In the old game where one had to guess someobject by asking no more than 20 questions, the first was often“animal, vegetable, or mineral?” Minerals have made America therichest nation on earth, and it is minerals that will keep it aheadof the rest of the world in the 21st century.

Obviously minerals are not our only natural resource: There areour more than 300 million Americans with skills and talents inhundreds of thousands of areas. Therefore it could be said thatpeople are perhaps our greatest resource. Animals—both in the wildand domestic—are resources for food, clothing, even fertilizer.Then there are our vegetable resources, not only agriculturalproducts produced on farms, but also millions of acres of timber,grasslands and shoreline plants that are nurseries for fish andother seafood. What would our world be like without songbirds orgame birds, or just plain old chickens? Each is a resource forsomething.

The Midwest and Mines

The first mine I ever entered as a child was a zinc mine inMissouri. It was “played out” but was still used as a touristattraction for those brave enough to ride down a few hundred feetinto the ground in what was basically a big tin can on a rope.Since then, I have been fascinated with mining, and have visitedsome of the largest ones in the country. My home town of Clevelandis built over a salt mine. Salt wells lined the Lake Erie shorelineeast of Cleveland. South and west of Cleveland were sandstonequarries, some of the deepest in the world. West of that part ofOhio the sandstone gave way to limestone, gypsum and dolomitequarries. On one venture, I watched a long boat (ships on the GreatLakes are called boats) being loaded with gypsum and limestone. Thenext day, I found the same boat cruising up the Cuyahoga River to asteel mill.

Iron and Oil

John D. Rockefeller was a vegetable merchant (probably sellingvegetable oil) when Drake discovered oil in Pennsylvania. The siteis now a historic park, and the story of Standard Oil is part ofthe story of America. Oil and gas are still produced in Ohio,Pennsylvania, and elsewhere in the nation. Coal is a major mineralasset. For my “History of American Transportation” course at EmoryUniversity's Osher Institute, one of the questions I ask on theinitial quiz is what four types of coal are produced in America.Most guess it is anthracite, bituminous, and a few even get tosub-bituminous, but most forget lignite. Train-loads ofmetallurgical coal arrive daily at ports such as Norfolk forshipment to foreign steel mills.

Iron ore in our Missabe Range and Northern Michigan is stillmined and shipped, but not to the same degree as in the early tomid-20th century when ore boats from Duluth, Houghton, and Superiorjammed the Great Lakes each season to keep the steel mills ofNorthern Indiana, Ohio and Pittsburgh going. Now the best ore isshipped by rail out of Northern Labrador in Canada and sent by shipto transfer points.

Open pit copper mines still dot the West from Montana to NewMexico and Arizona. The list of metals and minerals, from lithiumto cobalt produced in the U.S. is almost endless. On one trip backin the early 1950s I got to see the nickel mines in and aroundCoppercliff, Ontario.

Gold and 'The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of'

It wasn't gold that led to that famous line from Humphrey Bogartin The Maltese Falcon, but many a man has spent his life trying tofind it. It was the discovery of gold in the hills of North Georgiathat led Andrew Jackson to decree that all Cherokee in the stateshould move to Oklahoma on the “Trail of Tears” that cost so manylives. But what awaited them in Oklahoma? It was oil, which was—andstill is—better than gold in many ways.

According to Jonathan Fahey of the Associated Press inan October 24, 2012, article, U.S. production of oil may soonexceed that of Saudi Arabia. Fahey reports that “U.S. production ofcrude and other liquid hydrocarbons is on track to rise sevenpercent [in 2012] to an average of 10.9 million barrels per day.”He continues, “The Energy Department forecasts that U.S. productionof crude and other liquid hydrocarbons, which includes bio-fuels,will average 11.4 million barrels per day [in 2013]. That would bea record for the U.S., and just below Saudi Arabia's output of 11.6million barrels.”

Not only is coal production up in the Powder River Basin, butnatural gas is becoming so plentiful that the price per unit isdropping. But is there still “gold in them thar hills”? You bet;gold and silver mining is also on the increase, along with othervaluable minerals. Gold, of course, is still being prospected.Tourists can still pan for it in places like Juneau, Alaska, orDahlonega, Georgia. Just don't plan your retirement on what you'llfind.

The Hazards of Fracking

The increase in oil and gas production is due largely to newermethods of drilling for it, called fracking. It involves drillingholes deep into the earth, often far below where oil had alreadybeen depleted and at angles to the surface, pumping in some type ofhydraulic fluid, and putting pressure on the fluid to split open orfracture the layers of rock underneath to allow the oil and gas toflow to the pump, where it is pumped out after the hydraulic fluidis removed. Therein lies an environmental issue—the fluids used canbe toxic, and can get into the water table, polluting it. Water isitself a valuable natural resource, and if it is polluted, it isbasically an irreplaceable loss. There is further exposure when thetoxic fluid is being transported to or from the wells. (You canread more about fracking liability and potential exposures in thismonth's cover story, which begins on page 16.)

Much of the Canadian oil that became such an issue in the 2012Presidential campaign is produced in Northern Alberta by fracking,or from processing of oil shale. The fuss was over the President'shalting of a pipeline to transport Canadian oil from the borderacross the Midwest to Houston. Environmentalists warned that a leakcould devastate the only real source of water in much of theMidwest, an underground aquifer with millions of gallons of cleanwater in it. One solution would be to build a new refinery in NorthDakota where the oil arrives in the U.S.

