Renewable Resources

Renewable resources are commonly understood to be the environmental components—wind, sunlight, water, forests, crops, fisheries, and so on—of complex socio-ecological systems that, if managed properly, can meet human needs for raw materials, energy, and food on a long-term, sustainable basis. Societal interest in renewable resources stems from increased awareness of the problems resulting from reliance on nonrenewable resources (fossil fuels and minerals). Overdependence on these resources contributes greatly to air and water pollution, global climate change, geopolitical conflict, resource wars, economic instability, and other major difficulties that many believe can be addressed only by a global transition to economies that are based on renewable resources. Practically and conceptually, such a transition requires an appreciation of the complex socio-environmen-tal character of resources and renewability. This entry considers this character and explores how issues of scale, uneven resource distribution, and political power influence the potential for renewable resource systems to emerge.

Resources do not simply exist, they become, observed geographer Erich Zimmerman in 1939. They do so through the coevolution of ecological systems and human societies, and their degree of “renewability” depends on how one bounds the analysis. To explore this way of looking at resources, take the case of solar energy, a potentially highly renewable resource. The sun provides Earth enough solar radiation to power the planet's climate and life support systems and is expected to continue doing so free of charge, maintenance, or pollution for another 5 billion years in quantities far exceeding human demand. The “waste” associated with these solar flows is heat that warms the planet before radiating harmlessly into space. Solar energy is thus highly renewable and sustainable from both an energy supply and an ecological standpoint.

Solar energy becomes a human resource, however, through socio-environmental technologies that capture and convert its potential energy into commodities and services. Plants, for example, are “natural” devices for solar capture and circulation (e.g., as food or biofuels), but they constitute renewable resources only to the extent that people help maintain the conditions under which the desired plant species can thrive and be harvested repeatedly despite human and ecological perturbations. Fisheries, forests, and soils are likewise viable renewable resources when managed through social institutions that prevent their being overwhelmed by pollution, petrochemicals, overharvesting, habitat loss, or competition from less desired species.

Other solar harvesting devices appear more “technical” in nature. Windows, for example, may seem to be relatively simple and ubiquitous manufactured products that allow people to use sunshine to light and heat buildings. They are only possible, however, in “collaboration” with nature, which provides the raw materials, energy, and the rules by which the combination of these inputs will produce glass. Even less visible are the political, scientific, and entrepreneurial dimensions of windows; these are perhaps best revealed through the effort by sustainable energy advocates in recent decades to get states to mandate the use of higher-performance windows in buildings. The effort has spurred technical innovation in, marketing of, and ultimately the installation of windows that can better manage flows of sunlight and heat into and out of buildings—to, in effect, allow solar energy [Page 2429]to become a more powerful and renewable resource.

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