A logging operation in Scotland.
© Elnur/stock.adobe.com
natural resource management, ways in which societies manage the supply of or access to the natural resources upon which they rely for their survival and development. Insofar as humans are fundamentally dependent on natural resources, ensuring the ongoing access to or a steady provision of natural resources has always been central to the organization of civilizations and, historically, has been organized through a range of schemes varying in degrees of formality and involvement from the central authorities.
A “natural” resource is one that is afforded by nature without human intervention; hence, the fertile lands or the minerals within them, rather than the crop that grows on them, are examples of a country’s natural resources. Although what is considered a “resource” (or, for that matter, “natural”) has varied over time and from one society to another, resources are, ultimately, riches provided by nature from which can be derived some form of benefit, whether material or immaterial. Under some definitions, only those natural resources that can renew themselves and whose exploitation relies on their regenerative capacities properly necessitate management. For example, oil is not usually considered a subject of natural resource management, whereas forests are. The use of nonrenewable resources is subject to regulation rather than management. The management of renewable natural resources seeks to balance the demands of exploitation with a respect for regenerative capacities.
The emergence of a rational systematic management of natural resources can be traced back to the phase of accelerated industrialization of the late 19th century. In a period of unprecedented industrial growth, the pressures brought to bear on the supply of raw materials and natural resources by an unrelenting demand intensified the need to rationalize their utilization, so as to eliminate increasingly costly waste and to allocate them more efficiently. That coincided with a broader tendency toward rationalization, a general social pattern identified by the sociologist Max Weber that emerged in modern industrial societies in response to the large-scale reorganization of production and whereby goal-oriented rationality was increasingly infused into the organization of social activities. Natural resource management was born at the conjunction of rationalization and its twin process, bureaucratization, which yielded the first bureaucracies to manage nature.
Of course, there were huge variations in both the rates and degrees to which the different states became involved with questions of natural resource management. The French state, for example, took a heavy hand in forestry management as early as the 17th century, when wood became a strategic resource at a time of accelerated mercantilist (export-oriented) growth that relied primarily on maritime transportation—namely, wooden ships. Such local variations aside, overall it took a certain kind of state, the modern bureaucratic state, to steer the exploitation of natural resources toward principles of scientific management. In the United States, natural resource management was made a federal matter for the first time under the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt. At that time, principles of scientific management, which combined notions of rational management with in-depth scientific knowledge of the resource itself, were promoted by key figures such as Gifford Pinchot, who took a leading role in the U.S. government’s management of forests in the 1890s and served as head of the Forest Service from its creation, in 1905, to 1910. In Europe a similar concern with rational resource exploitation transpired at about the same time. The International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (established 1902), for example, provided a forum in which northern European countries could share concerns about maritime research and resources. It was effectively one of the first international conferences on a natural resource management question, and there too science was entrenched as a basis for exploitation of the seas, laying the grounds for future arrangement for the management of collective resources.
Encountering Earth’s limits
The 20th century saw natural resource management increasingly projected at a supranational level, where it was also collectivized. A first major impulse toward the internationalization of natural resource management was brought by the post-World War II context, with its pervasive spirit of cooperation on the one hand and its specific problems of food shortages on the other. Countries came together to address the issues of damaged capacities and insufficient production—in other words, insufficient use of available resources. That context yielded the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) in 1945, the International Whaling Commission in 1946, and, much later, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, established in 1977 to tackle problems of agricultural production in developing countries. The problem was seen to lie in the management of the resources rather than in the resources themselves. Therefore, the solution was to develop common solutions to management problems that were widely shared from one country to the next. The problem those organizations attempted to solve, in other words, was how to create international regimes that would disseminate better management solutions and thus enable each country to make better use of its resources.
In a second phase, attention shifted at a global level to Earth’s resources as a whole—the seas, the air, and biodiversity—because of the realization that those essential resources, hitherto taken for granted, were in fact limited. That realization came about through two successive crises. First was the new awareness that humankind had reached a global environmental crisis, which triggered a second wave of bureaucracies to manage nature at both the national and international levels. At the international level the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) was established in 1972, and at the national level environmental ministries (in Europe) or agencies (in the United States) flourished in developed countries in the early 1970s. Significantly, the issue that popularized the environmental crisis was an issue of failed global resource management: the overexploitation of whales, which threatened certain species with extinction. That initial awareness was rapidly compounded by a global energy crisis that began in 1973 (see Arab oil embargo). At that juncture natural resource management was recast as an issue of environmental governance, and it was connected to the new environmental discourses taking shape, such as sustainable development.
The issue of Earth’s limits is an unsettled question, not least because of the sheer diversity of natural resources and the difficulty in assessing them scientifically. However, the remaining controversy revolves not around the idea that Earth’s resources are limited but rather around its regenerative capacities, which in turn determines how those limits are to be considered. If they are relative, the question becomes one of regulating the access to a resource more stringently or of adapting the activity relying upon it so that it can use a more abundant primary resource. If the limits are absolute, then merely switching the activity from one dependency basis to another is simply insufficient, especially if such dependency continues to expand overall.
