Natural Resources Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Re sources , traditionally me aning natural resources, are at the center of many aspects of our economies, societies, and environmental concerns. Before there was environmental management, there was natural resource management, and indeed some of the resource management professions such as forestry, mining, and wildlife management go back thousands of years, with significant texts going back at least several centuries.

A resource is basically something useful to people and their societies and economies. Resources have always been used by human societies, and arguably even nonhuman societies to a limited degree. What has changed over time and space is the variety of resources used and the magnitude of resources extracted from natural systems and consumed. As the majority of human societies have moved from exclusively hunter-gatherer economies through agricultural to industrial and now a globalized industrial economy, their consumption of an ever greater range of resources has increased exponentially, along with the production of wastes from production and consumption. The history of these changes is a vast and sometimes contentious topic, but clearly it has been catalyzed in complex and interdependent ways by settlement; science and technology of many sorts, but especially transportation, energy, and communication; population growth; and social and cultural changes and developments. Human societies almost everywhere on the globe today, albeit to varying degrees, are linked by flows of resources, goods, labor, and information that greatly supplement the resources available locally.

An important feature of resources is that they represent a wide variety of things that are valued, needed, and wanted by societies at any particular time and place. In 17th and 18th-century North America, the great forests of the continent were mostly cursed by European fur traders and even early settlers because they impeded travel and had to be cleared for agriculture. A century later, they were found to be of great value for export to Europe and for use in the growing, industrializing cities of eastern North American and the Great Lakes Basin. Similarly, many minerals had little value until industrial processes developed to use them, such as petroleum products in the late 19th century, or uranium well into the 20th century. Other minerals, of course, such as iron, copper, gold, and coal, were traded and used for millennia by Greek, Roman, European, Asian, and American aboriginal societies.

Of course the things generally considered to be resources are usually also parts of the earth’s biophysical systems, of ecosystems, or food webs, or biogeochemical cycles. Some would ascribe a value to that as well, whether again anthropocentric as when we speak of the economic arguments for conserving biodiversity or maintaining essential ecological life services as in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, or ecocentric in terms of intrinsic value. Before returning to these issues, it is necessary to discuss what resources are in a bit more detail. Natural resources can be grouped or classified in a range of ways. Common ones include types or sectors of resources, renewable/nonrenewable, discrete/continuous, flow/stock, and public/private.

Categories of Resources

The most common sectors or categories of resources are water, air, land, agriculture, and food, minerals and fossil fuels, energy, fish and wildlife, forests, recreation, and population or human resources. Of course there are overlaps between these categories, in theory and in practice, and some are arguably more fundamental or critical than others. Water resources include freshwater and marine. Both are significant for navigation, recreation, and biodiversity, including fisheries; and freshwaters of course are critical to human individual survival and often industry. Both fresh and marine waters are subject to pollution threats, and freshwater resources face quantity threats from overuse as well. Air or atmospheric resources are equally critical to human and other life, playing a range of essential roles in biological and physical processes from respiration and photosynthesis to weather and climate regulation. Pollution of various kinds is the principal threat. Land resources are highly diverse, and relatively scarce compared to (salt) water. They support terrestrial life, and are crucial to a wide range of other resources, notably agriculture, and economic activities such as mining and land development. Land can be contaminated and ruined from a soil fertility perspective, and in places of high demand can be in short supply.

Agriculture and food resources are clearly central to human societies and sustainability. They include good soils and sites, and crop varieties including domesticated and wild progenitors. Agricultural resources are vulnerable to soil degradation, pollution and climate change, conversion to other uses, especially urban, and loss of diversity. Range, ranch, or grazing, resources may be a subset of agricultural resources, or sometimes singled out for discussion. They are of particular interest in terms of often complex mixes of public/private ownership and their joint significance to both local individuals or communities and to corporate interests.

