Doug

Has any non-living primary resource valued by humans entirely run out?

I got to musing while reading Jared Diamond's latest offering, Collapse, in the context of logging and overexploitation and subsequent collapse, and the Peak Oil stuff that everyone's so excited about atm.

I can't think of a single thing. There's a surfeit of examples of extraction becoming locally uneconomic - e.g. tin mining in Cornwall, cod fishing on the Grand Banks. There is also no shortage of living species that have gone extinct at human hands. The world dodo meat supply is utterly gone, 'frinstance. But for non-living material resources I can't think of a single example.

The best candidate I'd come across was Tanzanite, an obscure gemstone from Tanzania that comes from only one place. Several places claimed that it had entirely run out ... but a tiny bit of searching reveals that the company that produces it has recently claimed to have found twice as much of it underground as it previously thought, so exhaustion looks a long way off on that one.

My economics aren't great, but I'm somewhat suspicious of the argument that a decline in supply will generate an increase in price until the demand balances supply, thus rationing the remaining supply essentially indefinitely. Mainly because this presumes a free-ish market operating, and that is just not the case universally. So it seems likely to me that some things must have been destroyed completely.

Come to think of it, though, this is a tricky thing to happen in a complete sense since it's hard to destroy non-living things. Metals, for instance, are rarely destroyed: they are 'consumed' in the economic sense, but the actual metal doesn't get used up. (Except in still-rare circumstances involving nuclear reactors or particle accelerators.) The metal just becomes uneconomic to extract in to re-usable form at current prices: it's entirely possible that at some future point when the stuff in the ground runs out the price will rise and it'll be worthwhile to extract metals from landfill or whatever.

Even something like lapis lazuli isn't actually destroyed when ground up and used for paint - it just gets spread out thinly on canvas, making it uneconomic to gather together again. If people valued it highly enough to destroy pre-C19th art to get it, it's there for the taking.

But that's quibbling, I think: there is plenty of lapis lazuli still in the ground, and metal ores aren't running out neither. I think I'd accept something where the primary in-the-ground version had effectively been used up. But I can't think of any examples. It's entirely conceivable that it'd happen to oil - hence the Peak Oil fuss - but regardless of your view on whether we've passed the peak of oil production or not, nobody is arguing it has actually run out already.

"I can't think of any examples" is a pretty rubbish piece of evidence that something doesn't happen. Can any of you lot think of any? I could at least move to "a lot of smart people can't think of any examples" which is a shade better.