The increase in the human population is not an endless process. The most important factor against this is the limited natural resources and the depletion of the most important of them. Natural resources are all that a person uses in the course of his life. The broad meaning of this expression implies absolutely everything that serves the interests of mankind, and the narrow meaning of this concept includes only sources for material production.
Classification of natural resources
Depending on the types of use in the economy, natural resources are divided into industrial and agricultural.
Resources are divided into replaceable and irreplaceable if possible.
According to the sources of origin, resources are biological, mineral and energy.
According to the degree of exhaustibility, resources are divided into exhaustible and inexhaustible. Exhaustible natural resources, in turn, are divided into non-renewable and renewable. Oftenallocate the third group - partially (not completely) renewable. These are exhaustible natural resources that have a recovery rate much lower than the level of their consumption. Sometimes such a restoration stretches over several generations of mankind, and sometimes for millennia. If we talk about exhaustible natural resources, any person will give examples of them. Non-renewable are oil, gas, coal, renewable are representatives of flora and fauna.
That which is inexhaustible
Inexhaustible resources humanity knows little, but uses even less at the current time. First of all, solar energy belongs to this category. Secondly, its earthly manifestations: wind and tides.
They are interconnected with solar energy and are sometimes put on a par with it, called the general concept of climate resources. There are also water resources - the endless expanses of the World Ocean, used by mankind by less than one percent. The energy of the earth's interior is practically not used by man, but is also classified as an inexhaustible resource, because it has great potential.
Renewable resource base of the planet
As already mentioned, there are three categories of exhaustible natural resources - renewable, non-renewable and partially renewable. The former can be restored naturally or with the participation of a person. Mankind helps in the artificial purification of water and air masses, increasing land fertility, restoring forests andincrease in the number of representatives of the fauna. At the same time, it should be noted that it is active human activity that has already led to a significant decrease in such a component of the concept of exhaustible renewable natural resources as biological resources. Over the past four hundred years, about a hundred species of animals have disappeared from the surface of the planet, more than a hundred species of birds, not to mention representatives of the flora.
At the moment, thousands of species of animals, birds, fish, mollusks, and plants are endangered. All this is happening in connection with the destruction of their existing habitat - the increase in cities, the drainage of swamps, land reclamation, the creation of reservoirs. In addition, commercial hunting, environmental pollution and other factors of human activity contribute to this. To combat this problem, national parks and reserves, Red Books have begun to be created, national laws are being adopted aimed at reducing environmental pollution.
Partially renewable resources
Exhaustible natural resources also include the land fund, which is more than thirteen million hectares. They provide humanity with almost ninety percent of all food. The remaining ten bring forests and the oceans. Forests are very necessary for the planet, because they play a leading role in the cycle of carbon and oxygen in the earth's atmosphere, help regulate water runoff, and avoid soil erosion. But for all their importance, there is an annual decrease in the area of forests by almost twenty million hectares. And init mostly happens because of the person. Forests are cut down to obtain both valuable and ordinary wood for the woodworking and paper industries. Deforestation for fuel flourishes in Central Africa, which is poor in other fuels. This leads to desertification of the land and the advancement of the world's largest desert, the Sahara, deep into the mainland. In addition, people sometimes reduce forest area to increase land area.
And while soils are exhaustible renewable natural resources, even one inch of their thickness takes nearly a millennium to recover. That gives full right to classify them as partially renewable. The degradation of the soil cover of the planet is facilitated, again, by a person who pollutes the soil with his activities, contributes to their salinization and waterlogging, desertification and erosion.
The planet's non-renewable reserves
Exhaustible non-renewable natural resources are, first of all, all minerals and fossil fuels.
They are restored in the process of evolution, but, unlike renewable and even partially renewable resources, this process goes unnoticed by mankind, because the process will take hundreds of thousands or even millions of years. Exhaustible natural resources, such as metals, can be reused after disposal, but fuels - coal or oil - do not differ in this property. Increasing intensity of deposit developmentminerals affects the progressive depletion of the planet's interior. Today, one and a half times more resources are being mined than thirty years ago. And in fifteen years this indicator is expected to increase by another fifty percent.
To avoid subsoil depletion
In addition to direct mining, subsoil development affects the change in the surrounding terrain, contributes to soil, air and water pollution, which leads to the death of flora and fauna. To avoid this, mankind should extract such exhaustible non-renewable natural resources as oil and gas in large quantities from the shelves of the World Ocean.
Production from ocean waters and other mineral resources is possible, but the necessary technologies should be developed for this. Indeed, today from the entire table of periodic elements it is profitable to extract only sodium, chlorine, magnesium and bromine. While the ocean waters are not ready to give out the rest of the chemical elements to humans, it is worth using the bowels of the planet more rationally.
