article on conservation of natural resources
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Management of the human use of natural resources to provide the maximum benefit to current generations while maintaining capacity to meet the needs of future generations. Conservation includes both the protection and rational use of natural resources. Earth’s natural resources are either non-renewable, such as minerals, oil, gas, and coal, or renewable, such as water, timber, fisheries, and agricultural crops.
The combination of growing populations and increasing levels of resource consumption is degrading and depleting the natural resource base. Non-renewable resources, such as fossil fuels, are replaced over geologic time scales of tens of millions of years. Human societies will eventually use up all of the economically available stock of many non-renewable resources, such as oil.
Conservation entails actions to use these resources most efficiently and thereby extend their life as long as possible. By recycling aluminium, for example, the same piece of material is reused in a series of products, reducing the amount of aluminium ore that must be mined. Similarly, energy-efficient products help to conserve fossil fuels since the same energy services, such as lighting or transportation, can be attained with smaller amounts of fuel.
It may be expected that the biggest challenge of resource conservation would involve non-renewable resources, since renewable resources can replenish themselves after harvesting. In fact, the opposite is the case. Historically, when non-renewable resources have been depleted, new technologies have been developed that effectively substitute for the depleted resources. Indeed, new technologies have often reduced pressure on these resources even before they are fully depleted.
Fiber optics, for example, has substituted for copper in many electrical applications, and it is anticipated that renewable sources of energy, such as photovoltaic cells, wind power, and hydropower, will ultimately take the place of fossil fuels when stocks are depleted. Renewable resources, in contrast, can be seriously depleted if they are subjected to excessive harvest or otherwise degraded, and no substitutes are available for, say, clean water or food products such as fish or agricultural crops.