This document discusses the impact of globalization and industrialization on natural resource extraction and local communities. It provides examples from Goa, India and regions in the US and Russia to illustrate how outside commercial interests can exploit resource wealth in a way that is unsustainable and detrimental to local ecosystems and populations. The document argues that communities need strong social networks and institutions to develop their own resources in a holistic manner without relying on transnational companies that prioritize profits over environmental and social concerns. Relying too heavily on outside industrial recruitment can damage local environments and disrupt traditional ways of life.

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Natural Resource Capital and Industrial Recruitment
ANTH Capstone: 410
Persisting since the 20th century are a great deal of problems which can be seen on the news;
scarcity of resources, intervention by foreign investors with outsider capital, and a deteriorating
ecosystem being hounded by the interests of big business and a globalized economy. We all live in a
new type of world in which resource depletion need to be addressed and assessed, with skilled people
to analyze and interpret holistic solutions to many of these problems. Although it is difficult to find
information on the effect of worldwide globalization and commercialism on natural environments; there
are case studies on a smaller level in the United States, India, and Russia/Canada. Familiar cases of
holistic economic development will provide inspiration for the urgency of action in the resource­rich
areas of the world threatened by foreign interests, and will continue to propagate the threats of
ecological collapse to to the stability of civilization.
The world has become a give­and­take system between the industrialized north and the
underdeveloped south, an unsustainable system of resource grabbing and lack of social capital in driving
community action to protect scarce resources. A cultural resource is known as “social capital”: in short,
muscle power and the smooth flow of information to facilitate effective response and action across
social networks that are affected by negative outside influences. Sociologists, for the most part, have
unrecognized the impact that natural capital wealth has on low­level community economic development,
yet have made gains with a political ecology approach on the deteriorating conditions of the exchange
between the industrialized north and underdeveloped south (Crowe 828) in such cases as the Goa

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province in India, the Amazon rainforest, South Sudan, Canada, and even eastern Oregon in the United
States.
It is important to develop guidance strategies for the use of social capital to effectively
communicate to community leaders the best route to a holistic resource extraction without the use of
transnational foreign companies with political and economic agendas. World population will likely peak
before the end of the twenty­first century at less than 10 billion. The global population growth rate
peaked at 2.1% a year in the late 1960s and fell to 1.35% a year by 2000, when global population
reached 6 billion. Population growth over the next several decades is expected to be concentrated in the
poorest urban communities in sub­Saharan Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East. Populations in all
parts of the world are expected to experience substantial aging during the next century; while industrial
countries will have the oldest populations, the rate of aging could be extremely fast in some developing
countries (Nelson 74). This trend of urbanization and increasing world population in the poorest
developed and most vulnerable countries is disturbing. Without a solid driver for social capital to form
and domestic institutions and power structures to be created, the resource base of these peripheral
countries (where some of the most valuable resources are located) will be continue to be exploited until
they are reduced to nothing.
Looking at government in an institutional context, replacing rigid neoliberal leanings to having a
fluid and dynamic structure is more conducive to the adaptation process for a changing environment and
changing world. Not an entirely new system of government or economics is needed, but an adaptation
to new pressures from the environment. The cohesiveness of decision making groups, the distribution of
the benefits of management, and the consideration of many more deceptive variables are important to

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provide a dynamic and responsive social capital to outside influences, be that industrial recruitment,
environmental change, or anything else meant to alter the social landscape and natural capital of affected
areas around the globe. (Adger 400).
What is a natural resource? Most definitions include terminology along the lines of “Wealth
measured in naturally occurring matter”. This matter being further separated by the divisions labeled as
biotic vs. abiotic resources and renewable vs. nonrenewable, being the accepted divisions of natural
resource types. Abiotic resources, those which are non biological sources such as sunlight, water,
geologic heat and so on; plentiful minerals in the earth like gold, iron, potassium are also classified under
abiotic resources. Biotic resources include all those that come from living things, which include oil and
gas, food, timber, meat and fruit (Swartz). Resources and their total wealth level in an area in a
sustainably harvested sense could be applied the term “Natural capital”. Natural capital is seen as a
collection of wealth in an area and can be graded according to three criteria: Accessibility, Natural
Circumscription, and Ecology type. These three criteria can apply to the measurements of Natural
Capital and be seen as a useful tool to identify community wealth (Crowe 828).
Resource capital within the periphery countries within South America, Africa, and Asia provide
for most of the available non­renewable biotic and abiotic resources, South America for example,
contains half of the 8.5% of forestland left on Earth (Nelson). The tropic regions have seen most of the
deforestation in the past few decades, with 10% of Arid zones or dry areas of the world being
considered degraded, most of them in Asia. There are examples of these zones having resource capital
extraction in a sustainable way which is adaptable to both domestic and foreign pressure, technological
change, and property alteration. One such example of this is in Goa, India (Axelrod).

