Class 8 Social Science Chapter 1: Natural Resources and Their Use

Nature, and the things people take from it

One meaning of the word Nature is everything living and non-living around us that nobody made: the air, the rivers, the rocks under a field, the forest on a hillside. These things were not put there for us, and most of them go on quite happily whether or not anybody wants them. A forest does not grow in order to be furniture. It simply grows.

The moment a tree turns into timber

Something changes when people step in. A standing tree is part of the environment; cut it down and turn the wood into a chair, and the same tree has become a resource. The thing did not change. Our relationship to it did. That is the whole idea behind the word. A resource is a piece of Nature that people have found a use for, either to stay alive or to make something they want.

Three tests before we call it a resource

Not everything useful counts. Petroleum lying deep under the ocean floor is of no use to anyone who cannot reach it, so the first test is whether our technology can get at it. The second is cost: if taking a thing out of the ground costs more than it is worth, nobody will. The third is whether the community will allow it at all. Trees in a sacred grove may be perfectly reachable and perfectly valuable, and still nobody cuts them. Reachable, affordable, acceptable — a thing has to pass all three before it is a resource rather than simply part of the landscape.

A word that sounds harsher than it means

In ordinary speech, exploitation is an accusation. In this chapter it is not. It means only the taking, using and consuming of what Nature holds, and the word carries no blame on its own. Whether a particular act of exploitation deserves blame depends on how much is taken and how fast, which is a question for later in the chapter.

Treasures that took millions of years

Some of what we use is obvious: water, air, soil. Some is less so, because it lies out of sight and formed long before there were people to want it. Coal, petroleum, precious stones, the ores that metals come from, the timber of old forests all belong to that second kind. The slowness matters. A thing that took millions of years to form cannot be remade inside a human lifetime, however badly it is needed.

Why sorting things into groups is worth the trouble

Science sorts constantly, and so does everybody else. We pick out something that a set of things share, make that the test for belonging, and give the group a name. After that a single word carries the whole idea. Living and non-living, which you met in earlier classes, is exactly this: two words that save a paragraph of explanation every time.

Sorting by the use we put them to

One useful way to group natural resources is by what we do with them. Three groups cover most of it: the ones that keep us alive, the ones we build things out of, and the ones that give us energy. The groups are not sealed off from one another, and that is a feature rather than a fault.

Resources that keep us alive

Nothing lives on Earth without air to breathe, water to drink and food to eat. These come from the atmosphere, from rivers and ponds, and from soil that is planted and tended. The striking thing about this group is that we cannot manufacture any of it. No factory makes breathable air. We can only protect what is already there.

Resources we build things out of

People turn Nature's materials into objects, some useful and some beautiful, and often both. The same piece of wood can become a chair to sit on or a carved figure to look at. India's geography is generous here: the country yields wood and marble, coal and gold, and a long list in between, because such different landscapes sit inside one set of borders.

Resources that power the day

Energy runs modern life — light in buildings, vehicles on roads, machines in every kind of production. It arrives from sources that have little in common with one another: coal dug out of the ground, water falling down a hillside, petroleum, natural gas, sunlight and wind. A small hydel plant in Himachal Pradesh and an oil rig standing offshore are both doing the same job by utterly different means.

One thing can sit in two groups

Water is the clearest case. It belongs in the first group because we drink it, and in the third because falling water spins turbines. Timber heats a stove and also becomes a door. Nothing has gone wrong when this happens. Categories are tools for thinking, and a tool can be held more than one way.

When the answer changes with the year

Because all three tests can shift, the list of resources is never settled. A deposit beyond any drill in 1950 may be routine to reach today. A metal worth little one decade can be worth mining the next. A community may decide that a stretch of forest it once cut is now better left alone. None of this changes the ground; it changes the three answers people give about it.

Nature as something more than a supply

Many indigenous traditions around the world do not treat Nature as a store cupboard at all. In them it is sacred — a nurturer and a nourisher, owed respect rather than merely used. Honey is taken without the hive being destroyed. Ploughing is kept gentle enough to leave the soil's moisture and its small living creatures where they are. A tulasi plant is tended for the household's wellbeing. In each case, taking and caring happen together.

