Encyclopedia > Natural resource

  Article Content

Natural resource

Natural resources are commodities that are considered valuable in their relatively unmodified ( natural) form. A commodity is generally considered a natural resource when the primary activities associated with it are extraction and purification, as opposed to creation. Thus, mining, oil extraction, fishing, and forestry are generally considered natural-resource industries, while farming is not.

Natural resources are often classified into renewable and non-renewable resources. Renewable resources are generally living resources (fish and forests, for example), which can restock (renew) themselves at approximately the rate at which they are extracted. Non-living renewable natural resources include water, wind, tides and solar radiation - compare renewable energy.

Mineral resources are generally non-renewable and, once a site's non-renewable resource is exhausted, it is considered to be useless for future extraction -- barring technological improvements that allow economic extraction from the tailings[?].

Both extraction of the basic resource and refining it into a purer, directly usable form, (e.g., metals, refined oils) are generally considered natural-resource activities, even though the later may not necessarily occur near the former.

See also: fish, wood, metal, minerals, List of minerals, petroleum, mining, refining, prospecting[?], environment



All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License

 
  Search Encyclopedia

Search over one million articles, find something about almost anything!
 
 
  
  Featured Article
French resistance

... published an underground newspaper Combat that was printed in Lyon and distributed in Paris. Group’s most famous members were Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre and lat ...

 
 
 
This page was created in 52.5 ms