Our Environment: the Sum Total of Our Surroundings

I. Our environ workforcet is the sum total of our bugings A photograph of priming coat reveals a heavy(p) deal, unless it does non convey the complexity of our environs. Our environment (a term that comes from the French environner, to surround) is much than weewee system, land, and air it is the sum total of our surroundings. It includes alone of the biotic factors, or living things, with which we interact. It also includes the abiotic factors, or nonliving things, with which we interact.Our environment includes the continents, oceans, clouds, and ice caps you toilet see in the photo of Earth from space, as good as the animals, plants, forests, and farms that comprise the landscapes around us. In a more than inclusive sense, it also encom heades our built environment, the structures, ur toss away centers, and living spaces clements have created. In its intimately inclusive sense, our environment also includes the complex webs of scientific, ethical, political, economic , and amicable relationships and institutions that shape our daily lives.From day to day, hoi polloi around commonly use the term environment in the first, narrow senseof a non adult male or indwelling orbit a start out from homo community. This connotation is unfortunate, because it masks the very important fact that humans exist within the environment and argon a part of nature. As one of galore(postnominal) an(prenominal) species of animals on Earth, we shargon with others the same dependence on a levelheaded functioning planet. The limitations of language make it all too easy to speak of plurality and nature, or human society and the environment, as though they be separate and do not interact.However, the fundamental insight of environmental cognition is that we are part of the natural world and that our interactions with other parts of it matter a great deal. II. Environmental science explores interactions between humans and our environment Appreciating how we i nteract with our environment is crucial for a well-inform view of our place in the world and for a mature awareness that we are one species among many on a planet full of life.Understanding our relationship with the environment is also vital because we are mend the very natural systems we need, in government agencys we do not yet fully comprehend. We depend absolutely on our environment for air, water, food, shelter, and everything else essential for living. However, our actions modify our environment, whether we intend them to or not. umteen of these actions have enriched our lives, trifleing us longer life spans, better health, and greater material wealth, mobility, and leisure time. However, these improvements have often degraded the natural systems that sustain us.Impacts much(prenominal)(prenominal) as air and water pollution, soil erosion, and species extinction can compromise human well-being, pose risks to human life, and threaten our ability to build a society that wil l survive and exposit in the long term. The elements of our environment were functioning long before the human species appeared, and we would be wise to defecate that we need to keep these elements in place. Environmental science is the study of how the natural world works, how our environment be actives us, and how we affect our environment.We need to understand our interactions with our environment because such companionship is the essential first step toward devising solutions to our roughly pressing environmental problems. Many environmental scientists are taking this next step, trying to apply their friendship to develop solutions to the many environmental challenges we face. It can be daunting to reflect on the sheer order of magnitude of environmental dilemmas that confront us today, but with these problems also come countless opportunities for devising creative solutions.The topics canvas by environmental scientists are the most centrally important issues to our world and its future. Right now, global conditions are changing more quickly than ever. Right now, through science, we as a civilization are micturateing knowledge more rapidly than ever. And right now, the window of opportunity for acting to solve problems is still open. With such plentiful challenges and opportunities, this particular moment in history is indeed an exciting time to be studying environmental science. III. Natural imagerys are vital to our survivalAn island by definition is finite and bounded, and its inhabitants must cope with limitations in the materials they need. On our island, Earth, human beings, like all living things, ultimately face environmental constraints. Specifically, there are limits to many of our natural resources, the various substances and energy sources we need to survive. Natural resources that are virtually unlimited or that are replenished over short periods are known as renewable natural resources. almost renewable resources, such as sunlight, wind, and wave energy, are perpetually uncommitted.Others, such as timber, food crops, water, and soil, renew themselves over months, years, or decades, if we are careful not to use them up too quickly or destructively. In contrast, resources such as mineral ores and crude oil are in finite supply and are formed much more slowly than we use them. These are known as nonrenewable natural resources. one time we use them up, they are no longer available. We can view the renewability of natural resources as a continuum (Figure 1. 