APES Chapter 1 & 24
3 major cultural changes have occurred:
1) Agricultural Revolution (10000-12000 yrs. ago) 2) Industrial- Medical Revolution (275 years ago) 3) Information- Globalization Revolution (50 yrs. ago) Each of these three cultural changes gave us more energy and new technologies with which to alter and control more of the planet to meet our basic needs and increasing wants. They also allowed expansion of the human population, mostly because of increased food supplies and longer life spans. In addition, they each resulted in greater resource use, pollution, and environmental degradation as they allowed us to dominate the planet and expand our ecological footprints.
Pollutants can have 3 types of unwanted effects:
1) They can disrupt or degrade life-support systems for humans and other species. 2) They can damage wildlife, human health, and property. 3) They can create nuisances such as noise and unpleasant smells, tastes, and sights.
Species
A group of organisms that have a unique set of characteristics that distinguish them from all other organisms and, for organisms that reproduce sexually, can mate and produce fertile offspring. For example, all humans are members of a species that biologists have named Homo sapiens sapiens.
Renewable Resource
A resource that takes anywhere from a few days to a few hundred years to replenish through natural processes. However, we must hope that we do not use up the resource before it has naturally replenished itself.
Ecosystem
A set of organisms within a defined area or volume that interact with one another and with their environment of nonliving matter and energy. For example, a forest ecosystem consists of plants (especially trees), animals, and tiny microorganisms that decompose organic materials and recycle their chemicals, all interacting with one another and with solar energy and the chemicals in the ecosystem's air, water, and soil.
Environmentally Sustainable Society
A society that meets the current and future basic resource needs of its people in a just and equitable manner without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their basic needs. According to most environmental scientists, our ultimate goal should be to achieve an environmentally sustainable society. Protect your capital and live on the income it provides. Deplete or waste your capital and you will move from a sustainable to an unsustainable lifestyle.
Pollution
Any presence within the environment of a chemical or other agent, such as noise or heat at a level that is harmful to the health, survival, or activities of humans or other organisms. Pollutants can enter the environment naturally or through human activities. There are two main types of pollutants: biodegradable and nondegradable pollutants.
Resource
Anything that we can obtain from the environment to meet our needs and wants. Some resources are directly available for us to use, others we have to actually locate and work before it becomes available. For example, petroleum used to be just an oily fluid until we learned how to extract it and turn it into gasoline, heating oil, and other projects.
Recycle
Collecting waste materials and processing them into new materials. However, we cannot recycle energy sources such as oil and coal; once burned, their concentrated energy is no longer available to us.
Environment
Everything around us, or as the famous physicist Albert Einstein put it, "The environment is everything that isn't me." It includes the living and the nonliving things (air, water, and energy) with which we interact in a complex web of relationships that connect us to one another and to the world we live in. Despite our many scientific and technological advances, we are utterly dependent on the environment for clean air and water, food, shelter, energy, and everything else we need to stay alive and healthy. As a result, we are part of, and not apart from, the rest of nature.
The Environmental Wisdom Worldview
Holds that we are part of, and dependent on, nature and that nature exists for all species, not just for us. According to this view, our success depends on learning how life on earth sustains itself and integrating such environmental wisdom into the ways we think and act.
Stewardship Worldview
Holds that we can and should manage the earth for our benefit, but that we have an ethical responsibility to be caring and responsible managers, or stewards, of the earth. It says we should encourage environmentally beneficial forms of economic growth and development and discourage environmentally harmful forms.
Pollution Cleanup OR Output Pollution Control
Involves cleaning up or diluting pollutants after we have produced them. There are some problems with this though. First, it's only a temporary bandage, second, it often removes a pollutant from one part of the environment but then causes it in another part of the environment. Third, it costs a lot of money!
Second Component of Sustainability
Is to recognize that many human activities can degrade natural capital by using normally renewable resources faster than nature can restore them, and by overloading natural systems with pollution and wastes. For example, in some parts of the world, we are clearing mature forests much faster than they can grow back, eroding topsoil faster than nature can renew it, and withdrawing groundwater that was stored for thousands of years faster than nature can replenish it.
Environmental Worldview
Is your set of assumptions and values reflecting how you think the world works and what you think your role in the world should be. Consciously or unconsciously, we base most of our actions on our worldviews.
What is an environmentally sustainable society?
Living sustainably means living off the earth's natural income without depleting or degrading the natural capital that supplies it.
Organisms
Living things. Every organism is a member of a certain species
What are three principles of sustainability?
