ABSTRACT
This chapter presents contemporary concerns the implications of natural resource availability and environmental change. The first wave, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, focused primarily on the quantitative relations between resource availability and economic growth--the adequacy of land, water, energy, and other natural resources to sustain growth. The second wave of concern occurred in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The earlier concern with potential "limits to growth" imposed by natural resource scarcity was supplemented by concern with the capacity of the environment to assimilate the multiple forms of pollution generated by growth. Since the mid-1980s, these two earlier concerns have been supplemented by a third. The newer concerns center on the implications for environmental quality, food production, and human health of a series of environmental changes that are occurring on a transnational scale: issues such as global wanning, ozone depletion, acid rain, and others.