Minerals are a very broad category that includes the typical metals like gold, iron, and copper; energy-related elements such as uranium, and even fossil fuels in some classifications; and nonmetal minerals such as salt, potash, and sand and gravel, used in industry and construction. Minerals, as the mining industry likes to point out, are central to almost every aspect of modern economies and societies. While actual mineral extraction directly impacts small areas, temporarily, the indirect effects of water and air pollution from extraction, processing and refining are often significant and contentious. Energy resources are equally central to human activity, and include minerals such as coal, oil, natural gas (fossil fuels), nuclear, and also numerous other renewable energy sources, from biomass to solar, wind, tidal, and geothermal.

Fish and wildlife are resources of significance from ecosystem and biodiversity perspectives, as sources of wild and domesticated food for people, and for their roles in recreational activities as well. Both are vulnerable to overexploitation and habitat loss, and fish, especially, to pollution. Forest resources are also central to societies and economies in many ways: to biodiversity; to ecosystem services such as runoff and flood control, CO2 sequestration and climate moderation; to production of timber and pulp and paper, and numerous nontimber forest products in various parts of the world. Forest resources are vulnerable to overexploitation, pollution, conversion to agriculture and climate change. In many places, forests are also used for recreation, along with water and coastal areas, fish and wildlife, and human, built resources such as recreation facilities.

Population can also be seen as a resource, in terms of labor, knowledge and progress. The relationships of people, and population, to resources and environment is a huge topic but obviously significant. People and population create environmental problems, through production and consumption activities, but can also contribute to solving problems through their actions, knowledge, and inventions. At the least it must be recognized that population as such interacts with resources and environment through products, technologies, and lifestyles which can vastly multiply their consumption of resources and environmental impact (e.g., internal combustion engines and nuclear power versus walking or windmills) or reduce it (e.g., solar voltaics and high efficiency building design).

There are also other resources that are cultural such as folklore, history and music, and built or human-made resources such as heritage buildings, but these are beyond the scope of this article.

Other categories of resources span across these, and often reflect human interactions with resources. First, we divide resources into renewable and nonrenewable. Renewable resources are, at least in principle, renewable after we use them. Fish and wildlife, water and air, forests, agriculture, and food resources fall into this category. They grow and replace themselves within a reasonable timeframe from a human perspective. Nonrenewable resources do not replenish themselves. Minerals, coal, oil and natural gas are the prime examples which are replaced only on geological timescales. Some groundwater resources in deep aquifers also have very long replenishment times. It is, of course, possible to use renewable resources faster than they can be renewed, and then we commonly say we are mining them. Some renewable resources are more properly infinite or perpetual, at least under any reasonable assumptions, such as solar energy or air; other renewables can be said to be infinite as long as harvesting rates are below their rate of replenishment. Nonrenewable and overexploited renewable resources are finite (even if, in some cases, very, very large).

From a management perspective we also distinguish discrete and continuous resources. The former, such as wildlife, forests, and mineral deposits are distinct and bounded. Continuous resources such as air, and for practical purposes rivers and oceans, are not readily bounded and defined. Continuous resources are, of course, much harder to manage than discrete. Land falls somewhere in between, and while continuous over great areas, is readily measured and divided up-which has been a major part of the human conquest of nature and resources.

The consideration of renewability of resource use and ownership of resources falls under resource management. The need for management can be seen as deriving from scarcity, real or perceived: the belief there are not enough resources to meet all actual or potential demands on them. Of course early, and even classical modern, economists have seen natural resources as unlimited, or at least not limiting relative to the other economic resources of labor and economic capital. The great exception was Thomas Malthus who argued that population would increase exponentially while resource availability was ultimately finite and at best availability could only increase linearly-thus society was headed for collapse. Malthus was certainly a pessimist about human adaptability, learning, and technological inventiveness, but his basic point is good. Garret Hardin’s 1968 argument about the Tragedy of the Commons, and his later lifeboat ethics drew on this perspective to emphasize the perils of what we would now call open-access resources, and the need for resource ownership, management, and control.

