The Natural Resource Curse

ABC News

Imagine being marked for control simply because of the resource lying beneath your feet. That your existence as a resource-rich nation makes you a target. That your land is valuable in a way your people are not.

This is not a thought experiment. This is Venezuela.

Venezuela sits atop the largest oil reserves in the world, a geological fact that has shaped its political fate for decades Rather than providing stability or security, this abundance has invited sanctions, isolation, and persistent threats of U.S. intervention. The story is usually told in the language of democracy, corruption, or drug enforcement. But beneath these shifting justifications lies a far more consistent driver: oil. This is not an argument for oil. Oil is not a virtue or a solution; it is simply there. Yet, its presence alone is enough to warrant the forceful and hostile takeover of an entire country.

Click to enlarge.

The natural resource curse is often described as an unfortunate paradox. Countries rich in natural resources tend to experience slower economic growth and higher levels of conflict. Economists often frame it as a governance problem, an internal failure to manage abundance responsibly. But this framing obscures a critical truth and misplaces blame. Resource curses are not natural phenomena. They are produced, and they require external demand, global markets, and deliberate actors willing to enforce exploitation. According to Harvard’s Center for International Development, resource-rich countries often become locked into extractive economic structures that increase vulnerability to political pressure rather than resilience.

The United States plays a central role in this system. While presenting itself as a defender of democracy and environmental progress, U.S. foreign policy has repeatedly aligned with resource interests. Venezuela’s oil has made it strategically important even as fossil fuels are more consistently framed as environmentally dangerous. This contradiction sits at the heart of modern environmental politics. We acknowledge that oil accelerates climate collapse, yet treat access to it as a matter of national security. Recent U.S. actions toward Venezuela make this tension impossible to ignore. Sanctions targeting Venezuela’s oil sector have been framed as tools to pressure political leadership, but their environmental and humanitarian consequences are profound. Economic collapse pushes people toward informal mining, deforestation, and environmentally destructive survival strategies. Environmental degradation often becomes collateral damage from geopolitical pressure.

What bothers me the most is how rarely environmental value is discussed in these conversations. Land is valued for what can be extracted from it, not for its ecological function or the communities it sustains. Forests become a potential revenue. Rivers become infrastructure. Oil becomes leverage. When sanctions or military pressure destabilize a region, the resulting environmental harm is treated as incidental rather than structural. This is not unique to Venezuela, but Venezuela exposes the logic clearly. The country’s oil wealth renders it incapable of neutrality. To exist with valuable resources is to invite intervention.

There is something deeply unsettling about claiming to value the environment while overlooking the systems that destroy it abroad. We speak urgently about climate change while refusing to criticize foreign policies that reinforce extractive dependency. We mourn ecological collapse while ignoring the conditions that accelerate it. This is not just hypocrisy; it’s representative of a worldview that treats nature as a resource first and a living system second.

To truly value the environment would be treat abundance for what it is. Oil as neither something to be demonized nor coveted. Nothing more than the remains of ancient marine plankton. In such a world, resource-rich land would be protected, not militarized, and environmental stewardship would not stop at national borders. Venezuela reveals a failure of diplomacy and an even greater failure of imagination. A world that punishes abundance cannot build sustainability. A system that treats natural wealth as a trigger for control rather than care is fundamentally incompatible with environmental ethics.

Escaping the natural resource curse requires more than cleaner energy or better institutions. It requires a reform of how value itself is defined. Not what land can produce for global markets, but what it sustains. For the United States, that means confronting our own history of colonialism and imperialism disguised as concern. As long as the American ideology prioritizes energy-militarization over humanity and natural systems, abundance will remain dangerous. Countries like Venezuela will continue to pay the price for what lies beneath their soil. Personally, I’m sick of watching textbook examples of American imperialism play out in real time.

Rachel Carson National Environmental Leadership Fellow Symone Franks

Symone is a first-year Master’s student at the University of Colorado Boulder where she is a member of the Equal Water Lab conducting research at the intersection of environmental justice, water quality, and emerging contaminants. She earned her Bachelor’s degree in Earth and Environmental Science with a minor in Sustainability from the University of Missouri Kansas City. As an undergraduate, she was recognized as Honors Student of the Year for her graduating class and was awarded both the Marion Bloch Scholar and KC Scholar distinctions for her academic excellence and leadership.