All resources are created through human effort
by Mark J. Perry
From Don Boudreaux’s excellent post “Coming to Terms with Rhetoric“:
Take the term “natural resources” (which I’ve written about before; for example, here). This phrase suggests that some things of value to human beings occur naturally – without any human effort or creativity. But that suggestion is wrong. Nothing is naturally a resource; nature alone invests nothing with resourcefulness; ultimately, resources - all resources – are created by human beings. Nature creates raw materials, but never creates resources. Raw materials and human artifacts are made into resources only if, and only when, and only insofar as, human creativity figures out a way (or ways) to employ those materials and artifacts in ways that satisfy genuine human desires.
The point, here, is that the term “natural resources” can be misleading about the role of nature in creating human bounty. Nature exists, to be sure; but human bounty is created by human creativity; nature in matters economic is not the prime mover. Nature’s role in determining who is and who isn’t materially wealthy is much smaller than we are sometimes led to believe when focusing on “natural resources.”
From another article, Don provides an example:
Take petroleum. What makes it a “resource.” It’s certainly not a resource naturally. If it were, American Indians would long ago have put it to good use. But they didn’t. I suspect that for Pennsylvania’s native population in, say, the year 1300, the dark, thick, smelly stuff that bubbled up in watering holes was regarded as a nuisance.
Petroleum didn’t become a resource until human beings creatively figured
out how to use it to satisfy some human desires and other human beings figured
out how to extract it cost-effectively from the ground.
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