Ownership and Access

Building on some of these ideas, private, public, common, and open access resources are distinguished. Private resources are those owned and managed by individuals or organizations, often corporations or nongovernmental organizations. One way or another such resources must have been made discrete: definable and boundable in order to be assigned to an owner. Public resources are usually those owned by governments, to a greater or lesser degree for the public interest. In many countries there are large areas of land, forest, and water that are owned and managed by governments. Rights to use these resources are often sold to private interests, as in forestry and mining, but ownership remains with government. Generally, it is national and provincial or state governments that have the greatest role in resource ownership and government, although local governments can have a role within their lands. And international agreements can define roles for international or transnational agencies and instruments.

Common resources, sometimes confused with public and open access, are resources owned in common by communities or other groups of people, and whose use is usually governed by traditional, local cultural practices and beliefs in a sustainable way. Open access resources are just that: Owned and managed by no individual organization, and therefore free for the taking by whoever gets to them first. There are very few true open access resources, perhaps closest are the high atmosphere and the high seas.

Common property resources are ever diminishing as their management regimes are vulnerable to disruption by government economic, political, and land policies. While there can be little doubt the global trend is toward public and private ownership of resources, there are often not completely clear distinctions between them, as governments often retain some rights in relation to privatized resources (water, forests and minerals are often particularly complex this way).

The need for and benefits of private ownership of resources have long been a subject of debate. On the one hand, following Hardin and earlier political economic philosophers, private ownership is seen as encouraging careful management and stewardship, in contrast to open access, common, or even government regimes of misuse and mismanagement. The other side of the argument is that under economic policies of significant discount rates and poor internalization of resource development externalities, and limited regulation of resource development, private resource owners have incentives to develop resources faster than in the long-term public interest, without enough incentives to minimize local and global impacts of resource development.

At the extremes these positions are highly conflicted and influenced by deeper political views of the role of government and markets. The American “wise use” and “takings” movements and controversies are examples of very strong private property movements that oppose any substantial government control of resource development at levels from the local to the international.

More moderate debates focus on the relative roles of markets for resources and incentives for their conservation or sustainable use (e.g., taxes, subsidies, royalties) versus law and regulation. The last 10 or more years have seen considerable retreats from law and regulation in many countries, in favor of incentives and market mechanisms, and industry self-regulation.

This trend has been reinforced by actual and proposed policies and agreements under the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) and the World Trade Organization (WTO). In some contexts, such as North America under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) it is argued that trade agreements have reduced individual nations’ ability to control resource development to seek domestic benefits from resources while reducing costs of development.

Resource Management History

The history of resources and resource management reflects these positions in the several phases it is commonly seen as having gone through. These phases are also linked to broader philosophical perspectives on human relationships to nature. The earliest phase is a “frontier,” dominionistic, utilizationist, or individualistic phase in which resources are largely open access and abundant; government regulation, if not ownership, largely absent; and resource development goals are essentially short-term (private) profit maximization. Arguably this was the European development of much of North America before the mid-19th century.

Modern resource management emerged in response to that, and to observations and writing about resource degradation in eastern North America, southern Europe, and elsewhere by George Perkins Marsh, Gifford Pinchot, and others, in the midto late 19th century. This was a movement not so much against resource development and use, as against wasteful, extremely short-term resource development and use. It argued for stewardship, or conservation in the original sense of wise use of resources (similar to the modern sense of sustainable development), and for controlling some of the worst side effects of resource development including pollution and flooding from deforestation.

It was this movement that led to many of the early land and resource management agencies in the United States (e.g., U.S. Forest Service, Fish and Wildlife Service, Department of Agriculture), soon replicated in many other countries, and many of the first systematic surveys of resources and efforts to control their rates of exploitation. The movement’s goals were broader, anthropocentric rather than individualistic, and included notions of the public interest and public good, and seeking the most benefit for the most people (Pareto optimality).

Simultaneously, there were the beginnings of more preservationist movements, led by the early Audubon Societies, John Muir, the newly-founded Sierra Club, and numerous older organizations in England. These movements sought to prevent use and development of resources, from bird feathers for fashion, to scenic and natural areas protected in parks. The goals of preservationist movements are more ecocentric, recognizing intrinsic values of species, ecosystems, and resources. The late 20th century environmental movement has roots in both conservationist and preservationist perspectives, catalyzed by particular pollution crises.

