Managing natural resources for sustainability

I believe that sustainability with respect to natural resource management has a solid economic underpinning. It implies maintaining the productivity of the resource base. In fact, it implies more. In precisely those countries where populations are rising more rapidly, the poorest, the relative importance of natural resources in total productive capital is greatest. If those larger populations are to be enabled to improve their standards of consumption, the productivity of the asset base must increase. Yet, in these same countries and others, a wide range of natural resources are becoming less productive through depletion and deterioration. There is an issue of intergenerational equity. I do not propose to plunge into the arcane subject of social rates of time discount--one I gladly leave to more sophisticated theorists. But I raise the question: Is it fair to leave for a population that will inevitably be much larger (whatever to be much better off) a natural resource base that has been depleted and rendered significantly less productive than it is today? (author)