ABSTRACT
Environmental problems can usually be identified with the inter-temporal malutilization of resources which are at the same time potentially self-regenerative and in principle exhaustible. There is, of course, more to such problems than the characterization that has just been offered. But for our purposes here it is as well to note that such a characterization is very much consistent with common parlance. Resources such as minerals and fossil fuels do not fall into this category, for they are not renewable. They are a pristine example of exhaustible resources. The act of extracting and utilizing a unit of such a resource reduces the total stock by precisely that amount. There are no means by which the total stock can be increased. Improvement in technology (for example, enabling one to drill offshore or engaging in recycling) can, of course, increase the quantity that can be used. But this is a different matter. Then again, discoveries of new deposits will increase the known available stock. But this too is a different matter. Note as well that we do not usually regard the depletion of an exhaustible resource as an environmental issue, except in so far as the act of extraction and use in production has ‘environmental effects’. Thus, to take two examples, the burning of fossil fuels increases the mean surface temperature, and the smelting of ores is a common source of atmospheric pollution. The environmental issues here pertain not to the fact that the world’s supply of fossil fuels and mineral ores is being reduced, but rather the fact that such activities have a deleterious effect on the earth’s atmosphere.
