Encyclopedia of Global Resources part 21 provides a wide variety of perspectives on both traditional and more recent views of Earth's resources. It serves as a bridge connecting the domains of resource exploitation, environmentalism, geology, and biology, and it explains their interrelationships in terms that students and other nonspecialists can understand. The articles in this set are extremely diverse, with articles covering soil, fisheries, forests, aluminum, the Industrial Revolution, the . Department of the Interior, the hydrologic cycle, glass, and placer mineral deposits. . | 170 Capitalism and resource exploitation Global Resources to market forces. A market economy allocates labor capital and resources to their most profitable uses. While markets do exist in traditional economies they play a limited role serving as a means of disposing of surplus products. In command economies markets are subordinated to the authority of the state. Second capitalism is characterized by the production of commodities. Commodities are anything produced for sale. As Vandana Shiva points out in Staying Alive Women Ecology and Development 1989 the transformation of natural resources into commodities requires separating resources from their natural environment. From a market perspective forests wildlife and other natural resources have value only as commodities. Third capitalism is characterized by private property. Private property conveys to the owners of capital and resources the right to use their property regardless of the impact on society or nature. More recently property refers not to the use of the property but rather to its value. Fourth capitalism is characterized by the accumulation of capital. Accumulation begins with the capitalist who invests money to purchase inputs capital labor and resources. These inputs are then converted into finished products which are sold for money exceeding that originally invested. The resulting profit is subsequently reinvested. This implies that the accumulation of capital is self-expanding requiring increasing quantities of resources and other inputs. The quest for profits makes capitalism an inherently dynamic system. As Joseph Schumpeter observes in Capitalism Socialism and Democracy 1942 Capitalism . is by nature a form or method of economic change and not only never is but never can be stationary. Economic change results from the introduction of innovations that is from opening new markets developing new products introducing new technologies and so on. Competition for profit compels capitalists to innovate. .
