economies more than anything else, so by making ever better use of the Sun (which is naturally increasing its own entropy all the time), we have a lot of basis for creating more ordered things here on Earth when we will have to, assuming no one resource gets too scarce to produce enough of an important technology. The increasing need we have for organized things like cities and technologies is going to lead us to develop even more advanced technologies to harness what the Sun is giving us. Now of course this only ensures that we get by, not that other species do, like you say. The Sun provides us with a pretty huge amount of negentropy, but you're right that there is only so much of it to go around, especially if you can't get yourself up into space to collect energy up there. It does seem like there will necessarily be a great loss of species due to our increasing evolution and organization, so if there's nothing we can do about evolution/organization because it is completely natural, there's nothing we can do about killing all the other species, either. Now how about this: if there's some kind of special force like you suggest driving our evolution, and there's nothing we can do to stop it, the force/being/whatever seems to want us to kill all the other species!
Please tell me if this reasoning is no good...
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