Chapter 1 Key Terms Flashcards
Affluence
A country’s wealth
Biodiversity
variety of genes, organisms, species, and ecosystems- interactions among species provide ecosystem services, and biodiversity allows life to more easily adapt to changing environmental conditions
Biocapacity
Estimate of production of certain biological materials and absorption and filtration of wastes- expressed in global hectares per person, and therefore dependent on human population
Biomimicry
The rapidly growing scientific effort to understand, mimic, and catalog the ingenious ways in which nature has sustained life on earth for 3.8 billion years (Janine Benyus,
Chemical cycling
Circulation of chemicals necessary for life from the environment (soil, water, air) thru organisms and back to the environment. Wastes from one organisms become the raw materials for another
earth-centered environmental worldview
Natural capital exists for all species, not just humans
Ecological community
A group or association of populations of two or more different species occupying the same geographic area at the same time.
Ecological footprint
Amount of land + water needed to supply a person/area w food, water, etc, and that are needed to absorb and recycle wastes and pollution produced by this resource usage
Ecological deficit
When ecological footprint exceeds biocapacity
Ecology
Studies how living things interact with each other + environment, and how the interactions determine evenness and richness of species
Ecosystem
Set of organisms within a defined area or volume that interact with one another and with their environment of nonliving matter and energy (solar energy, chems in air, water, + soil, plants, animals, decomposers)
Ecosystem services
Benefits to humanity provided by healthy ecosystems at no monetary cost to us
Environment
Everything around us, including living and nonliving (air, water, E)
Environmental degradation
Wasting, depleting, and degrading the earth’s natural capital
Environmental ethics
The study of varying beliefs about what is right and wrong with how we treat the environment, provides useful tools for examining worldviews.
Environmental science
Draws on math, chem, physics, bio- work together to provide advanced scientific and quantitative understanding of contemporary environmental changes
Environmental worldview
Your set of assumptions and values concerning how the natural world works and how you think you should interact with the environment.
Environmentalism
Envi activism- social movement dedicated to protecting the earth’s life and resources, supported by environmental science, explores politics and ethics
Environmentally sustainable society
Protects natural capital and lives on its income.
Would meet the current and future basic resource needs of its people.
Would not compromise the ability of future generations to meet their basic resource needs.
Exhaustable resource
Fossil fuels like oil, coal, natural gas, and minerals like iron, copper, and aluminum.
Exponential growth
Occurs when a quantity increases at a fixed percentage per unit of time, such as 0.5% or 2% per year
What is happening with the human population
Full-cost pricing
Some economists urge us to find ways to include the harmful environmental and health costs of producing and using goods and services in their market prices
This practice would give consumers information about the harmful environmental impacts of products
human-centered environmental worldview
Sees the natural world as support system for human life
2 variations – the planetary management worldview and the stewardship worldview
Both these variations say that humans are separate from and in charge of nature; we should manage the earth for our benefit; and if we degrade or deplete a natural resource or ecosystem service, we can use our technological ingenuity to find a substitute.
Inexhaustible resource
Solar Energy, Geothermal, Wind, Waves (some are higher quality than others)
LDCs
Low industrialization, low GDP per capita
life-centered environmental worldview
All species have value in fulfilling their particular role within the biosphere, regardless of their use to humans
models (including IPAT)
Simplify systems, generate testable predictions
IPAT- calculation of environmental impact based on population x consumption per person x impact per unit of consumption
(population, affluence, technology)
more-developed countries
Highly industrialized, high GDP per capita
natural capital
Natural resources + Ecosystem services: keep us and other species alive and support our economies
natural resources
Materials and E in nature that are essential or useful to humans- classified as inexhaustible, renewable, or depletable
peak coal
The point in which the max global coal production
Poverty
People can’t fufill basic needs for food, water, shelter, healthcare, education
solar energy
provides heat and light E that plants convert into chem E. Also indirectly powers wind and flowing water that are used for electricity
Sustainability
Capacity of earth’s natural systems to support human cultural systems despite changing environmental conditions into the very long term future
sustainability revolution
Social change leading to increasingly sustainable policies
sustainable yield
Highest rate at which we can use a renewable resource indefinitely without reducing its available supply
tragedy of the commons
Cumulative effect of many people exploiting a shared resource which can degrade, exhaust, or ruin it
