Resource management: oil resources and the Gulf conflict

Material worlds? Resource geographies and the `matter of nature'

“…Issues of resource supply, resource control and the effects of rampant resource consumption on planetary health are now resurgent in geopolitics; questions about value and identity are articulated with stunning clarity in popular struggles over resource appropriation; 'nature' continues to enjoy a prolonged moment in the sun within academic inquiry; and yet the scope and purpose -even the existence -of a formal subdiscipline of'resource geography' are surprisingly unclear. This journal, for example, has not published work that identifies itself as resource geography since the early 1990s (Wescoat, 1991;.The disappearance of resource geography as a formal field, however, is misleading. There is, on the one hand, a substantial body of work in the applied and teaching traditions of'resource management and 'environmental conservation' that embraces the term 'resource' unproblematically, and which seeks to organize, administer and produce new resource geographies that operationalize public and/or private management objectives like efficiency, the optimization ofwelfare, or 'sustainability' (Mitchell, 1989;Cutter et al, 1991;Holechek etal., 2000;Shenk and Franklin, 200 1;Chiras et a., 2002).…”

A Regionally Based Energy End-Use Strategy: Case Studies from Centre County, Pennsylvania

“…Pasqualetti and Rothwell (1991) edited a special issue of The Energy Journal dedicated to analyzing the fundamentals of nuclear decommissioning economics. Westcoat (1992) critiqued the role of oil relative to other geopolitical, cultural, and political-economic forces in the 1991 Gulf conflict, and Smil (1994) published Energy in World History, arguing that society has historically faced the dichotomy of growing environmental burdens, yet expanding energy use.…”

Resource geographies 1

“…It has been some time since ‘natural resources' formed the subject of a report for Progress in Human Geography . Natural resource management and conservation were staple features of reviews from the establishment of this journal in the 1970s until the early 1990s (Mitchell, 1980; Munton, 1983; Owens and Owens, 1987, 1989; Simmons, 1977, 1979, 1980, 1982; Wescoat, 1991, 1992, 1993). Since then research on the appraisal, appropriation, regulation and co-production of the non-human world has continued to feature within Progress but largely under the alternative flag of ‘environmental issues' (Braun, 2005, 2006, 2008; Castree, 2002, 2003, 2004; Reed and Christie, 2009) or political ecology (Neumann, 2009, 2010).…”