Chapter 1 Flashcards
An interdisciplinary study of how humans interact with the living and non living parts of their environment.
Environmental Science
One or more communities of different species interacting with one another and with the chemical and physical factors making up their nonliving environment.
Ecosystem
Materials and energy in nature that are essential or useful to humans
Natural resources
Anything that we can obtain from the environment to meet our needs and wants.
Resource
A resource that takes anywhere from several days to several hundred years to be replenished through natural processes, as long as it is not used up faster then it is replaced.
Renewable source
The highest rate at which we can use a renewable resource indefinitely without reducing it’s available supply.
Sustainable yield
Resources that exist in a fixed quantity, or stock, in the earth’s crust and has the potential for renewal by geological, physical, and chemical processes taking place over hundreds of millions to billions of years.
Nonrenewable resources
Involves using a resource over and over in the same form.
Reuse
Involves collecting waste materials and processing them into new materials.
Recycle
The annual market value of all goods and services produced by all businesses, foreign and domestic, operating within a country.
Gross domestic product (GDP)
The GDP divided by the total population a midyear.
Per capita GDP
Undesired change in the physical, chemical, or biological characteristics of air, water, soil, or food that can adversely affect the health, survival, or activities of humans or other living organisms.
Pollution
Broad and diffuse areas, rather than points, from which pollutants enter bodies of surface water or air.
Non-point sources
Single, identifiable source that discharges pollutants into the environment.
Point sources
Threshold level at which an environmental problem causes a fundamental and irreversible shift in the behavior of a system.
Tipping point
Occurs when people are unable to fulfill their basic needs for adequate food, water, shelter, health, and education.
Poverty
Your set of assumptions and values reflecting how you think the world works and what you think your role in the world should be.
Environmental worldview
Energy stored in an object because of its position or the position of its parts.
Potential Energy
Energy that matter has because of its mass and speed, or velocity.
Kinetic energy
Energy that is dispersed and has little ability to do useful work.
Low quality energy
Energy that is concentrated and has great ability to perform useful work.
High quality energy
Worldview holding that humans are part of and totally dependent on nature and that nature exists for all species, not just for us.
Environmental wisdom
The point at which there is an abrupt change in an ecosystem quality, property or phenomenon, or where small changes in an environmental driver produce large responses in the ecosystem.
Environmental Threshold
Interaction of two or more factors or processes so that the combined effect is greater than the sum of their separate effects.
Synergistic interaction
Also known as the Law of conservation of energy, states thats energy cannot be created or destroyed in a chemical reaction.
1st law of thermodynamics
It states that the entropy of any isolated system not in thermal equilibrium almost always increases.
2nd law of thermodynamics
The data on chemistry of precipitation, beginning in 1963, represent the longest continuous record of precipitation chemistry in North America.
Bormann and likens 1963 studies