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While private property is the product of the emergence of a stratified state, collective
organization of shared resources within an area rich of resource capital, in fact these areas within the
Goa state of India existed alongside private properties in the traditional sense, but these collective areas
had wealth which was divided according to shares held within the community (usually of profit driven,
upper caste landholders). These community driven plots of farming have survived successive system
changes in the feudal, state, colonial, and postcolonial eras. The two distinctions of the Old Conquests
and New Conquests within Goa state are divisions of time when the Portuguese first came to the region,
and acquired land in two separate waves (Axelrod 84). These Portuguese incursions left a cultural mark
on both regions, but they kept separate function due to the differences of terrain and productive
techniques. The New Conquest areas were hillier and drier than the Old Conquest areas, in both lands a
ruling class of gauncars held the rice paddies and other forms of production, they are the descendents
of the first four men to produce the rice from nothing. These gauncars collect all revenue from the land,
and after paying taxes to the state, distribute the wealth amongst themselves. The Portuguese found this
system valuable to them and sponsored it, seeing the villages as corporate entities with formal revenue
generating systems. The gaucars allocated expenses for repairs or for irrigation payments, and
everyone shared in the wealth. The British could not dislodge this system from Goa, as in other parts of
India (Axelrod 87).
Oregon and Washington, in the western United states, are rather large states by comparison and
have many different environmental systems, to a similar but maybe even more degree than that of central
India. From redwood tropical forest to the semiarid eastern lands these states have different land
structure and resource capital. This natural capital is found to have a significant influence on the

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development of the local communities in these areas as well as Goa (Crowe 845). Within these regions,
two development styles have been seen to alter the socio­economic landscape; Self­Development, and
Industrial Recruitment (Crowe 845) Industrial Recruitment being the process of bringing outsider
industrial development to the forefront to promote economic growth at home, which may lead to
unintended damage to the ecology or social structure of the local area. While natural resource wealth
did not have an impact on Self­Development pursuit or implementation; the process of a people or
cultural group creating their own higher levels of economic activity, the natural ecosystem did have an
impact on pursuing and successfully recruiting outside industry (Industrial Recruitment). Crowe’s
findings also show that the presence of interstate highways increased the likelihood of communities
following Self­Development strategies, while the presence of interstate commerce on those highways
increased the likelihood of outside industrial intervention and recruitment.
Resource extraction by outside foreign companies and the driving force from the capitalist
economies of Western Europe and North America, as well as the command economies of the former
Soviet Union, has been shown to be detrimental to the health of the ecosystems exploited in the manner
of industrial recruitment, much to the dismay and detriment to the overall health and lifestyles of native
populations. (Chance 223) “Large scale” petroleum development in the Siberia region of the Russian
Federation, as well as similar programs in Alaska by the United States government have full backing by
their respective governments, and neither seem to take their native populations welfare into account, and
don’t realize their resource development in the region is ecologically destructive, economically wasteful,
and culturally harmful (Chance 223). These lands, though sparsely populated, have held indigenous
groups for generations; and due to the relatively recent focus by foreign governments on these lands, the

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native inhabitants have gained a clear voice in the issue. They have articulated their position well,
allowing them to hold much of their self­actualization and preserve their way of life. Within the region of
Yamal in northern Russia, the difficult transition into a capitalist economy is in the hands of powerful
bureaucrats within the government, who want very little to do with the growing voice of Nenets and
Khanty people. Nothing will change within the region while their natural gas capital is extracted to the
wealth of others (Chance 229).
Within Alaska, there has been a similar situation unfolding for the native inhabitants, but there
are voices speaking out for the welfare of the native groups in Alaska which are not heard in Russia; the
voices of Greenpeace, Natural Resources Defence Council, Wilderness Society, and the Sierra Club
have powerful lobbyists in Washington to challenge congressional legislation and military seizures
perceived as threatening wildlife refuges and wilderness areas known to have natural resource wealth
(Chance 229). Things might go differently in Alaska in the coming century, but climate change is
radically altering the structure of the ecology within polar and tundra regions, and time will tell the
outcome. The evidence for global warming, on a scale unprecedented in the era of modern human
history (the range of 1.4C to 5.8C by 2100) was summarized by the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (2001) (Adger 387). Within the affected communities and peoples who face threats,
such as foreign industrial recruitment or catastrophic climate change, a measure of cultural resource
needs to be applied.
Social capital (realtime communication and response) will be the driving force which brings
people to control their own resource capital in a direction leading to the self determination of indigenous
groups, despite the mounting pressure and increasing apparentness of the resource conflict between the