1). Some renewable resources whitethorn turn nonrenewable if we overuse them.For example, overpumping groundwater can deplete underground aquifers and turn a lush landscape into a desert. Populations of animals and plants we harvest from the wild may be renewable if we do not overharvest them but may vanish if we do. In recent years, our consumption of natural resources has increased greatly, driven by rising affluence and the produce of the largest human un iverse in history. IV. Human population growth has do our relationship with natural resources For nearly all of human history, only a few million people populated Earth at any one time.Although former(prenominal) populations cannot be calculated precisely, Figure 1. 2 gives some idea of just how recently and suddenly our population has grown beyond 6 jillion people. Two phenomena triggered remarkable increases in population size. The first was our transition from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to an agricultural way of life. This change began to occur around 10,000 years ago and is known as the agricultural novelty. As people began to grow their own crops, raise domestic animals, and live sedentary lives in villages, they found it easier to meet their nutritionary needs.As a result, they began to live longer and to produce more children who survived to adulthood. The second notable phenomenon, known as the industrial revolution, began in the mid-1700s. It entailed a shift from rur al life, animal-powered agriculture, and manufacturing by craftsmen, to an urban society powered by fogey fuels (nonrenewable energy sources, such as oil, coal, and natural gas, produced by the decomposition and fossilization of antiquated life). The industrial revolution introduced improvements in sanitation and medical technology, and it enhanced agricultural production with fossil-fuel-powered equipment and synthetic fertilizer.Thomas Malthus and population growth At the outset of the industrial revolution in England, population growth was regarded as a good thing. For parents, high school birth rates meant more children to support them in old age. For society, it meant a greater pool of get the picture for factory work. British economist Thomas Malthus (17661834) had a disaccordent opinion. Malthus claimed that unless population growth were controlled by laws or other social strictures, the sum of people would outgrow the available food supply until starvation, war, or si ckness arose and reduced the population (Figure 1. ). Malthuss most influential work, An Essay on the Principle of Population, published in 1798, argued that a growing population would eventually be checked either by limits on births or increases in deaths. If limits on births (such as abstinence and contraception) were not implemented soon enough, Malthus wrote, deaths would increase through famine, plague, and war. Malthuss thinking was shaped by the rapid urbanization and industrialization he witnessed during the early years of the industrial revolution, but debates over his views continue today.As we will see in Chapter 8 and throughout this book, global population growth has indeed helped spawn famine, disease, and social and political competitiveness. However, increasing material prosperity has also helped bring down birth ratessomething Malthus did not foresee. capital of Minnesota Ehrlich and the population bomb In our day, biologist Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University has been called a neo-Malthusian because he too has warned that population growth will have disastrous effects on human welfare.In his 1968 book, The Population Bomb, Ehrlich predicted that the rapidly increasing human population would unleash widespread famine and conflict that would consume civilization by the end of the 20th century. Like Malthus, Ehrlich argued that population was growing much accelerated than our ability to produce and distribute food, and he maintained that population control was the only way to close out massive starvation and civil strife. Although human population nearly quadrupled in the past 100 yearsthe fastest it has ever grown (see Figure1. a)Ehrlichs predictions have not materialized on the scale he predicted. This is due, in part, to agricultural advances made in recent decades. As a result, Ehrlich and other neo-Malthusians have revised their predictions then and now warn of a postponed, but still impending, global crisis. V. Resource consumption exe rts social and environmental impacts Population growth affects resource availability and is unquestionably at the root of many environmental problems. However, the growth in consumption is also to blame.The industrial revolution enhanced the material affluence of many of the worlds people by considerably increasing our consumption of natural resources and manufactured goods. Garrett Hardin and the tragedy of the park The late Garrett Hardin of the University of California, Santa Barbara, disputed the economic theory that unfettered exercise of individual self-interest will coiffe the universal interest. According to Hardins best-known essay, The Tragedy of the Commons, published in the journal Science in 1968, resources that are open to unregulated exploitation will eventually be depleted.Hardin based his argument on a scenario described in a pamphlet published in 1833. In a public pasture, or common, that is open to unregulated grazing, Hardin argued, each person who grazes ani mals will be motivated to increase the number of his or her animals in the pasture. Ultimately, overgrazing will cause the pastures food production to collapse (Figure 1. 