Chapters 1 and 2 for Test #1

Question 1

Anthropocene

Answer 1

When people exert enormous influence on environments all around the Earth, but where control of these environments and their enormous complex ecologies is inevitably elusive.

Question 2

Political Ecology

Answer 2

An approach to environmental issues that unites issues of ecology with a broadly defined political economy perspective. Nature and society are produced together in a political economy that includes humans and non-humans.

Question 3

Reconciliation Ecology

Answer 3

A science of imagining, creating, and sustaining habitats, productive environments, and biodiversity in places used, traveled, and inhabited by human beings.

Question 4

Rewilding

Answer 4

Long-lost ecosystems are crafted by people from whole cloth, in order to reclaim or create landscapes as they might have been before human influence.

Question 5

Exponential Growth

Answer 5

The state of increasingly accelerated and compounded growth, with ecological implications for scarcity.

Question 6

Neo-Malthusians

Answer 6

Present-day adherents to a position that population growth outstrips limited natural resources and presents the single greatest driver of environmental degradation and crisis.

Question 7

Kuznets Curve

Answer 7

Based on the theory that income inequality will increase during economic development and decrease after reaching a state of overall affluence, this theory predicts that environmental impacts rise during development, only to fall after an economy matures.

Question 8

Forest Transition Theory

Answer 8

Model that predicts a period of deforestation in a region during development, when the forest is a resource or land is cleared for agriculture, followed by a return of forest when the economy changes and population outmigrates and/or becomes conservation-oriented.

Question 9

Carrying Capacity

Answer 9

The theoretical limit of population (animal, human, or otherwise) that a system can sustain.

Question 10

Ecological Footprint

Answer 10

The theoretical spatial extent of the earth’s surface required to sustain an individual, group, system, organization; an index of environmental impact.

Question 11

Induced Intensification

Answer 11

A thesis predicting that where agricultural populations grow, demands for food lead to technology innovations resulting in increased food production on the same amount of available land.

Question 12

Green Revolution

Answer 12

A suit of technological innovations, developed in universities and international research centers, which were applied to agriculture between 1950s and 1980s and increased agricultural yields dramatically, but with a concomitant rise in chemical inputs (fertilizers and pesticides) as well as increased demands for water and machinery.

Question 13

Zero Population Growth

Answer 13

A condition in a population where the number of births matches the number of deaths and therefore there is no net increase; an idealized condition for those concerned about overpopulation.

Question 14

Death Rate

Answer 14

A measure of mortality in a population typically expressed as the number of deaths per thousand population per year.

Question 15

Birth Rate

Answer 15

A measure of natural growth in a population typically expressed as the number of births per thousand population per year.

Question 16

Demographic Transition Model (DTM)

Answer 16

A model of population change that predicts a decline in population death rates associated with modernization, followed by a decline in birth rates resulting from industrialization and urbanization; this creates a sigmoidal curve where population growth increases rapidly for a period, then levels off.

Question 17

Fertility Rate

Answer 17

Measure describing the average number of children birthed by an average statistical woman during her reproductive lifetime.