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industrialized North and the peripheral South. Little fundamental change is seen to be made by
government agendas, who are concerned more about efficient resource extraction, recycling, and waste
management than a radical change in lifestyle, economic systems, and political agendas. At the very
worst, sustainable development of resource capital infrastructure is a signal to portray political
correctness while nothing is done to fix a broken structure (Simon 189). Dominant post­modern
development strategies are concerned with the economic feasibility of liberalizing and stabilizing
governments through privatization and liberalization programs; they have been proven to work in some
circumstances but have gained their traction though ‘aid conditions’ from donor organizations, seen as
playing a part of overcoming debt in periphery countries and promoting an international trade, as
regulated by the IMF, World Bank, and WHO (Simon 189).
All too often, modern development discourse appears to be a system of “do’s and don’ts” in
the form of tasks for a national government to accomplish in order to receive any aid from outside
agencies. These tasks put a cement block on the political structure of the country at hand, ensuring not
just the survival of the people, but the survival of the ruling elite to keep state power. The tasks that
keep this hold include (but not limited to) establishing a national identity, integrating society, creating an
acceptable authority system, mobilizing and distributing resource capital, and securing freedom from
external control. (Nabudere 212). This development is aimed from the top­down instead of the
ground­up, relying on a model of a nation­state with a cohesive centralized government instead of a
natural organization the local peoples self­develop on their own. Within communal structures like that in
Goa, India, resistance to outside influence and protection of their natural resources against the face of
the British and Portuguese were far more successful than the animists and christians of Sudan/South

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Sudan in the face of external Chinese oil company intervention.
Maintaining a level of social capital from a ground level in the face of either an oppressive
government, NGO, industry or anything else is going to lead to some amount of conflict, yet there are
synergies that exist as well between the nation­state and its civil society in creating a workable amount
of social capital to protect home resources from outside intervention and acquisition. In the context of
climate change, many of the risks on a greater scale involve planning, analysis, and action by the state
body, but the adaptation strategy and overall coping mechanisms in a change of life are equally
dependent on the ability of individuals and communities to act collectively, and immediately in the face of
risks to their livelihoods. The interdependence and synergy between the state and social capital is
particularly the case for resource dependent communities in the peripheral countries, or developing
world that already require dense social capital to manage resources effectively (Adger 400).
The ability of social capital to be a human muscle power to enact vast policy changes cannot be
understated; while there are examples of smaller and weaker groups under oppression by business
interests that have been in Sudan, Northern Russia, and elsewhere on the globe, there are
complimentary examples of social capital in action; gaining ground through ever increasing lines of
communication within social groups. The world has a finite reserve of biotic capital; and preserving it for
future generations while simultaneously upgrading the welfare of indigenous and oppressed people
around the world is not an easy task, and it falls on a disproportionate amount of policymakers in
declining countries to make first steps towards a more wholesome and compassionate resource based
world economy.

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Position Paper Bibliography
Barrett Reinking ANTH 410
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Geography (2003): n. pag. JSTOR. Clark University. Web. 5 Mar. 2013.
Axelrod, Paul, and Michelle Fuerch. "Common Ground: Risk, Scarcity, and Shared Resources in Goan
Agriculture." Human Ecology 34.1 (2006): 79­98. Print.
Chance, Norman A., and Elena N. Andreeva. "Sustainability, Equity, and Natural Resource
Development in Northwest Siberia and Arctic Alaska." Human Ecology 23.2 (1995): 217­40.
Print.
Crowe, Jessica. "THE ROLE OF NATURAL CAPITAL ON THE PURSUIT AND
IMPLEMENTATION OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT." Sociological Perspectives
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http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/10.1525/sop.2008.51.4.827.pdf?acceptTC=true.
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Poor Reject Development. Series B, Human Geography , Vol. 79, No. 4, Current
Development Thinking (1997), pp. 203­215. Swedish Society for Anthropology and
Geography. http://www.jstor.org/stable/490358
Nelson, Gerald C. “Drivers of Ecosystem Change” MA Solutions. March 2013. Print.
http://www.unep.org/maweb/documents/document.272.aspx.pdf
Simon, David. "Development Reconsidered; New Directions in Development Thinking." Geografiska
Annaler, Series B: Human Geography 79.4 (1997): 183­201. Print.
Swartz, Fredrick. "Natural resource." New World Encyclopedia, . 6 Dec 2010, 16:54 UTC. 6 Mar
2013,
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/p/index.php?title=Natural_resource&oldid=948379.