Evaluating Environmental Potential

Abstract

Environmental potential has helped to shape the course of history. In Britain, geology and climate provide abundant coal, iron and water which helped stimulate the Industrial Revolution. The demise of Hitler’s Reich was accelerated by the lack of key resources within its boundaries, and contemporary geopolitics are greatly influenced by the distribution of oil reserves. The physical environment is a resource which can be used for many purposes; their reconciliation within a spatial framework, as conditioned by social, economic, political, moral and aesthetic constraints, is the challenge faced by environmental management. This necessarily requires evaluations of environmental potential for particular purposes, and their synthesis into an overall management framework.