4). Because no single person owns the pasture, no one has incentive to expend effort taking care of it, and everyone takes what he or she can until the resource is depleted.Some have argued that private ownership can address this problem. Others point to cases in which people sharing a common resource have voluntarily organized and cooperated in enforcing its storyable use. Still others maintain that the dilemma justifies government regulation of the use of resources held in common by the public, from forests to tonic air to clean water. Weighing the issues The Tragedy of the Commons Imagine you make your living fishing for lobster. You are free to boat anywhere and set out as many traps as you like.Your harvests have been good, and vigor is stopping you from increasing the number of your traps. However, all th e other lobster fishers are thinking the same thing, and the fishing thou are getting crowded. Catches decline year by year, until one year the fishery crashes, leaving you and all the others with catches too meager to support your families. Some of your fellow fishers call for dividing the waters and selling access to individuals plot-by-plot. Others advocate the fishers to team up, set quotas among themselves, and prevent newcomers from entering the market.Still others are imploring the government to get involved and pass laws regulating how much fishers can catch. What do you think is the best way to combat this tragedy of the commonalty and restore the fishery? Why? Wackernagel, Rees, and the ecological footprint As global affluence has increased, human society has consumed more and more of the planets limited resources. We can quantify resource consumption development the concept of the ecological footprint, developed in the 1990s by environmental scientists Mathis Wackern agel and William Rees.The ecological footprint expresses the environmental impact of an individual or population in terms of the cumulative amount of land and water required to provide the raw materials the person or population consumes and to dispose of or recycle the fling off the person or population produces (Figure 1. 5). It measures the total amount of Earths surface used by a given person or population, once all direct and indirect impacts are come up. For humanity as a whole, Wackernagel and Rees have calculated that our species is using 30% more resources than are available on a sustainable basis from all the land on the planet.That is, we are depleting renewable resources 30% faster than they are being replenishedlike drawing the principal out of a bank account rather than living off the interest. Furthermore, people from wealthy nations have much larger ecological footprints than do people from forgetfuler nations. If all the worlds people consumed resources at the rat e of North Americans, these researchers concluded, we would need the eq of two additional planet Earths. VI.Environmental science can help us avoid mistakes made by past civilizations It remains to be seen whether the direst predictions of Malthus, Ehrlich, and others will come to pass for todays global society, but we already have historical evidence that civilizations can crumble when pressures from population and consumption overwhelm resource availability. Easter Island is the classic case (see The Science behind the Story), but it is not the only example. Many great civilizations have fallen after depleting resources from their environments, and each has left devastated landscapes in its wake.The Greek and Roman empires disposition evidence of such a trajectory, as do the Maya, the Anasazi, and other civilizations of the New World. Plato wrote of the deforestation and environmental debasement accompanying ancient Greek cities, and today further evidence is accumulating from r esearch by archaeologists, historians, and paleoecologists who study past societies and landscapes. The arid desolate of todays Middle Eastern countries were far more vegetated when the great ancient civilizations thrived there at that time these regions were lush enough to support the very origin of agriculture.While deforestation created deserts in temperate regions, in more tropical climates, the ancient cities of fallen civilizations became overgrown by jungle. The enormous stone monuments of the Angkor civilization in Southeast Asia, like those of the Maya in Mexico and Central America, remained unknown to Westerners until the 19th century, and most of these cities remain covered by rainforest. Researchers have learned enough by now, however, that scientist and author Jared Diamond in his 2005 book, Collapse, could synthesize this information and formulate sets of reasons why civilizations succeed and persist, or fail and collapse.Success and persistence, it turns out, depend largely on how societies interact with their environments. I. People set off in their perception of environmental problems Environmental science arose in the last mentioned half of the 20th century as people sought to better understand environmental problems and their origins. An environmental problem, stated simply, is any undesirable change in the environment. However, the perception of what constitutes an undesirable change may vary from one person or group of people to another, or from one context or power to another.A persons age, gender, class, race, nationality, employment, and educational background can all affect whether he or she considers a given environmental change to be a problem. For instance, todays industrial societies are more likely to view the spraying of the pesticide DDT as a problem than those societies viewed it in the 1950s, because today more is known about the health risks of pesticides (Figure 1. 