Resources are vexing!

Abstract

Resource use and management are central concerns to environmental geography scholars, who have mobilized diverse approaches to examine the making, circulation, and socioecological effects of resources and resource systems. Informed by our reading of the resource geography literature and our experiences editing The Routledge Handbook of Critical Resource Geography, we reflect on the role of resources in the study of human–environment interactions. First, we outline what we mean by “critical” in critical resource geography and identify approaches scholars working in this area have taken to understand resources and the worlds that are created and undone through their production, circulation, consumption, and disposal. We then identify an aporia internal to critical resource geography that derives from the field's centering of a concept—“resources”—that is fundamentally linked to the colonial and capitalist subjugation of peoples and environments. Building from this, we propose an orientation for the field that recognizes critique to be the starting point of a collective effort to “unbound” the World of Resources with the aim of making what are now familiar resource-relations unacceptable.