Question

five historical events influenced by the depletion of natural resources

Answer 1

It's been argued that the Romans invaded Britain in 43 in part to secure good supplies of tin, because the easily reduceable deposits around the Mediterranean were insufficient. I've heard it argued that the New World was discovered in part by a quest for fisherman fishing in the Grand Banks for cod, after it had been fished out around Iceland, for nearby land on which to dry their catch. I've also heard it said part of the reason the British settled the War of 1812 on such favorable terms was renewed peaceful access to timber from the New World, as Britain herself had been stripped of large trees in the building of its Napoleonic Era navy. I've heard it argued that the rise of petroleum production in the 1880s and 1890s in the United States was in part the consequence of the increasing scarcity of whale oil for lighting, caused by the depletion of whales in the mid- to late 19th century. Finally, it's a plain historical fact that the Japanese Empire opened war on the United States in 1941 in no small part because the Japanese had long ago used up their domestic supplies of oil, and the US had embargoed the export of oil to Japan over the latter's aggression in Manchuria. A rather famous case of a total depletion resulting in extinction is that of Easter Island, where the theory is that a native population used up all the agricultural resources and went extinct.

The problem with almost all of these examples, however, is that it is not really all that clear what role, if any, resource depletion played. There are, in each case, alternate explanations for why events turned out the way they did. Economics is certainly a factor, but it is hardly the completely decisive factor the Marxists say it is (otherwise the Marxists would not be so often wrong about how history develops).

Furthermore resource "depletion" itself is a tricky concept. It is almost never the case that a resource is genuinely depleted, in the sense of something irreplaceable is simply gone. Usually what happens is that a certain need is met by a certain material, and the material has a variety of sources that vary in how expensive they are to bring to a state of readiness. For example, copper lying around in pure nuggets is a much cheaper and easier source of copper than is a vein of pure copper ore, and that in turn is a much cheaper and easier source than some rock containing 1 or 2% of copper ore mixed in. Oil that seeps from the ground is easy to collect, while oil lying in pools deep underground requires drilling, and oil stashed away in pockets in oil shale requires fracking and whatnot. There are also transportation issues: oil in Saudi Arabia used to be very expensive to use in the United States, because only camels were available to transport it. WIth the advent of pipeline and supertankers, this is no longer true.

So as easily-exploitable resources are used up, typically less easily exploitable resources become competitive, and the amount of "available" material increases. Furthermore, most needs have alternate materials as well. Kerosene is a good substitute for whale oil, and electric light was an even better substitute for both.

It is, therefore, extremely difficult to say with any degree of confidence how "depleted" or "flush" the world is with respect to any given resource. As a rule, the best we can do is, at any given moment in time, to label a resource as "scarce" (price high) or "abundant" (price low). That says nothing about whether it will be scarce or abundant in the future, and, indeed, as a matter of historical fact, it has been very difficult to make any such predictions of future scarcity with accuracy (cf. the famous Simon-Ehrlich wager).