What this topic has settled

A resource is not a kind of object. It is a relationship between people and a piece of Nature, and that relationship has to pass three tests to exist at all. Once it does, the thing can be sorted by what it does for us. The next question is a harder one: of these resources, which come back, and which do not?

Scenario:

A timber trader visits a village and offers a good price for the old trees in the grove beyond the fields. The road reaches the grove, the trees are sound, and the price would pay for a year of repairs to the village school. The elders refuse. They explain that the grove has never been cut, that it is held sacred, and that the spring the village drinks from rises inside it. The trader argues that trees left standing earn nothing at all.

Analysis:

The trees pass two tests and fail the third, and the cultural test alone is enough to keep them standing. The spring adds a second reason: the grove protects a resource essential for life, which no payment could replace.

Activity:

Find out whether any grove, pond or tree near you is protected by custom rather than by law, and ask an elder how long that has been so.

Title:

Trace five things back to Nature

Safety:

Use objects already in the room. Do not take anything apart.

What You Notice:

Almost every chain ends in Nature within three or four steps, and several objects turn out to need materials from two groups.

A sacred grove can be the best-preserved patch of forest in a district. The trees are reachable and valuable, and they stand because the community does not permit cutting them — a cultural rule doing the work of a fence.

A microhydel plant does not need a great dam. It takes a stream running down a Himachal hillside and turns the fall of the water into electricity for the villages nearby.

The plastic button on a shirt traces back to Nature too. Follow it far enough and it reaches petroleum, which formed underground long before anyone needed a button.

The three tests a resource must pass — REACH it, AFFORD it, ALLOW it — Reach is the technology, afford is the cost, allow is the culture. Fail any one and the thing stays part of the landscape instead of becoming a resource.

The three groups by use — LIVE, BUILD, POWER — Live is air, water and food; build is wood, marble and metal; power is coal, sunlight, wind and falling water.

How Nature puts itself back together

Left alone, the natural world repairs itself. A cut on your skin closes over. A forest burnt by a wildfire comes back. This habit of returning to a healthy state after damage has a name: restoration. It is one of the most important ideas in the chapter, because almost everything else here depends on it.

Beyond repair, towards new life

Regeneration goes further than restoration. Restoration puts back what was damaged; regeneration is the making of new life and of the conditions in which life can thrive. Plant trees on ground that was cleared for housing, choosing the kinds that grew there before, and the whole system starts up again. Food and shelter return, and with them the birds and the squirrels.

A cycle with no waste in it

Watch a tree fall in a forest. Bacteria, fungi and insects feed on the trunk until it has broken down completely, and what is left enriches the soil. Seeds fall on that soil and grow. In time one of those trees falls too, and the whole thing begins again. Nothing in that sequence is thrown away, because every output is some other creature's input.

Resources that come back

Sunlight falls on most of India in abundance. Rain and melting glaciers feed the rivers, forests grow new trees, and soil replenishes itself. These are the renewable resources — solar energy, wind, the energy of flowing water, timber from a managed forest — and what makes them renewable is not the substance but the rhythm. They return because Nature's cycle of restoration and regeneration keeps running.

The condition attached

Renewable does not mean unlimited, and the word comes with a condition that is easy to miss. The rhythm must not be disturbed. Take timber faster than the forest can grow it and the forest thins out and eventually goes, although timber is a renewable resource. A renewable resource is renewable at a certain rate, and only at that rate.

When the rhythm is broken

Several human actions have interfered with Nature's cycles at once. Industrialisation driven by fossil fuels is one, and the clearing of forests for farming and other uses is another. Together they have pushed temperatures up, and in parts of the Himalayas the glaciers are now melting faster than snowfall can replace them. That matters far beyond the mountains, because the people of the plains depend on those glaciers.

Why the mountains are called a water tower

Think of a tower holding water for a town below. Himalayan ice does the same job across seasons: it stores water in winter and releases it through the melting months, which is what keeps the rivers running when the rain has stopped. Lose the store and the rivers become as unreliable as the weather, which is the water-security problem now being discussed.

