According to Zimmermann, resources are not known, fixed things; they are what humans employ to service wants at a given time. Human “appraisal” turns the “neutral stuff” of the earth into resources. What are resources today may not be tomorrow, and vice versa.8
Zimmermann wrote:
Resources are highly dynamic functional concepts; they are not, they become, they evolve out of the triune interaction of nature, man, and culture, in which nature sets outer limits, but man and culture are largely responsible for the portion of physical totality that is made available for human use.9
Zimmermann concluded: “Knowledge is truly the mother of all resources.”10 Link
From the Coming Dark Age Newsletter:
On the other hand, the ultimate resource is something that itself
becomes scarce in a declining civilisation. Technological development
stagnates. People find that life is comfortable enough and they have no
motivation to change. Vested interests obstruct new discoveries that
might ruin their megabucks industries.
Even though it was an American that invented the transistor, for
instance, American companies declined to license the patent. That would
have meant throwing away their existing product lines, designing new
wares and retooling their manufacturing plants. They didn’t want to do
that.
So instead the transistor patent was licensed by the Tokyo
Telecommunications Engineering Company, which was starting from scratch
like the rest of post-war Japan. It produced the first transistor
radio, and in 1958 changed its name to the Sony Corporation. (This is
an example of the Phoenix Principle, by the way.)
It is for these reasons that our society will seem to run out of
resources. Future historians may say that western civilisation
collapsed because the oil was all used up. But the truth is that lack
of oil only became a problem because our society was already sick and
rotten. We didn’t create the opportunities that would have meant we
didn’t need to rely on oil any more.
FORWARD BASE B 