Preface

This text on Natural Resources Sustainability: An Introductory Synthesis has evolved from my 30 years of experience in teaching undergraduate and graduate students at Southern Illinois University (SIU) and at Utah State University USU), both state institutions that resemble many of the mid-size to large state universities in the United States. In particular, it has grown from my 20 semesters in teaching Geography 300I: Geography, People, and the Environment, at SIU and Environment and Society 2340: Natural Resources and Society at USU, courses that attracted about 100 undergraduates, mostly sophomores and juniors, as part of those universities’ core or general education curricula. The text is designed for freshmen through junior-level courses in geography, environmental studies, and natural resource management at junior, community, and four-year colleges and universities in the United States.

Natural resource sustainability is not a one-size-fits-all subject; each country and locality has a unique physical geography, history and culture, and economic structure from which must evolve a more sustainable natural resource use pattern. For this reason, I have unabashedly focused on the United States’ situation with examples and colloquialisms, and I have even resorted to using English units of measure whenever possible (while introducing metric measures in parentheses).

Over the years, I have found that there is a lack of understanding that pervades on opposite sides of the natural/social science chasm that is discouraging to those who view sustainability as an essential goal. Economists, lawyers, political scientists, journalists, and others educated on the human side of the chasm sometimes mistake scientists for an interest group and the environment itself as a second-tier issue that humans may or may not choose to value. Natural scientists are more likely to view the environment as an all-enveloping and ancient life-support system as well as a source of essential resources. Natural scientists, however, sometimes fail to understand human perception, the political process, or the “socioeconomic driving forces” that dominate the human use and management of natural resources and, on a human-dominated planet, the environment itself.

My own education and extensive research experience, with over 50 peer-reviewed papers and millions in research grants, is in geography and water resources management, and you will find this perspective clearly evident. I have found, however, that if geography as a discipline provides a guide to the study of natural resources issues, it is only because geography is particularly open to integrating concepts derived from other disciplines. But what disciplines?

Among the sciences, some basic chemistry and a sense of technology is essential. A little geology certainly also aids the understanding of natural resources such as fossil fuels. Among the social sciences, a sense of modern history is invaluable as well as a basic understanding from political science of the roles of the private and public sectors and what “policy” really means. I have found, however, that a fundamental understanding of natural resource sustainability is founded even more firmly in the natural science fields of ecology and environmental science on the one hand and the social science of economics on the other. My most difficult decision in organizing this text was in how to treat economics for students who haven’t taken a course in that subject. To many, economics (or, to say something quite different, the economy) is the problem, so why dwell on that? Yet this is exactly why we must dwell on it if we are to understand how the economy governs natural resource use and how it can govern it more sustainably.

You will find that this text does not view the sustainability problem through any one theoretical or disciplinary perspective, though the emergent field of ecological economics does have a special status, even if this is usually implicit. Geography, with its emphasis on what is actually out there on the ground (or in the water or the air) in specific places, especially American places that the students using this text may be familiar with, serves as an integrative package to keep us empirically honest. Geography also emphasizes the powerful technologies of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and remote sensing that show us in great detail, with enormous datasets, what really is out there and how things interrelate. This is the interdisciplinary scheme used in this text as “an introductory synthesis.” It thus differs considerably from introductory texts on environmental studies or environmental science, such as Miller’s Living in the Environment, through its focus on the economic and political decision-making that guide the provision of human needs for food, water, energy, and ecosystem services. It also differs considerably, however, from introductory texts on natural resource and environmental economics, such as Tietenberg and Lewis’s Environmental & Natural Resource Economics, by delving deeply into what the environment is actually composed of and how this determines the nature and geography of natural resources.

What I hope to provide—in a one semester or one quarter undergraduate course that requires no prerequisites—is a fundamental background that provides students with the essentials they need to deal intelligently with natural resource and environmental issues as an informed citizen. Few students take a bit of ecology, economics, geography, and so forth and then proceed onto study natural resources sustainability. So the task here is—through the analysis of essential issues in natural resources sustainability—to provide a brief introduction to these disciplines that students can build on later if they choose to take one of these disciplines as their major or minor. In the meantime, they will have obtained a valuable lesson in how to draw from ideas and concepts from disparate disciplines to gain an understanding of essential real-world issues.

