Erich Walter Zimmermann (July 31, 1888 – February 16, 1961) was a resource economist.
[2] Unlike traditional descriptive inventories, Zimmermann's method offered a synthetic assessment of the human, cultural, and natural factors that determine resource availability.
Resources are not known, fixed things; they are what humans employ to service wants at a given time.
To Zimmermann (1933, 3; 1951, 14), only human "appraisal" turns the "neutral stuff" of the earth into resources.
"[4] "According to the definition of ew Zimmerman, the word ,"resource " does not refer to a thing but to a function which a thing may perform to an operation in which it may take part,namely,the function or operation of attaining a given end such a satisfying a want.