Natural Resources: Gifts of the Earth
Natural resources like water, soil, trees, and sunlight come from the earth on their own and are used to produce nearly everything.
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What this means
Some things were already here before any person showed up. Water in a river. Trees in a forest. Soil in the ground. Fish in the ocean. Sunlight. Wind. Iron buried in a mountain. Those are natural resources.
The test is simple. Ask yourself: did a person have to make this, or was it already here? Nobody manufactured a river. Nobody built a forest. They occur naturally.
Natural resources are important because they are where goods begin. Before there was a wooden chair, there was a tree. Before there was a glass of milk, there was grass a cow ate. Before there was a phone, there was metal in the ground.
Sometimes a natural resource gets changed a lot before you see it. A cotton T-shirt does not look like a cotton plant. But if you follow the shirt backward far enough, you always land on something that came from the earth.
Why it matters
Natural resources explain why different places produce different things. Places with rich soil grow food. Places near forests make lumber and paper. Places with big rivers make electricity from moving water. Where you live shapes what people around you produce.
They also matter because many of them are limited. There is only so much fresh water, so much fish in a lake, so much land. Learning to notice natural resources is the first step to learning why people have to be careful with them.
Real-world example
Trace a glass of lemonade backward. The lemons grew on a lemon tree, which needed soil, water, and sunlight. The sugar came from a sugar cane or sugar beet plant, which also needed soil, water, and sunlight. The water in the glass came from rain that fell and collected. Even the ice is just that same water, frozen. Not one of those things was invented by a person.
Try it
- Pick a good you like to eat. Apple pie and lemonade are good starters, but you can choose pancakes, pizza, or ice cream.
- List every ingredient you can think of.
- Next to each ingredient, write the natural resource it came from. Apples come from an apple tree. Flour comes from wheat. Butter comes from milk, which comes from a cow that ate grass.
- Now add the resources you cannot see in the recipe. What did every one of those plants need in order to grow? Write down soil, water, and sunlight.
- Draw a picture with two halves. On the left, draw the natural resources. On the right, draw the finished good. Connect them with arrows.
- Look around the room and find one thing that seems totally artificial, like a plastic chair or a window. As a class, try to trace it back to a natural resource. Every single object can be traced back.
Teacher note
The key move is tracing backward, and students need modeling on it. The most common misconception is that only "outdoorsy" things like trees and rocks count, so anything plastic, metal, or processed gets excluded. Plastic comes from oil, which is in the ground; metal comes from ore. Do that trace out loud once and students will start doing it themselves. A second confusion is calling a farmed apple unnatural because a person planted the tree. Clarify that the apple tree itself, the soil, the rain, and the sun are all things people cannot manufacture. Assess by giving a student a brand-new good and asking them to name one natural resource inside it.
Check yourself
Which of these is a natural resource?
What natural resources does a farmer need to grow apples for a pie?
Someone says a plastic water bottle has no natural resources in it. Are they right?
Natural resources are things the earth provides on its own, and if you trace any good backward far enough, you always find one.