Monday, February 10, 2014

Environmental Resources

Resource
From a human standpoint, a resource is anything obtained from the environment to meet human needs and wants. Examples include food, water, shelter, manufactured goods, transportation, communication, recreation, etc. On our short human timescale, we classify the material resources we get from the environment as perpetual, renewable, or nonrenewable .     
Solar energy is called a perpetual resource because on a human time scale it is renewed continuously. It is expected to last at least 6 billion years as the Sun completes its life cycle.                                                           
A renewable resource can be replenished through natural processes as long as it is not used up faster than it is replenished. Examples are forests, grasslands, wild animals, fresh water, fresh air, fertile soil, etc. Groundwater may become a nonrenewable resource because of its slower rate of recharge compared to very fast rate of consumption. It has taken hundreds or even thousands of years to accumulate and usually only a small portion of it is recharged each year by percolation of precipitation.
Nonrenewable resources are present in limited supplies and are depleted by use. Natural processes do not replenish non-renewable resources within a reasonable period of time on the human time scale. Fossil fuels, for example, take millions of years to form. People in the US and other highly developed nations tend to consume most of the world’s nonrenewable resources. Earth has a finite supply of nonrenewable resources that sooner or later will be exhausted. In time, technological advances may enable us to find or develop substitutes for nonrenewable resources. Therefore, slowing the rate population growth will help us buy time to develop such alternatives.

Fig: Different types of resources with examples

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