It’s an attitude Americans have had for centuries. It’s an attitude that has led to excessive spending and consuming, excessive usage of natural resources and ultimately an economic crisis and an environment on the verge of disaster. It’s the attitude that there is no such thing as too much.

In the spirit of this mantra, Americans not only spend as if there are no monetary limits, but they also use up natural resources as if the earth will always supply them with more.

But with each tree — the kind that money doesn’t grow on — that is logged and each piece of coal that is mined from the ground, the earth depletes a finite amount of resources.

In the state of Kentucky in particular, mining coal has become a controversial topic that often divides the state right down the middle: on one hand, the coal industry is huge for the state’s economy (and for investments in and donations to UK), but on the other it is a business that is ripping apart the state’s landscape.

Groups protest mining while the university relies on it for power, and now smack in the middle of campus, a sculpture stands in an effort to connect Kentucky’s coal use to that of Ghana, Africa.

The sculpture towers over campus in the UK Art Museum sculpture garden as a symbol of the ties between Ghana and Kentucky’s coal culture, but also as an apparent shrine to the resource. Elevated about 10 feet off the ground in a cauldron-like bowl, real pieces of coal donated by a local coal company remind the community not only of our dependence on the resource but also our attitude that these natural resources are mine-able at any time for any purpose and are expendable.

“The issues around coal are positive and negative, but it connects us with his home culture,” said Kathy Walsh-Piper, director of the UK Art Museum, in a Kernel article Friday of the work by contemporary artist El Anatsui.

But this connection to Anatsui’s culture — where in Ghana they use coal only to cook their food and not in the mass amounts used in the United States — falls to the background as the sculpture stands as a reminder that this state and nation use coal, and other natural resources, in huge amounts and for whatever they want.

“This sculpture is a reminder that coal is a subject,” Walsh-Piper said in the Friday article. “Coal kind of runs our life as well as enhancing it. It is essential to every day.”

It runs our life, and now it decorates it too. It sure seems like coal — as the finite resource that it is — could be put to better use.