6). At the same time, a person living today in a mala ria-infested village in Africa or India may welcome the use of DDT if it kills mosquitoes that transmit malaria, because malaria is viewed as a more immediate health threat.Thus an African and an American who have each knowledgeably assessed the pros and cons may, because of differences in their circumstances, differ in their judgment of DDTs severity as an environmental problem. Different types of people may also vary in their awareness of problems. For example, in many cultures women are responsible for collecting water and fuelwood. As a result, they are often the first to perceive environmental degradation affecting these resources, whereas men in the same area simply might not see the problem.As another example, in most societies information about environmental health risks tends to reach wealthy people more readily than poor people. Thus, who you are, where you live, and what you do can have a huge effect on how you perceive your environment, how you perceive and act to chan ge, and what impact those changes may have on how you live your life. In Chapter 2, we will examine the diversity of human values and philosophies and consider their effects on how we define environmental problems.II. Environmental science provides interdisciplinary solutions analyse and addressing environmental problems is a complex endeavor that requires expertness from many disciplines, including ecology, earth science, chemistry, biology, economics, political science, demography, ethics, and others. Environmental science is thus an interdisciplinary fieldone that borrows techniques from numerous disciplines and brings research results from these disciplines together into a broad deductive reasoning (Figure 1. 7).Traditional established disciplines are priceless because their scholars delve deeply into topics, uncovering new knowledge and developing expertise in particular areas. Interdisciplinary fields are valuable because their practitioners take specialized knowledge from incompatible disciplines, consolidate it, synthesize it, and make sense of it in a broad context to better serve the multifaceted interests of society. Environmental science is especially broad because it encompasses not only the natural sciences (disciplines that study the natural world), but also the social sciences (disciplines that study human interactions and institutions).The natural sciences provide us the means to gain accurate information about our environment and to interpret it reasonably. Addressing environmental problems, however, also involves weighing values and consciousness human behavior, and this requires the social sciences. Most environmental science programs focus predominantly on the natural sciences as they pertain to environmental issues. In contrast, programs incorporating the social sciences heavily often prefer using the term environmental studies to describe their academic umbrella. Whichever approach one takes, these fields reflect many diverse perspe ctives and sources of knowledge.Just as an interdisciplinary approach to studying issues can help us better understand them, an integrated approach to addressing problems can produce effective and lasting solutions. One example is the dramatic improvement in one expression of air quality in the United States over the past few decades. Ever since automobiles were invented, lead had been added to flatulence to make cars run more smoothly, even though medical professionals knew that lead emissions from tailpipes could cause health problems, including idea damage and premature death.In 1970 air pollution was severe, and motor vehicles accounted for 78% of U. S. lead emissions. But over the spare-time activity years, engineers, physicians, atmospheric scientists, and politicians all merged their knowledge and skills into a process that eventually resulted in a ban on leaded gasoline. By 1996 all gasoline sold in the United States was unleaded, and the nations largest source of atmosp heric lead emissions had been completely eliminated. III.Environmental science is not the same as environmentalism Although many environmental scientists are interested in solving problems, it would be incorrect to confuse environmental science with environmentalism, or environmental activism. They are not the same. Environmental science is the pursuit of knowledge about the workings of the environment and our interactions with it. Environmentalism is a social movement dedicated to protecting the natural worldand, by extension, humansfrom undesirable changes brought about by human choices (Figure 1. ). Although environmental scientists may study many of the same issues environmentalists care about, as scientists they attempt to maintain an objective approach in their work. Remaining free from personal or ideologic bias, and open to whatever conclusions the data demand, is a hallmark of the effective scientist. We will now proceed with a brief overview of how science works and how sc ientists go about this enterprise that brings our society so much valuable knowledge.