Concept

Natural resource

Overview

Natural resources are resources that are drawn from nature and used with few modifications. This includes the sources of valued characteristics such as commercial and industrial use, aesthetic value, scientific interest, and cultural value. On Earth, it includes sunlight, atmosphere, water, land, all minerals, along with all vegetation, and wildlife.

Natural resources are part of humanity's natural heritage or protected in nature reserves. Particular areas (such as the rainforest in Fatu-Hiva) often feature biodiversity and geodiversity in their ecosystems. Natural resources may be classified in different ways. Natural resources are materials and components (something that can be used) found within the environment. Every man-made product is composed of natural resources (at its fundamental level).

A natural resource may exist as a separate entity, such as freshwater, air, or any living organism, such as a fish, or it may be transformed by extractivist industries into an economically useful form that must be processed to obtain the resource, such as metal ores, rare-earth elements, petroleum, timber, and most forms of energy. Some resources are renewable, which means that they can be used at a certain rate, and natural processes will restore them. In contrast, many extractive industries rely heavily on non-renewable resources that can only be extracted once.

Natural resource allocations can be at the centre of many economic and political confrontations both within and between countries. This is particularly true during periods of increasing scarcity and shortages (depletion and overconsumption of resources). Resource extraction is also a major source of human rights violations and environmental damage. The Sustainable Development Goals and other international development agendas frequently focus on creating more sustainable resource extraction, with some scholars and researchers focused on creating economic models, such as circular economy, that rely less on resource extraction, and more on reuse, recycling and renewable resources that can be sustainably managed.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

Possible passages

Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.

It is very absurd to attempt a discourse of the essence of natural things, and not to understand what is the power and sphere of Nature. If Aristotle be credited, Nature is the principle of motion and rest, in that thing in which it exists as a principle and not by accident. For all things that are conspicuous to our eyes, which are neither fortuitous nor necessary, nor have a divine original, nor acknowledge any…
Plutarch, Complete Works of Plutarch — Volume 3
States what Natural resource is.
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It is thus that MAN is, as a whole, or in his nature, the result of a certain combination of matter, endowed with peculiar properties, competent to give, capable of receiving, certain impulses, the arrangement of which is called _organization_; of which the essence is, to feel, to think, to act, to move, after a manner distinguished from other beings, with which he can be compared. Man, therefore, ranks in an order…
Paul Henri Thiry Holbach, The System of Nature, or, the Laws of the Moral and Physical World. Volume 1
States what Natural resource is.
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I wish both of you would drop dialectics and go to history. You would find history to be a struggle for existence--for bread, for a roof, for protected and nourished offspring. You would find history a picture of the masses always going under--just missing--in the struggle, because others have captured the control of natural resources, which in themselves, if not as benign as the eighteenth century imagined, are at…
John Dewey, The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy, and other essays in contemporary thought
Names Natural resource twice.
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Philosophers who discussed Natural resource

Hillel Steiner

Related ideas

Opposing perspectives

Communism

Place in the tradition

Part of Communism.

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