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… is from page xxxii of the 2003 Third Edition of economic historian Eric Jones’s 1981 book, The European Miracle [2]:
Resources are a function of the available technology, and have no economic meaning until a technology has been invented to employ them. The North American Indians knew about oil but had no conception or means of using it as petroleum.
DBx: Yes. Resources (as opposed to raw materials) are created and produced by human ingenuity. And so because human creativity is open-ended, the notion that there is a fixed amount of resources on earth, or even in any region of earth, is economically mistaken. See the work of the late, great Julian Simon [3].
Pictured here is one of the oil-drilling rigs erected by Edwin Drake [4].