Unnatural Resources

Language has always been the first tool of extraction.

Before a forest is logged, it becomes “timber.” Before land is drilled, it becomes “energy potential.” Before water is diverted, it becomes “infrastructure.” By the time anything physical happens, the transformation has already occurred — not in the ground, but in the vocabulary.

Modern resource policy depends on this quiet shift. What was once described as disruption is reframed as efficiency. What was once depletion becomes development. The resources themselves haven’t changed. The story around them has.

Redefining the Natural

The term “natural resource” suggests something waiting politely to be used. Oil beneath the ground. Gas in the shale. Water flowing where it always has. But extraction today rarely resembles anything natural. It is engineered, accelerated, and optimized beyond recognition.

Horizontal drilling, chemical processing, and large-scale diversion projects create outcomes that bear little resemblance to the ecosystems they replace. Yet the language remains reassuringly pastoral.

Economic Urgency as a Justification

The argument is almost always economic. Jobs. Growth. Competitiveness. Communities are told that hesitation is a luxury they cannot afford. Regulation becomes obstruction. Caution becomes weakness.

What rarely enters the conversation is the cost of permanence. Once a resource is exhausted or a landscape altered, the consequences don’t follow election cycles or quarterly earnings reports.

The Ohio Equation

In states like Ohio, the tension is especially visible. Industrial legacy collides with environmental reality. Communities built on extraction now face its aftermath — polluted waterways, unstable land, and the long tail of cleanup no one wants to fund.

Promises of revitalization often arrive faster than results. When they fail to materialize, the damage remains.

What Gets Left Out

Discussions about resources tend to focus on what can be taken, not what must be sustained. Air quality, public health, and long-term resilience are treated as secondary concerns — issues to be addressed later, if at all.

By then, the definition of “later” has usually expired.

An Uncomfortable Accounting

The irony of unnatural resources is that they require enormous effort to appear normal. The systems that extract them are anything but simple. The impacts are anything but temporary.

What’s missing from the debate isn’t technology or innovation. It’s honesty — about limits, trade-offs, and the difference between use and consumption.

Resources can be managed responsibly. They can also be rationalized into disappearance. The difference lies less in geology than in intent.