A fish that holds an ocean in balance

Communities once stopped fishing during the spawning season, so that fish stocks could rebuild themselves. Commercial fishing on a large scale ignored that pause, and tuna were caught faster than they could breed. Their numbers fell so sharply that agreements had to be reached to limit the catch, and even so the decline continues. Tuna eat smaller fish and shrimps, so their loss unsettles the balance of the whole ocean.

Waste that no creature can eat

Industry makes the goods we use, and it also makes waste, much of which is poured into rivers and other water bodies. The trouble is that a good deal of this waste cannot be broken down by any living thing, so it never becomes food for anything. Nature's cycle of restoration stalls, and a river can be left poisonous and unable to support life at all.

Two words worth separating

A forest filters water, holds soil in place and shelters animals. Those are ecosystem functions — things the forest does because of what it is, whether or not anyone benefits. Clean water in our wells, farmland that does not wash away, crops pollinated by insects that live in the forest: those are ecosystem services, the same workings seen from our side.

The arithmetic of one tree

A mature tree gives off roughly 275 litres of oxygen in a day, varying with the kind of tree. A person uses about 350 litres a day, varying with height, weight and how active they are. Set those two figures side by side and a single tree does not cover a single person. It is a quick way to see how much forest a city quietly depends on.

Resources that do not come back

Non-renewable resources form over immense stretches of time and cannot be replaced anywhere near the rate at which we use them. Fossil fuels are the familiar examples, coal and petroleum among them, along with minerals and metals such as iron, copper and gold. Nothing stops them forming again; it is simply that the forming takes longer than any civilisation has lasted.

India's coal, and the fifty-year estimate

India holds a great deal of coal and mines it to meet a demand for electricity that keeps climbing as the population grows and development speeds up. Current estimates give those reserves about another fifty years. That is not a reason for alarm so much as a deadline: until sustainable alternatives are widely available, the coal we have needs to be used with care.

What this topic has settled

Resources divide into those Nature restores and those it does not, and the line between them is about rate rather than about substance. A renewable resource stays renewable only while we take it no faster than it returns. A non-renewable one buys us time, and the sensible question is what we do with that time.

Scenario:

Two villages take firewood and timber from the same forest. The first takes what it needs for cooking and occasional repairs, and its elders keep a rough count of the trees felled each year. The second has begun supplying a timber merchant in the town and now fells many times that number. After ten years the forest near the first village looks much as it did. Near the second there are open patches where soil washes away in the rains, and the stream that ran all year now dries up in April.

Analysis:

Timber is renewable in both villages in name, but only one is taking it within the rate of return. Near the other, a lost function has taken a service with it, and the stream shows it.

Activity:

Count the trees felled in one month near where you live, and ask whether anyone keeps such a count.

Title:

Count the rate, not the amount

Safety:

Ask an adult before reading any meter, and do not open any cover.

What You Notice:

Daily use is steadier than most people expect, and the largest single saving is usually the easiest one to make.

The Himalayas are often called a water tower. They hold water as ice through the winter and release it as they melt, which is what keeps the rivers of the plains running long after the rain has stopped.

Before commercial fishing, many coastal communities simply stopped fishing during the spawning season. It was an unwritten rule that did the work of a modern quota.

A river can be killed without anything being taken from it. Waste that no living thing can break down never becomes food for anything, so the cycle that normally cleans a river never restarts.

What keeps a renewable resource renewable — RATE, not AMOUNT — The question is never how much is left but how fast it is taken compared with how fast it returns.

Functions against services — Nature DOES, we GET — What Nature does is a function; what we get from it is a service. The forest filters either way, but only one of the two is about us.

Nowhere spreads its gifts evenly

Resources are scattered unevenly across the Earth, and unevenly inside single countries too. Coal sits in some districts and not others; oil lies off certain coasts; iron ore and bauxite keep to their own belts. No country was dealt a complete hand, and that single fact shapes a great deal of what follows.

