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Technological changes which accompanied the
increased pace of production of the recent past,
particularly of the last hundred years, again revolu
tionized production by allowing some of these natural
processes to be bypassed. Where once other living
things performed an intermediate kind of processing,
they could be replaced in many instances and resort made
more directly to minerals themselves. Men learned to
use fertilizer to enrich the soil rather than wait
for natural processes to accomplish the act. Still
later, animals, too, were bypassed and fertilizers
were produced by artificial means. In the case of
energy, wood, wind, and water came to be supplanted by
coal and other fossil fuels. Men availed themselves of
the stored energy of ages at a rapid pace. Productive
processes were accelerated, changed, and made more
complex as structural materials such as iron were
obtained at a rate greatly exceeding nature's slow,
painstaking production of wood.
Increased knowledge of the physical world
allowed men to address themselves more directly to
nature, to bypass some natural bottlenecks and to
exploit virgin stores of minerals. Thus, the nature
of things that could be thought of as resources
changed as did the types of final products that could
be made, the ways in which production could be