Joseph Tainter, a Professor in the Department of Environment and Society at Utah State University, and author of the seminal work "The Collapse of Complex Societies", recently gave a speech on complexity and resource use at the 94th Annual Meeting of Ecological Society of America in New Mexico: (Conference theme: Human Macroecology: Understanding Human-Environment Interactions Across Scales). The speech, 'Human Resource Use: Timing and Implications for Sustainability', based on a forthcoming paper, is reprinted below with the authors permission.