What the unevenness decides

Where resources lie helps settle where people live, what they trade and with whom, and how countries deal with one another. It has also decided where armies go. Many wars have been fought over control of natural resources, and some are being fought still. A map of minerals is never only a map of minerals.

When an industry arrives

An industry built beside a resource brings work with it. A township grows up around the plant, shops and services follow, and facilities that improve daily life become reachable for people who did not have them before. That is the gain, and it is a real one.

And what arrives with it

The same arrival carries costs, some immediate and some slow. People living on resource-rich land have been moved out of their homes to make room for such development, in India and elsewhere. Sometimes a place the community holds sacred is threatened, and conflict follows. Gains and losses here are rarely shared by the same people.

Reading the minerals map

The chapter's map of important minerals is worth studying slowly. Coal appears in a broad belt across the east and centre — Raniganj, Jharia, Bokaro, Korba, Talcher, Singareni. Iron ore clusters at Bailadila, Gua and Mayurbhanj, with Kudremukh and Ballari further south. Bauxite shows at Amarkantak and Koraput. Oil is a coastal and north-eastern story, from Digboi and Naharkatia in Assam to Ankleshwar, Kalol and Mumbai High in the west. Almost no district holds all four.

Short term and long term

Costs arrive on two timescales, and only one of them is obvious at the start. A family moved off its land knows at once what has happened. Soil that loses its cover, a stream that silts up, a skill that nobody in the next generation learns: those take years to show, and by then the decision that caused them is old. Weighing a project means asking what it will look like in thirty years, not only at the opening ceremony.

Trade follows the map

National and international trade both depend on where resources happen to sit. Put human knowledge and skill alongside the raw material and something distinctive can emerge — Wootz steel, made in India and sought far beyond it, is the standing example. Trade of this kind fed the growth of large empires in India.

Rivers do not read maps

Nature pays no attention to political boundaries. A river rises in one state and waters three others, which is a recipe for disagreement about who may take how much. The Kaveri is shared by Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Puducherry, and keeping that sharing peaceful has taken negotiation and careful management over many years.

Harder still between countries

If sharing a river between states of one country is difficult, sharing one between countries is harder again. There is no single authority above the parties, agreements rest on what each side is willing to accept, and a decision taken upstream is felt downstream whether or not anyone agreed to it.

Plenty that does not make a country rich

It seems obvious that a land full of resources must be a wealthy land. It is not so. Economists have a name for the puzzle — the natural resource curse, or the paradox of plenty — because regions rich in resources have often grown more slowly than regions without them.

Why plenty can disappoint

The usual reason is that the raw material leaves in the state it was found. If an economy cannot build the industries that turn ore into steel or crops into goods, it sells cheaply what others sell dearly, and the value is added somewhere else. The chapter on factors of production, later in this book, takes that argument further.

How India has answered it

India has largely avoided the curse by investing in exactly those industries, so that more of what is dug up or grown here is also made into something here. That decision was not automatic and it was not free; it was a choice about where to put money and effort over many years.

What actually decides the outcome

Knowing where the resources are is only a starting point. What turns them into lasting benefit rather than a brief windfall is human knowledge, good governance and planning that looks further ahead than the next contract. The balance between extracting and sustaining is still an open question everywhere.

What this topic has settled

An uneven map explains a great deal: where towns grow, what is traded, who quarrels with whom. But the map does not decide prosperity by itself. What a country knows, how it is governed and what it chooses to build turn out to matter more than what happens to lie under its ground.

Scenario:

A district in eastern India is found to hold a large bauxite deposit. A company proposes a mine and a road to the nearest railhead, promising eight hundred jobs. The ore would be shipped out unprocessed to a smelter in another state. Four villages lie on the land to be mined; their people farm it and hold a hill within it sacred. Two councillors argue that the district should insist on a processing plant being built locally, so that the ore is turned into metal before it leaves. A third says the jobs are needed now and that conditions will drive the company away altogether.

Analysis:

Shipping ore out unprocessed is the pattern behind the paradox of plenty, and a local plant is the councillors' answer to it. The sacred hill is the part no payment settles.

