Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Economic Geography - "Natural" Resources – What Are They?



The worldbank.org website defines natural resources as materials that occur in nature and are essential or useful to humans, such as water, air, land, forests, fish and wildlife, topsoil, fossil fuels and minerals.   Thorough out civilization, the use of these resources has been the major factor in the continuation of the expansion of human life as we know it.   
From the use of these resources by our ancestors hundreds of years ago, mankind has now advanced to a stage where the harnessing, collection, and detection of natural resources has become a main focus because of our over usage.   Especially the use of fossil fuels, the impact of energy production on the environment has intensified with industrialization and the growth of vehicle traffic in the United States. Throughout the 19th century and well into the 20th, coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, drove the Industrial Revolution and left its mark as a heavy cloud that darkened the skies over the industrial centers of the Midwest and Northeast.   
Development of the gasoline-driven, internal-combustion engine and the mass production of Henry Ford's Model T in the early 1900s marked the beginning of the ascent of oil as the main source of energy in the United States. Although oil is less polluting than coal, the increase in oil consumption that accompanied the rise in auto traffic more than made up for the difference. By the 1960s, smog caused by auto exhaust combined with coal-fired industrial emissions to foul the air in many American cities.
Today the focus of natural resources have changed, they have now become a focus for energy, the collection and sale of that energy from the countries that have, to the ones that don't.   In the early 1970s, a series of energy crises awakened the country to its growing dependence on foreign oil. In response, lawmakers created federal subsidies to help develop and promote solar, geothermal and other renewable energy sources. The goal was not only to develop more domestic energy...

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