Think back to Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776), which identified three primary business inputs: labor, capital, and land (defined broadly as any resource that can be produced or mined from land or disposed of as waste on it). The two industrial revolutions the world has thus far seen focused primarily on labor and capital. The first gave us factories and limited-liability corporations to drive growth at scale. The second, from the late 1800s to the early 1900s, added petroleum, the electric grid, the assembly line, cars, and skyscrapers with elevators and air-conditioning, and it created scientific management, thus enabling corporate globalization. But neither revolution focused on Smith’s third input: land and natural resources.
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