Activity:

Find one factory in your state that processes a local raw material, and write down what it makes and from what.

Title:

Follow one object back to its deposit

Safety:

Handle sharp or heavy objects carefully, and ask before taking anything from the kitchen.

What You Notice:

The ore and the finished object are often made in different states, and the second is usually worth far more than the first.

Wootz steel was made in India and wanted far beyond it. It is the standing example of what happens when human skill is added to a local material rather than the material being sold as it was found.

The Kaveri is shared by three states and a union territory. The arrangement has never been a single permanent settlement, but a long process of negotiation and management.

What an uneven map shapes — SETTLE, TRADE, FIGHT — Where resources are helps decide where people live, what moves between countries, and what has been fought over.

The paradox of plenty — RAW out, RICH elsewhere — Send the material away unprocessed and the value is added, and kept, in somebody else's economy.

Stewardship, and what the word asks

A steward looks after something on behalf of others, including others not yet born. Applied to resources, stewardship asks two different things at once: let renewable resources restore and regenerate, and use non-renewable ones judiciously enough that they last until better options exist. Neither half works without the other.

The warning scientists have given

Treating resources carelessly has produced three results that scientists have been warning about for years: pollution, loss of biodiversity, and climate change. Biodiversity loss means the shrinking of the range of living things on Earth. All three have been moving faster in recent years, which is what makes the question urgent rather than merely interesting.

Water taken faster than it returns

In most states, farmers draw groundwater for irrigation faster than the water table is refilled. A deficit that small each year builds steadily. Pumping costs rise as the water sinks further down, and eventually the water simply is not there. Several of our growing cities have been predicted to run out of groundwater before long.

What is being tried

Remedies exist and are being attempted. Traditional water harvesting has been revived, ponds and tanks rejuvenated, wasteful consumption cut, and water processed and used again rather than discarded once. None of these is new technology. Most are old practices being taken seriously after a period of neglect.

Punjab, and a crisis in fertile country

Punjab is the sharpest case. The Green Revolution began there, which fed a large share of the country and helped India become self-sufficient in food, and today the same state faces a sustainability crisis. In the 1960s farmers moved to wheat and paddy bred for higher yields. Those seeds needed more water than the traditional ones, so groundwater was pumped to supply it.

Free power, and what it encouraged

Electricity supplied free to farmers removed the brake. When pumping costs nothing, there is little reason to pump less, and over-pumping became normal — a situation still common across much of India. Modern methods also brought chemical pesticides and fertilisers into regular use on the same fields.

The figures from Punjab

The effects can be stated plainly. Across a large part of the state the water has fallen out of reach to depths of about thirty metres. Chemicals from pesticides and fertilisers have dissolved into what remains, creating health hazards. Almost 80 per cent of Punjab's area is now classified as over-exploited, which means water has been drawn far faster than it can be restored.

A short-term gain and a long-term bill

Food security was secured, and that mattered enormously at the time. The bill arrived later, and it will take time and effort to settle. The pattern is worth recognising. A decision can be right for the decade it is taken in and still leave a problem for the decade after, and that is exactly why stewardship looks further ahead.

Soil, and the cost of forcing it

Chemical fertilisers and pesticides used improperly have degraded soil as well. Traditional farming treated soil as part of Mother Earth. Its practices — cow dung and other natural fertilisers, mulching, growing several crops together — managed soil as a whole rather than feeding it one nutrient at a time. Those practices are worth learning from now, because soil has to be replenished and rejuvenated rather than merely used.

An old science of trees

Vrikshayurveda is an ancient Indian botanical science concerned with how plants and trees are studied and looked after; the name joins the Sanskrit words for tree and for the science of life. The tradition goes back several thousand years and was set down in texts such as Surapala's work around the tenth century CE.

What that science actually contains

Its recommendations are detailed rather than general. It matches plants to soil types, describes methods for collecting, preserving and treating seed before planting, and sets out irrigation adjusted to the species, the stage of growth and the season. It manages pests with natural repellents and companion planting, and recommends crop rotation, mixed cropping and ploughing that keeps soil moisture and protects the fungi, bacteria and earthworms living in the soil.