Nature has sustained itself for billions of years by relying on solar energy, biodiversity, and nutrient/chemical cycling. In other words, rely on the sun, promote multiple options for life, and reduce waste. Our lives and economies depend on energy from the sun and on natural resources and natural services (natural capital) provided by the earth.
Natural Services
Processes in nature, such as purification of water/air and the renewal of topsoil, which support life and human economies.
Nonrenewable Resources
Resources that exist in a fixed quantity or stock in the earth's crust. We deplete these resources faster than we can restore them.
Environmental Science
Science, an interdisciplinary study of how humans interact with the living and nonliving parts of their environment. It integrates information and ideas from the natural sciences such as biology, chemistry, and geology; the social sciences such as geography, economics, and political science; and the humanities such as philosophy and ethics. The three goals of environmental science are to learn how nature works, to understand how we interact with the environment, and to find ways to deal with environmental problems and to live more sustainably.
Gross Domestic Product (GDP)
The annual market value of all goods and services produced by all businesses, foreign and domestic, operating within a country.
Per Capita Ecological Footprint
The average ecological footprint of an individual in a given country or area. Basically an estimate of how much of the earth's renewable resources an individual consumes.
Ecology
The biological science that studies how organisms interact with one another and with their environment.
Sustainability
The capacity of the earth's natural systems and human cultural systems to survive, flourish, and adapt to changing environmental conditions into the very long-term future. It is about people caring enough to pass on a better world to all the generations to come.
Reliance on Chemical/Nutrient Cycling
The circulation of chemicals from the environment (mostly water and soil) through organisms and back to the environment. This process is essential for life. Natural processes keep the cycle going, and the earth receives no new supplies of these chemicals. Without chemical cycling, there would be no air, no soil, no water, no food, no life!
Three potential ecological tipping points that we now face:
The collapse of certain populations of fish due to overfishing; premature extinction of many species resulting from humans over hunting them or reducing their habitats; and long-term climate change caused in part by the burning of oil and coal, which emits gases into the atmosphere that cause it to warm more rapidly than it would without such emissions.
Environmental Degradation OR Natural Capital Degradation
The entire process of us humans living unsustainably by wasting, depleting, and degrading the earth's natural capital at an accelerating rate.
Sustainable Yield
The highest rate at which we can use a renewable resource indefinitely without reducing its available supply
Natural Capital
The natural resources and natural services that keep us and other forms of life alive and support our human economies. Natural capital can support the earth's diversity of species as long as we use its natural services and resources in a sustainable fashion. Natural Capital= natural resources + natural services
Natural Income
The renewable resources such as plants, animals, and soil provided by the earth's natural capital. Living sustainably means living on natural income. capital. It also means not depleting or degrading the earth's natural capital, which supplies this income, and providing the human population with adequate and equitable access to this natural capital and natural income for the foreseeable future.
Economic Development
An effort to use economic growth to improve living standards.
Economic Growth
An increase in a nation's output of goods and services. Usually measured by the GDP of a country.
How are our ecological footprints affecting the earth?
As our ecological footprints grow, we are depleting and degrading more of the earth's natural capital.
Where does Sustainability Begin?
At local and personal levels!!
Trade-offs
Basically compromises :)
Environmental Ethics
Beliefs about what is right and wrong with how we treat the environment, are an important element in our worldviews. People with widely differing environmental worldviews can take the same data, be logically consistent with it, and arrive at quite different conclusions because they start with different assumptions and moral, ethical, or religious beliefs.
Nondegradable Pollutants
Harmful chemicals that natural processes cannot break down. Examples are toxic chemicals like lead and mercury.
Biodegradable Pollutants
Harmful materials that natural processes can break down overtime. Examples are newspaper and sewage.
I= P x A x T
Impact = Population x Affluence x Technology In the early 1970s, scientists Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren developed a simple model showing how population size (P), affluence, or resource consumption per person (A), and the beneficial and harmful environmental effects of technologies (T) help to determine the environmental impact (I) of human activities.
Why do we have environmental problems?
Major causes of environmental problems are population growth, wasteful and unsustainable resource use, poverty, and the exclusion of environmental costs of resource use from the market prices of goods and services.
Social Capital
Making the shift to more sustainable societies and economies includes building what sociologists call social capital. This involves getting people with different views and values to talk and listen to one another, to find common ground based on understanding and trust, and to work together to solve environmental and other problems facing our societies.