Resource management has been strongly influenced by the planned development of resources as an engine for broader economic and political development. Mineral development, agricultural settlement, hydroelectric development, and related transportation infrastructure have been core elements in many governments’s plans, policies, and initiatives for catalyzing economic development, settlement, and national progress. How effective resource development is as a catalyst of broader socioeconomic development is highly variable, and tied to other social characteristics as well as how well resource development fosters secondary and tertiary economic activity: Processing, manufacturing, governance, and management. In the absence of such linkages, what economists call multiplier effects will be low and most of the economic benefits will flow out of the development region itself. This remains a problem in remote parts of many countries, from Canada and Russia to Brazil and Indonesia. It is also manifested in the boom-and-bust development cycle of many resource frontiers and towns. At the extreme it produced gold or other mineral rushes that last just a few years; more commonly one saw so-called resource towns built, operated, and then completely shut down and emptied after a few decades. Governments often subsidize resource development in remote regions, through paying for infrastructure to make it feasible, developing access or power generation facilities, selling power at reduced prices to industry, buying resources or surplus power at guaranteed prices, guaranteeing loans, or offering reduced royalty (resource tax) rates. In the absence of requirements and incentives for resource developers to ensure local benefits (through, for example, local employment, purchasing, value-added activities as well as extraction) such practices reinforce the imposition of development costs on resource regions without concomitant benefits. Recognition of these problems has arguably led to improved policies and practices in many places in the last 20 years, but in others there are certainly still problems.

The practices of resource management have certainly evolved over the last century. Early efforts focused on inventorying resources and determining methods for setting long-term extraction levels. During the Great Depression and droughts and Dust Bowl of the 1930s resource management was an arena for employment of many people in the United States, in land and forest reclamation and other activities. In the post-war period multiple demands on particular resources, e.g., forests, lead to development of multiple use management approaches which sought to facilitate varied and more or less simultaneous or adjacent use of resources.

By the 1960s these often technically-focused approaches were well developed and began to be criticized and modified by more systems-oriented, and integrated, management approaches that went beyond traditional, economic cost-benefit analyses. Among these concepts was maximum sustainable yield (MSY), particularly applied to renewable resources such as fish, wildlife, and trees, which sought to maintain a population at the level where its annual growth was greatest-thus maximizing a sustainable economic yield from that population. Like much in traditional resource management it implied detailed knowledge of the specific population, its behavior and environment, and assumed its essential isolation from other species and populations. Such detailed information is rarely available, and the assumption is even more rarely true, and the failures of ecologically simplistic, if mathematically complex MSY calculations, especially in fisheries, are now widely known.

These were influenced by early computer simulation efforts, by the move toward environmental impact assessment, by experience in integrated watershed management, and by broader social movements that encouraged attention to the broad public interest, and especially participation of the public in planning, policy and management of resources (and many other issues).

Sustainable Development

By the 1980s, these approaches were supplemented by sustainable development notions that emphasized ensuring resources remain available in the future for future generations to meet their needs. Rehabilitation and restoration of degraded resources and ecosystems such as soils, wetlands, rivers, and forests became increasingly feasible and common in the late 20th century. They cannot replace conserving and protecting ecosystems and resources in the first place, but can be part of a comprehensive approach to resources and ecosystems.

The noneconomic or nonmonetized effects of resource development and processing are numerous, and were certainly a major factor in the development of environmental impact assessment beginning in the 1960s and 1970s. These impacts include physical alteration of the environment, loadings (wastes or pollution), and direct effects of harvesting renewable resources on species and ecosystems. These impacts may affect local ecosystems, species, and human health; often particularly impacting traditional subsistence lifestyles. Rural landscapes also see impacts from agricultural intensification and industrialization, and sand and gravel extraction for nearby urban areas. EIA has been much improved and broadened to include social and cumulative effects, as well as economic and environmental, over the years. But it is still very difficult to assess and quantify many social and environmental impacts. Environmental economics has developed methods such as contingent valuation for indirectly valuing resource and environment systems, but it remains difficult. The effects of economic discount rates in devaluing future development of a resource, on decisions about resource extraction versus remain a particular challenge, along with properly accounting for externalities, or full-cost accounting and life-cycle analysis as these areas have developed.

