¿What are natural resources?

When we talk about natural resources we use to think in material goods as raw materials, or food. Natural resources would actually include a wide range of services ecosystems can offer us. Yes, ecosystems do offer us services; they are not only a landscape to gaze at or to go take a walk in. These services can be divided in four types: support (nutrient cycle, soil formation, vegetal primary production...), supplies (food, water, wood, fuel...), regulation (climate, floods, diseases...), and culture (educational, recreational, aesthetic, spiritual...) (Millenium Ecosystem Assesment, 2005).  It is worth mentioning that this four types don’t exist isolated in different ecosystems, they are different types of services that ecosystems give us as a whole. To understand this it is important to take a holistic point of view, understand that the flows of matter and energy running in them, from which we obtain these services, they do it thanks to an internal “gear mechanism/engine” constituted by the different  species that inhabit them (from  a monkey  to a bacterium) , the environment they live in, the relationship between them, with other ecosystems, and also with human being.

The riches that ecosystems give us emerged from the interaction of all their components, and although some species or geological processes are key for different natural processes to take place, it is also worth mentioning that the rest of species can play a very important role regulating key species. This is the way to develop a vision of nature as an integrated system in which every component plays an important role.

With this perspective it may be easier to understand that nature is not a pantry to take anything we want from without thinking about consequences.