Cement, and an industry worth naming

Cement is in our houses, schools, hospitals, bridges, roads and airports, and its production is among the most polluting of all industries. Fine dust from the process enters human and animal lungs, settles on leaves and cuts plant yields, and pollutes soil and water. The Central Pollution Control Board has issued guidelines so that this pollution is reduced or removed.

Building with something else

Alternatives are being developed in parallel. Some are traditional materials such as stone and mud, some are new plant-based materials, and some are recycled from waste plastic. Jaisalmer fort, a mud structure of the twelfth century later refurbished with sandstone, shows how long such materials can last. A modern community building at Auroville, made of mud by specialised techniques, shows they are not only historical.

Sikkim, and a transition that worked

Pema's family farm in Sikkim was losing yields and gathering debts from costly chemical inputs. When the state promoted organic farming, the family switched, and the early years were hard: yields fell while the soil recovered from years of chemicals. They composted, made pest repellents from neem and garlic, and grew several crops through the year. After roughly five years the farm was thriving and its cardamom, ginger and traditional vegetables sold at premium prices.

What one state proved

In 2016 Sikkim became a fully organic state, with all its farmland certified. The results went beyond the farms. Beneficial insects and birds returned, visitors came to see the model and tourism grew, and farmers' incomes rose by about 20 per cent on average. Sikkim is now cited internationally as proof that a whole region can make such a transition and improve both its ecology and its economy.

Solar power, and leadership abroad

For non-renewables the task is to make them last until alternatives are ready, which means switching to renewable energy wherever we can. The international solar alliance was launched by India and France in 2015, bringing together countries with abundant sunshine. India has helped direct large sums into solar projects in developing nations and has shared technical knowledge and financing arrangements.

Who gets clean air and water

One more question runs underneath all of this. Access to resources, even basic ones, is often unfair. Many city neighbourhoods do not receive an adequate or regular supply of drinking water. Air pollution from industry and heavy fossil-fuel use falls hardest on people least able to protect themselves from it. A policy that ignores this is incomplete however green it looks.

An old idea for a current problem

The Bhagavad Gita speaks of lokasangraha, the idea that a person should rise above personal desire and act for the wellbeing of all. Set beside groundwater tables, cement dust and solar alliances, it reads less like scripture and more like a job description. The chapter ends by asking whether the time has come to take it seriously.

Scenario:

A village in a dry district has farmed the same fields for generations. Ten years ago it switched to a crop that sells well in the town but needs far more water, and the state began supplying power free for irrigation. Yields and incomes rose for six years. In the seventh, two borewells failed and had to be deepened. This year four more have failed, the water that comes up tastes of fertiliser, and the panchayat has called a meeting. One farmer proposes deepening every well; another proposes reviving the two old tanks and changing the crop.

Analysis:

The pattern repeats Punjab's in miniature. Deepening chases the water downwards; reviving the tanks and changing the crop work on the rate, which is the only thing that lets a table recover.

Activity:

Ask at home how deep the nearest borewell is, and whether it has been deepened in the last ten years.

Title:

Map your own water

Safety:

This is an interview and a record, so there is nothing to handle and nothing to switch on.

What You Notice:

Supplies that were once a well or a tank have often become a pipe or a tanker, and the change is usually within living memory.

Sikkim did not convert a district or a few farms. In 2016 the whole state was certified organic, which is why it is studied internationally rather than locally.

Jaisalmer fort is a mud structure of the twelfth century, later refurbished with sandstone. Earth as a building material has already lasted eight hundred years there.

The Auroville Earth Institute, which built a modern community building out of mud, holds a UNESCO Chair for Earthen Architecture.

The two halves of stewardship — LET IT RETURN, MAKE IT LAST — Renewables need their rhythm left alone; non-renewables need to be stretched until alternatives arrive.

Punjab's chain of causes — SEEDS, POWER, PUMPS, DEPTH — Thirstier seeds raised demand, free power removed the cost, pumping went unchecked, and the water fell out of reach.