Community Involvement

Many current developments in resource management emphasize local and community relationships and management of resources. Comanagement represents joint management of resources, usually by government and local or aboriginal people. Community-based conservation or natural resource management (CBNRM) is broader and emphasizes more comprehensively inclusive management processes and ownership at local levels. Comanagement initiatives are often resource-specific; CBNRM may be as well, but is often broader addressing multiple resources in an area. Neither is a panacea. Neither simplifies, or speeds up, resource management, or guarantees broad benefits to a local region. Communities are complex and rarely unitary in terms of interests and perspectives. But these approaches do help to balance the traditional, top-down, technocratic forms of resource management.

These traditional, top-down efforts to control resources and ecosystems are particularly criticized for their history of unexpected side effects, and outright failure to achieve lasting development or sustainability. Emerging approaches to resource theory and management, including adaptive management and governance, or ecological modernization, emphasize learning and learning to deal with uncertainty, most of all not seeking to eliminate uncertainty by controlling natural systems. Other responses include approaches derived from complexity sciences, or the precautionary principle, as well as more radical ideas such as bioregional self-sufficiency.

Current Challenges

In the early 21st century we are seeing rising, if fluctuating, resource prices, especially for energy. Dire forecasts of resource scarcity and decline go back to the 1960s, or even Malthus 200 years ago, and have often been wrong; but it is likely we are entering an era of greater scarcity, and cost, for at least some major resources. Estimates of remaining resources, whether known economic reserves, currently uneconomic resources, or probable or possible future discoveries, are notoriously difficult to make. Rising prices stimulate new exploration, make more resources economic, and also encourage new technologies that can increase reserves or find substitutes for declining resources.

What one considers to be the appropriate response depends on one’s view of the capacities of science and technology to find substitutes for declining resources and waste assimilation problems. The Green Revolution that vastly increased agricultural production is pointed at as a great success. But other perspectives identify negative social and environmental consequences in the greater energy consumption and chemical usage, and loss of traditional crops and practices, that the Green Revolution has created in many parts of the world.

It is the production of wastes, the residuals or externalities, that many would argue provides the hardest limit to resource development and consumption-the capacity of the earth’s system to absorb pollution such as waste heat, ozone, carbon dioxide, nutrients, sediment, and persistent toxic chemicals. Climate change is widely recognized as perhaps the strongest global manifestation of this very difficult challenge. A different global challenge emerges from the very unequal distribution of resources between and within countries. There are arguments, and concerns, that there will be growing international and intranational conflict over scarce resources, most obviously freshwater.

Other, perhaps deeper, approaches to resource scarcity and the side effects of resource consumption seek to minimize resource consumption, as a start through recycling, reducing, and reusing products and resources. The “3 R’s” can be implemented in household, industrial, and commercial sectors with support of various government levels. These may be especially important for nonrenewable resources, where the precise meaning of sustainability is not completely clear. Going further requires redesigning industrial processes, and products, to make them more efficiently and fundamentally reusable, recyclable, and less productive of waste-called cradle-to-cradle approaches. Deeper reductions of production and consumption, to make more significant changes to ecological footprints (a measure of resource and ecosystem service consumption) may well require lifestyle changes, which are even more difficult. Lifestyle change depends on complex cultural and technological changes in, for example, urban design to bring work, home, and shopping closer together; vastly improved public transit; or greater use of communication versus transportation technologies.

The nature, uses, and proper management of resources have been debated for centuries, in many disciplines. Those debates will likely continue, for there can be little doubt that the societal and economic significance, the complexity of resources and ecosystems, and the diversity of actual and potential approaches to resources and their management are not going to go away.

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