Environmental Management: Principles and practice

Resources
A resource can be defined as: ‘something which meets perceived needs or wants’. A
resource is the expression of appraisal, a subjective concept (Zimmermann, 1993).
Resources become available through a combination of increased knowledge,
improving technology, changing individual and social objectives. Mitchell (1993:2)
noted ‘In summary, natural resources are defined by…perceptions and attitudes,
wants, technical skills, legal, functional, and institutional arrangements, as well as
by political customs’. Economic and non-economic criteria determine utility. Non-
economic criteria include: aesthetic quality, sense of moral duty to conserve wildlife,
cultural importance, religious beliefs, etc. An economist might subdivide resources
into those with actual value, those with option value (possible use perceived), and
those with intrinsic value (no obvious practical value, but there is a will to maintain
them). Resource demand changes as human perceptions alter, new technology is
developed, fashions vary, and new materials are substituted. There are some who

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wish to develop environmental management with non-utilitarian goals (part of the
postmodern trend), so that resources are valued for their own sake and, if need be,
utilization forgone; how this will be done in practice is not clear.
A rough classification of resources which may be useful to environmental
management is:
♦
those that can be safely stretched by humans;
♦
those that can be stretched with care;
♦
those which cannot or should not be stretched.
Stretching of resources might be achieved through strategies like the alteration of
natural vegetation to agriculture; the conversion of slow-growing woodland to fast-
growing plantation; farming of fish rather than fishing wild stocks, etc.
The amount of a particular resource believed to exist is the total resource; the
term ‘identified resource’ is applied to that which has actually been mapped and
assessed. A reserve or economic resource is that which is extractable, given current
technology, economic conditions and civil order. Undiscovered resources are those
deemed by specialists to be likely to exist but are unproven. Resources vital to a
country are termed critical resources and those needed to ensure national security
are strategic resources. A comparison of known resource supplies and rates of use
yields a depletion rate, typically the time it takes for 80 per cent of known reserves to
be used.