Natural Resources, Economy and Society

During the 1960s there was a renaissance of public and academic interest in a plethora of natural resource problems. These included the physical scarcity of vital energy and metallic minerals; geopolitical threats to mineral supplies; unequal trading relations between the resource exporters of the South and the importing countries of the North; the deteriorating quality of the environment; the depletion of renewable resources, such as soils, fish and forests; and the potentially disastrous effects of changes in global biogeochemical cycles. Despite the fact that geographers once defined their subject as the study of the relationship between human society and the physical environment, this reawakening of concern over natural resources largely by-passed human geography. The subject was at that time preoccupied to the point of obsession with the quantitative revolution, with the search for spatial order and the development of theoretical models of industrial location, land use patterns, urban hierarchies and transport networks. It was commonly assumed that the location and nature of the resource base were fixed and given; the way in which human societies define resources and give meaning to natural systems was largely ignored and the physical environment vanished behind neat optimising rules for the spacing of economic activities and settlements. In addition, and perhaps most importantly, there was almost total neglect of the critical question of how natural resources, and the wealth or welfare derived from them, are allocated between socio-economic, political and cultural groups over space and time. This neglect was evident at all spatial scales — global, national and local.