Abstract
The starting point for placing the macroeconomy in an ecological context is to understand some basics of how ecosystems function and how energy moves resources around within them. “Resources” are then generalized to “gradients,” followed by making the distinction between renewable and nonrenewable resources and a consideration of the major types of renewable resources. There is discussion of the rational use of exhaustible resources, but a more detailed treatment is left for Chap. 19 The final part of the chapter looks at the relationship between technology and resource use.
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Notes
- 1.
These two attributes—energy content and nutrient arrangements—help make virgin soils so productive when first converted to agriculture. Their value is a function of the “work” nature did before humans started using them for farming.
- 2.
If we were to extend the time frame of the analysis, the energy in the soil would also eventually go somewhere. Similarly, if a fire sweeps across the prairie, much of the energy in both the dead plants and the live grass will be quickly converted to heat and dissipated to the air.
- 3.
In North America, for instance, the first European explorers were struck by the “natural” parklands of large pine trees relatively far apart with sparse underbrush, seemingly made by God to be perfect deer-hunting grounds; in fact, the native peoples of the area co-created that habitat by periodic controlled burns that left the large trees intact while clearing out the understory and prompting the growth of new shoots; the shoots attracted deer, while the absence of understory made them easy to hunt (see [3]).
- 4.
Strictly speaking, that statement is only true of what’s called “conventional oil,” that you can get out of the ground with a relatively simple pump. A small but growing fraction of our liquid fuels comes from “unconventional oil” such as tar sands or oil shale, where the oil is thicker and more closely bound to the rock in which it’s found, requiring more arduous extraction techniques than just pumping.
- 5.
Note that if you are carrying out non-industrialized agriculture, the diffuse nature of solar-derived sources is not a problem; you are working with a system that has been shaped by natural selection and by humans to make good use of the solar resource as it is found “in nature.”
- 6.
The validity of this statement depends on whether you count geothermal energy in the category of renewables. If you do, then it is an exception to the statement.
- 7.
Another exception: Some hydropower systems, such as in the Pacific Northwest of the U.S., have been built in places where the twentieth-century weather pattern included large winter snowpacks. These acted as natural reservoirs, releasing the winter precipitation throughout the spring melt into June or July. In the warmer twenty-first century, the snowpacks are smaller and they melt sooner. To get the same level of summer electricity production as in the twentieth century, we’re going to need larger human-made reservoirs than before. Droughts related to climate change make the problem worse.
- 8.
The same can be said of agroecosystems, the ecosystems created by humans in our farming endeavors.
- 9.
In reality, there’s almost always some coal left, stuff that it’s simply not practical to get out. And the definition of “practical” shifts with our technology and our desperation. But with that caveat we can modify the sentence to say, “when we pull the last chunk of practically mineable coal.”
- 10.
This is discussed further in Sect. 19.3
- 11.
Ethanol—a form of alcohol derived from plants—was widely used early in the history of the automobile. For various reasons, it was displaced by gasoline, derived from petroleum, a fossil fuel.
- 12.
The obvious exception is electric trains, trolleys, and trolleybuses, which don’t carry their energy source but pick it up along the way from wires or electrified rails. But note that these are currently the only widespread applications of electric vehicles—the on-board delivery systems for electricity are so heavy as to make them weak competitors so far for fossil fuels.
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Seeley, K. (2017). Resources and Economic Processes. In: Macroeconomics in Ecological Context. Studies in Ecological Economics, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51757-5_2
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