The journey of teaching thousands of undergraduates at typical state universities has taught me some pedagogical lessons that I hope can benefit other students who come to college motivated to learn and with an educational background that features a mix of As, Bs, Cs and perhaps even letters further down the alphabet. One of these lessons is that only a small minority of students have the motivation, skills, and preparation to learn challenging subjects such as natural resources sustainability simply by reading the text or other course readings on their own. This is true partly because most texts are written to appeal to the well-informed and prepared instructors who choose them rather than the students who struggle to learn from them. In my experience, students in the fat part of the bell curve often face three barriers to learning that make most scientific textbooks difficult to learn from:

1. technical terminology and units of measure that are not explained in everyday terms,
2. unnecessarily complex mathematics and the lack of a sense of context when it is used,
3. use of inferior visual aids that are poorly explained.

Each of these barriers can be overcome, not by “dumbing down,” although some cutting-edge, avant-garde topics that faculty cherish (I go for complexity theory) really don’t belong in an introductory undergraduate course. Rather, the challenge is to “write up,” to use the English language and visual aids to speak to students directly and guide them through the learning process, even hold their hands a little. This puts the onus on the instructor and the course material to reach out to students—from the best students in the class to the ones struggling to pass the course—and thereby increasing the overall level of reading comprehension and student understanding of key concepts and retention of critical knowledge.

A second lesson is that some of the best reading material for developing conceptual understanding and motivation to learn among undergraduates is not found in the strictly “academic” literature of textbooks and peer-reviewed journal articles but in the world of high quality (if possible Pulitzer-Prize-winning) nonfiction literature. For example, in my course students select one non-fiction book, with my current list (which changes frequently as I find the time to read additional books) consisting of:

• Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies (Pulitzer Prize, 1999) by Jared Diamond
• Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005) also by Jared Diamond
• The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (2006) by Michael Pollen
• Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization (2010) by Steven Solomon
• 1491: New Revelations from the Americas before Columbus (2011) by Charles Mann
• The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future (2018) by Gretchen Bakke.
• The New Map: Energy, Climate and the Clash of Nations (2020) by Daniel Yergin

In this text, I draw extensively from these and other excellent books and I recommend that they be used in some fashion to complement it. Through these books, students can begin their wrestling match with core issues of sustainability in a world that has long been characterized by inequality, power struggles, and poor decision-making but that has nevertheless succeeded in achieving an overall trajectory of human progress.

A third lesson is that undergraduate students can learn a great deal through visuals—photographs, graphs, maps, images, diagrams—but, like a beholder of paintings, only if their eyes are properly trained. Only a minority of undergraduate students correctly translate from legend to map or from axis to graphed data without direct help from the instructor or from the reading material itself. From Edward Tufte’s excellent books, such as Envisioning Information, we learn that visual presentations of ideas or data can either mislead or inform and, if properly designed, are often the key to understanding. For this reason, this text includes over 100 pedagogically useful visuals both for the text itself and, simply by using snapshot in Adobe Acrobat, as PowerPoint slides for use in class.

This book was developed using many sources as listed in the recommended readings list at the end of chapters. I have refrained, however, from littering the text with citations, as most undergraduate readers find this a distraction, except when a particular publication is being discussed directly.

The text also includes a set of four computer games oriented around carbon, nitrogen, water, and energy with accompanying classroom exercises.

I would like to invite every instructor who uses this text to let me know what they like or dislike about it. Just e-mail me at chris.lant@usu.edu.

I would like to thank the Utah State University Libraries’ Open Educational Resources program. I also thank a number of students who have helped with the visuals, including Amy Kovak and Samuel Adu-Prah at SIU as well as Ashley Peterson at USU.