Environmental problems, their causes, and sustainability - Some resources are renewable and some are not

3 important questions on Environmental problems, their causes, and sustainability - Some resources are renewable and some are not

What is a resource?

(Human standpoint) Anything that we can obtain form the environment to meet our needs and wants.

Accesibility:
- Some resources are directly available for use (solar energy, fertile topsoil, edible wild plants)
- Other resources become useful to us only with some effort and technological ingenuity (petroleum, iron, underground water, cultivated crops)

What is sustainable yield?

The highest rate at which we can use a renewable resource indefinitely without reducing its available supply.

What are nonrenewable resources?

Recources that exist in a fixed quantity, or stock, in the earth's crust.
On a time scale of millions to billions of years, geologic processes can renew such resources. But on the much shorter human time scale of hundreds to thousands of years, we can deplete these resources much faster than nature can form them.

Such exhaustible stocks include:
- energy resources (coal, oil)
- metallic mineral resources (copper, aluminium)
- nonmetallic mineral resources (salt, sand)

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