We need more refining capacity anyway. After all, pipelines havebeen known to break and spill; there have been a number of spillsor leaks on the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, including one in May of 2010of more than 5,000 barrels of crude. According to the AnchorageDaily News it was the third worst spill on the pipeline, butother spills of lesser amounts are not uncommon.

'Water Everywhere, but Not a Drop to Drink'

The sea, of course, is full of water, but we can't drink itwithout desalination. Most people flying coast to coast sit intheir tight little airline seats and read, watch a movie, or playwith their I-things. If they were to look out the window as theytravel over much of the Midwest, Colorado and Texas, they would seebig green circles. These are irrigated plots of crops, and thecircle is the result of the moving water distributor that makes a360-degree trip frequently to keep the crop growing.

The water comes from wells deep into the aquifer—the sameaquifer where local towns get their drinking water, and the sameaquifer that environmentalists fear could end up being polluted.Yes, there are annual floods on Midwestern rivers, the Red, theMissouri and its tributaries, and occasionally even the Arkansas.However, the other rivers—the Cimarron, Canadian, Rio Grande or thePecos—are often little more than dry creek beds. So much water isdrawn from the Colorado as it separates Arizona from Californiathat by the time it reaches Yuma there is only a trickle of waterleft.

Wars have been fought over water—and as the supply dwindles, oris polluted, wars will be fought again. Farmer Adams messes withhis creek; Farmer B sues him. It's the stuff of cowboy movies; onlyin the movies Farmer B shoots Adams.

The Great Drought of 2012 rivaled the Dust Bowl of the 1930s,but of course, there are politicians who don't believe in GlobalWarming. To many it is not a scientific issue, suggested theproducers of a PBS Frontline feature, it is strictly apolitical one. It does not matter to the seaside housing developerthat 98 percent of climate scientists predict a 37-inch increase insea level by 2030 or so—a few politically motivated scientists callthat prediction hogwash.

But will there be enough water to wash a hog in 2030? Thatdepends on how well the natural resource of water is managed.Already hooboos—the Arabic name for a sand or dust storm—havedamaged homes in Arizona and Oklahoma. My wife and I drove throughone back in the 1980s in Northwestern Texas, and they are notfun.

The dust collects as silt in streams and rivers, and is trappedby dams on those rivers that form reservoirs to preserve water.While oil and gas production may increase, water production islimited, and what now exists must be carefully preserved.

“CO² Is Plant Food!”

The Frontline feature on global warming filmed onepolitician proclaiming that the government's attack on carbondioxide was a waste of government money, because, he maintained,carbon dioxide is not a poison; it is absorbed by trees and plants.Yes, trees and plants do absorb CO², but we're cutting down thetrees and rain forests that used to absorb all the excess gas, andnow it's floating up into the atmosphere and doing harm.

So one political party talks about green energy (wind, water,solar, and maybe even nuclear). Meanwhile, the other suggests thatwe have adequate energy sources in coal, gas and oil. Well, we do,but unless the power plants that use those hydrocarbons addexpensive “scrubbers” on their smoke stacks to capture and securethe CO², then we are slowly killing ourselves.

One issue is what to do with the carbon dioxide that iscaptured. It is a gas, and if it is stored underground, it couldleak out and poison whole neighborhoods. Hopefully some smartuniversity scientist will come up with a way to break carbondioxide down into ­carbon and oxygen, and solve the problem. Afterall, a diamond is nothing but pure carbon, compressed underpressure and heat. Hmm. Maybe we can turn the gas intodiamonds.

National Parks and Treasures

The U.S. Department of Interior is in charge of our nationalparks, monuments, and unowned wilderness. Some of that wildernessis leased to corporations to mine or drill for oil—often becoming apolitical issue—but it is a potential resource of money for thegovernment if the rent were to keep pace with reality. In a tighteconomy, government money customarily allocated to our parks islikely to be reduced in order to pay for the deficit. It's notunfathomable that the parks could one day be leased to privatecorporations to operate, and the park ranger will become some sortof private security guard. In 2012, Yosemite National Park made thenews because of an outbreak of the hanta virus, a rodent-borndisease. Yosemite was one of the first parks to have some privateoperations. Whether there is, or was, a connection is stillunknown.

The National Park Service operates hundreds of sites that fewwould consider “national treasures.” Last fall, my wife and Ivisited the Portage site where canal boats were once hauled up amountain by cable and lowered to the other side—a national treasuremaintained by the Park Service. It involved John Roebling and theinvention of steel cable. We then drove to Shanksville,Pennsylvania, to the site of where United Flight 93 crashed, as itsheroic passengers prevented the terrorists who had taken over theairliner from crashing it into the Capitol. It, too, wasestablished and manned by the Park Service. The entire CumberlandCanal Parkway is another federal park project, as are hundreds oflarge and small historic sites. These are part of our nationalresources infrastructure, and must be carefully maintained andmanned for their survival.

Whether we protect and restore our natural resources or exploitthem to the point of extinction will depend on whether childrenborn after 2001 will have a fair shot at a safe and prosperousfuture. It is certainly possible, but whether or not it is probabledepends on many current politically complex factors.