Tragedy of the Commons
Many common-property and open-access renewable resources have been degraded. In 1968, biologist Garrett Hardin called such degradation the tragedy of the commons. It occurs because each user of a shared common resource or open-access resource reasons, "If I do not use this resource, someone else will. The little bit that I use or pollute is not enough to matter, and anyway, it's a renewable resource." When the number of users is small, this logic works. Eventually, however, the cumulative effect of many people trying to exploit a shared resource can degrade it and eventually exhaust or ruin it. Then no one can benefit from it. Such degradation threatens our ability to ensure the long-term economic and environmental sustainability of open-access resources such as the atmosphere or fish species in the ocean. There are two major ways to deal with this difficult problem. One is to use a shared renewable resource at a rate well below its estimated sustainable yield by using less of the resource, regulating access to the resource, or doing both. The other way is to convert open-access renewable resources to private ownership. The reasoning is that if you own something, you are more likely to protect your investment.
Sustainability Revolution
Many environmental scientists and other analysts now call for a fourth major cultural change in this century. This cultural transformation would involve learning how to reduce our ecological footprints and to live more sustainably.
Natural Resources
Materials and energy in nature that are essential or helpful to humans. Classified as either nonrenewable (copper, oil, coal, etc.) or renewable (air, water, soil, wind, etc.).
Per Capita GDP
Measures the changes in the economic growth per person. GDP/total population at midyear
Exponential Growth
Occurs when a quantity such as the human population increases at a fixed percentage per unit of time, such as 2% per year. Exponential growth starts off slowly. But eventually, it causes the quantity to double again and again. After only a few doublings, it grows to enormous numbers because each doubling is twice the total of all earlier growth. The exponential rate of global population growth has declined some since 1963. Even so, in 2010, we added about 83 million more people to the earth—an average of a about 227,000 people per day.
Poverty
Occurs when people are unable to fulfill their basic needs for adequate food, water, shelter, health, and education. According to a 2008 study by the World Bank, 1.4 billion people—one of every five people on the planet and almost five times the number of people in the United States—live in extreme poverty and struggle to live on the equivalent of less than $1.25 a day. Poverty causes a number of harmful environmental and health effects.
Pollution Prevention OR Input Pollution Control
Reduces or eliminates the production of pollutants.
Point Sources
Single, identifiable sources. For example, the smokestack of a coal-burning power or industrial plant.
Non-Point Sources
Sources of pollutants that are dispersed and often difficult to identify. For example, pesticides that are blown from the land into the air or the runoff into rivers of fertilizers and other things.
The Planetary Management Worldview
States that we are separate from and in charge of nature, that nature exists mainly to meet our needs and increasing wants, and that we can use our ingenuity and technology to manage the earth's life-support systems, mostly for our benefit, indefinitely.
Ecological Footprint
The amount of biologically productive land and water needed to provide the people in a particular country or area with an indefinite supply of renewable resources and to absorb and recycle the wastes and pollution produced by such resource use. Concept was created by William Rees and Mathis Wackernagel.
Reliance on Solar Energy
The sun warms the planet and supports photosynthesis—a complex chemical process used by plants to provide the nutrients, or chemicals that most organisms need in order to stay alive and reproduce. Without the sun, there would be no plants, no animals, and no food. The sun also powers indirect forms of solar energy such as wind and flowing water, which we can use
Private Property
The type of resource/property right where individuals or companies own the rights to land, minerals, or other resources.
Open-access Renewable Resources
The type of resource/property right where no one owns them and they are available for use by anyone at little to no charge. Examples of such shared renewable resources include the atmosphere, underground water supplies, and the open ocean and its marine life.
Common Property
The type of resource/property right where the rights to certain resources are held by large groups of individuals. For example, roughly one-third of the land in the United States is owned jointly by all U.S. citizens and held and managed for them by the government.
Topsoil
The upper layer of any soil in which plants can grow. It provides the nutrients that support plants, animals, and microorganisms living on land.
Reuse
Using the same resource over and over in the same form.
Reliance on Biodiversity
This refers to the great variety of organisms, the natural systems in which they exist and interact, and the natural services that these organisms provide free of charge (renewal of top soil, pest control, and air and water purification). Biodiversity also provides numerous ways for life to adapt to changing environmental conditions. Without it, most life would have failed to survive long ago.
Threshold Level OR Ecological Tipping Point
Time delays can allow an environmental problem to build slowly until it reaches a threshold level, or ecological tipping point, which causes an often irreversible shift in the behavior of a natural system.
Affluence
Wealth or an abundance of money
Perpetual Resource
When a resource's supply is continuous and expected to last about 6 billion years. Solar energy is an example.
