1.1 What Makes Something a Resource
A Thought to Begin
Imagine three things: a lump of coal, a bucket of seawater, and a stretch of sunlight falling on a desert. A thousand years ago, none of these was worth much to most people. Today, coal lights cities, seawater is turned into drinking water in places like the Gulf, and that desert sunlight runs vast solar farms. The things did not change, we did. So what exactly turns a piece of “stuff” into a resource?
From “stuff” to “resource”
A natural resource is any material or form of energy that occurs in Nature and that human beings can use to satisfy a need or a want. Air, water, soil, minerals, forests, sunlight and wind are all natural resources.
But notice the key word: use. A substance simply sitting in the ground is not automatically a resource. It becomes one only when three conditions are met at the same time.
The Three Conditions for a Resource
For something in Nature to count as a resource, it must be:
- Technologically accessible, we must have the know-how and tools to reach it and put it to use. (Petroleum deep under the sea was useless until we built rigs that could drill for it.)
- Economically feasible, the value we get must be worth the cost of obtaining it. (Gold exists in seawater, but extracting it costs far more than the gold is worth, so it is not treated as a resource.)
- Culturally and legally acceptable, society must be willing, and permitted, to use it. (A food may be eaten in one culture and avoided in another; a protected forest may legally not be cut.)
This is why the same object can be a resource in one time or place and not in another. Uranium was just an odd, heavy metal until physicists learned to release its energy; only then did it become one of the most valuable resources on Earth.
Think About It Plastic waste floating in the ocean is a problem today. But companies are now learning to collect it and turn it into shoes, roads and clothing. If that technology becomes cheap and widespread, has the waste become a resource? Which of the three conditions would have changed?
Resources are partly “created” by human ingenuity
It follows from the three conditions that resources are not fixed by Nature alone, they are partly made by people. A well-known saying among geographers captures it: “Resources are not, they become.” Knowledge, skill and need are what convert a neutral substance into a resource.
This has an encouraging side and a warning side:
- The encouraging side: as our technology improves, new resources keep appearing. Wind and sunshine, ignored for centuries, are now leading energy resources.
- The warning side: because we decide what to value and how fast to use it, the responsibility for using resources wisely rests entirely with us.
A quick map of the chapter’s vocabulary
| Term | Meaning | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Natural resource | A useful gift of Nature | River water, iron ore, sunlight |
| Stock | Material in Nature we cannot yet use | Hydrogen as a fuel (technology still developing) |
| Reserve | The part of a resource we can use now, profitably | Coal in a working mine |
| Conservation | Using resources carefully so they last | Closing taps, recycling metal |
Let’s Explore List ten things you have used since waking up this morning, your toothbrush, breakfast, school bag, and so on. For each, trace it back to the natural resource it came from. Which single resource appears most often on your list?
In the next section we take all these resources and learn to sort them into families, a skill that helps you make sense of everything from a geography map to a news report about an “energy crisis.”