PEOPLE AND EARTHS ECOSYSTEM Flashcards
ENVIRONMENTAL MILESTONE
1962 Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring
1969 Friends of the Earth Established
1971 Greenpeace established
1975 Worldwatch Institute established
1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster
Name for the new epoch of Earth’s history– an epoch when human activities have become so profound and persuasive that they rival or exceed the great forces of Nature in influencing the functioning of the Earth’s system.
ANTHROPOCENE
STAGES OF ANTHROPOCENE
Stage 1: The Industrial Era
– lasted from 1800-1945
Stage 2: The Great Acceleration
– lasted from 1945-2015
Stage 3:
– Stage when people have become aware of the extent of the human impact and start stewardship of the Earth System
IMPACT OF HUMANS ON THE ENVIRONMENT:
This equation was first proposed by two scientists named ________ in the early 1970s as a way to calculate the impact of humans on the environment.
Ehrlich and Holdren
are unique tools makers.
Humans
Termed to very early tools
Oldowan
Stones, sticks and animal bones utilized as materials for weapons and implements
Stone Age
wood for ladder, fire, pigment, drying of wood and digging sticks.
Palaeolithic Age
termed Palaeolithic as “Palaeoxylic” or “Old Wood Age”
Tyldesley and Bahn
Showed the efficiency of wooden hunting tools in comparison with ones made of stone.
Tyldesley and Bahn
more complex shelters were in use
Upper Palaeolithic Age
Humans have been foragers rather than farmers for around (how many %?) of their history but at the end of Pleistocene major changes were afoot.
95%
Began to domesticate rather than to gather foods and plants and to keep, rather than just hunt animals. establishments of the first major settlements – town
HUMAN AS CULTIVATORS AND KEEPERS
termed by Isaac as the single most important intervention man had made in his environment.
Domestication
Regarded by Harris as the most fateful change in human intervention
The Transition from Foraging to Farming
Termed by Diamond as the momentous change in Holocene human history
The Transition from Foraging to Farming
claimed by Mithen as the defining event of human history; the one turning point that has resulted in modern humans having a quite different type of lifestyle and cognition to all other animals and past types of humans.
Origin of farming
Involves deliberate sowing or other management, and entails plants which do not necessarily differ genetically from wild populations of the same specie
Cultivation
results in genetic change brought about through conscious and unconscious human selection
Domestication
Major Theory of Domestication
- Demographic Hypothesis
- Oasis Propinquity hypothesis
- Feasting hypothesis
Domestication was produced by crowding, possibly brought by a combination of climatic and deterioration and population growth.
- Demographic Hypothesis
By Gordon Childes, held that increasing desiccation brought wild animals and plants into ever closer relationship, which symbiosis and ultimately domestication emerged.
- Oasis Propinquity hypothesis
Based on the idea that in many societies, those wishing to achieve rank and status do so by throwing a feast. The adoption of cultivation and the husbanding of domestic animals made it possible for ambitious individuals to produce increasing amounts of food which would give them an advantage in social competition.
- Feasting hypothesis
Stages of Domestication of Plants
Gathering
Cultivation
Domestication
Cereals, pulse and flax
Founder Crops
Initially domesticated as a source of oil and earliest known domesticated fiber.
Flax (Linum Usitatissimum)
first domesticated animal for hunting
Dog (Canis familiaris)
people manipulated their immediate surroundings, different populations of wild animals would have been attracted to elements of human niche, including human waste or smaller animals that were also attracted to the refuse.
Commensal Pathway
from wild prey to game management, to herd management, to direct breeding desires to increase the supply of the resource that have been diminished by hunting.
Prey Pathway
only pathway that began with deliberate objective to domesticate a specie
Directed Pathway
uses animal power
Irrigation and adoption or riverine agriculture
Domestication first fully established in south-western Asia around 7500 BC
Hunting-Gathering and Early Agriculture
Great irrigation-based economies lasting from 4000 BC to the first century.
Technology developed to attempt to free civilizations from some of the constraints of a dry season.
Riverine Civilizations
Technology was developed (terracing and selective breeding) to help overcome environmental barriers to increase production.
Agricultural Empires
From 1800 AD to today, it formed an economic core area based on fossil fuel use.
Societies have increasingly divorced themselves from the natural environment.
Atlantic-Industrial Era
Emphasis on the Pacific Basin as the primary focus of the global economy.
The Pacific-Global Area
- People began to gather into even-larger settlements (cities) and into more institutional social formations (states)
Modern Industrial and Urban Civilizations
Certain Trends in Human Manipulation
Nuclear Bomb
DDT, Lead, and Sulfates
Massive dams
-is an accounting tool for ecological resources in which various categories of human consumption are translated into areas of productive land required to provide resources and assimilate waste products. It is thus a measure of how sustainable the lifestyles of different population groups are.
Ecological footprint
-or pollution bacterielle
-Caused by bacteria living and developing in decaying and putrefying materials and stagnant water associated with settlements of growing size;
Pollution microbienne
associated with small-scale craft industries such as tanneries, potteries and other workshops carrying out various rather disagreeable tasks, including soap manufacture, bone burning and glue-making;
Pollution artisanale
involving large-scale and pervasive pollution over major centres of industrial activity, particularly from the early nineteenth century in areas like the Ruhr or the English ‘Black Country’;
Pollution industrielle
in which whole regions are affected by pollution, as with the desiccation and subsequent salination of the Aral Sea area.
Pollution fondamentale
in which vast quantities of chemicals are deliberately applied to the land as fertilizers and biocides;
Pollution foncière
in which major accidents can cause pollution which is neither foreseen nor calculable (e.g. the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986).
Pollution accidentale
2 Components of Global Environmental Change:
Systemic Global Change
Cumulative Global Change
