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Chapter 1

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Chapter 1

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1 ENVIRONMENTAL

CHAPTER

PROBLEMS, THEIR
CAUSES, AND
SUSTAINABILITY
WHAT ARE SOME PRINCIPLES OF
SUSTAINABILITY?
• CONCEPT 1.1A Life on the earth has been sustained for billions
of years by solar energy, biodiversity, and chemical cycling.
• CONCEPT 1.1B Our lives and economies depend on energy from
the sun and on natural resources and ecosystem services (natural
capital) provided by the earth.
• CONCEPT 1.1C We could shift toward living more sustainably
by applying full-cost pricing, searching for win-win solutions, and
committing to preserving the earth’s life-support system for future
generations.
Sustainability

Sustainability is the capacity of the


earth’s natural systems and human cultural
systems to survive, flourish, and adapt to changing
environmental conditions into the very long-term
future.
Environmental Science Is a Study of
Our Interactions with the World
The environment is everything around us. It includes the
living and the nonliving things (air, water, and energy) with which we
interact in a complex web of relationships that connect us to one
another and to the world we live in.

Despite our many scientific and technological advances, we


are utterly dependent on the earth for clean air and water, food,
shelter, energy, fertile soil, and all other components of the planet’s
life-support system.
ENVIROMENTAL SCIENCE
Environmental science, an interdisciplinary study
of how humans interact with the living and nonliving
parts of their environment. It integrates information and
ideas from the natural sciences such as biology,
chemistry, and geology; the social sciences such as
geography, economics, and political science; and the
humanities such as ethics.
• A key component of environmental science is ecology, the
biological science that studies how living things interact
with one another and with their environment. These living
things are called organisms. Each organism belongs to a
species, a group of organisms that has a unique set of
characteristics that distinguish it from other groups of
organisms.
• A major focus of ecology is the study of ecosystems. An
ecosystem is a set of organisms within a defined area of land
or volume of water that interact with one another and with
their environment of nonliving matter and energy.
Three Principles of
Sustainability
• The latest version of our species has
been around for only about 200,000
years—less than the blink of an eye,
relative to the 3.8 billion years that
life has existed on the planet.
• Yet, there is mounting scientific
evidence that, as we have expanded
into and dominated almost all of the
earth’s ecosystems during that short
time.
DEPENDENCE ON SOLAR ENERGY

• The sun’s input of energy, called solar


energy, warms the planet and provides
energy that plants use to produce
nutrients, the chemicals necessary for
their own life processes and for those of
most other animals, including humans.
The sun also powers indirect forms of
solar energy such as wind and flowing
water, which we use to produce
electricity
BIODIVERSITY
• The variety of genes, organisms, species,
and ecosystems in which organisms exist
and interact are referred to as biodiversity
(short for biological diversity). The
interactions among species, especially the
feeding relationships, provide vital
ecosystem services and keep any population
from growing too large. Biodiversity also
provides countless ways for life to adapt to
changing environmental conditions, even
catastrophic changes that wipe out large
numbers of species.
CHEMICAL CYCLING

• Thecirculation of chemicals
necessary for life from the
environment (mostly from soil
and water) through organisms and
back to the environment is called
chemical cycling, or nutrient
cycling.
Ecology and environmental science reveal
that interdependence, NOT independence, is what
sustains life and allows it to adapt to a continually
changing set of environmental conditions. Many
environmental scientists argue that understanding
this interdependence is the key to learning how to
live more sustainably.
Key Components of Sustainability

Natural capital refers


to the natural resources and
ecosystem services that keep
us and other species alive and
support human economies.
NC = NR + ES
• Natural resources are materials and energy in nature
that are essential or useful to humans. They are often classified as
inexhaustible resources (such as energy from the sun and wind),
renewable resources (such as air, water, topsoil, plants, and
animals) or nonrenewable or depletable resources (such as
copper, oil, and coal).

• Ecosystem services are processes provided by healthy


ecosystems that support life and human economies at no monetary
cost to us.
• One essential ecosystem service is chemical or
nutrient cycling—the basis for one of the three
scientific principles of sustainability.
• Chemical cycling helps to turn wastes into
resources. An important component of nutrient
cycling is topsoil—a vital natural resource that
provides us and most other land-dwelling species
with food. Without nutrient cycling in topsoil, life as
we know it could not exist on the earth’s land.
• Natural capital is also supported by energy
from the sun—the focus of another of the
scientific principles of sustainability.
• Thus,our lives and economies depend on
energy from the sun, and on natural
resources and ecosystem services (natural
capital) provided by the earth.
Degradation of Natural Capital
• According to a large and growing body of scientific
evidence, we are living unsustainably by wasting,
depleting, and degrading the earth’s natural capital – a
process known as environmental degradation or natural
capital degradation.
• In
2005, the UN released its Millennium Ecosystem
Assessment, a 4-year study by 1,360 experts from 95
countries.
Degradation of Natural Capital
• According to this study, human
activities have degraded or overused
about 60% of the earth’s ecosystem
services. The report’s summary
statement warned that “human
activity is putting such a strain on
the natural functions of Earth that
the ability of the planet’s ecosystems
to sustain future generations can no
longer be taken for granted.”
Degradation of Natural Capital
• Human activities degrade
natural capital by using
normally renewable
resources such as trees and
topsoil faster than nature can
restore them and by
overloading the earth’s
normally renewable air and
water systems with pollution
and wastes.
Solutions
• While environmental scientists search for scientific
solutions to problems such as the degradation of forests
and other forms of natural capital, social scientists are
looking for economic and political solutions.
• For example, the timber company might be persuaded to
plant and harvest trees in an area that it had already
cleared or degraded, instead of clearing the undisturbed
forest. In return, the government might give the
company a subsidy, or financial support, to meet some of
the costs for planting the trees.
Earth’s Resources
• A resource is anything that we can obtain from
the environment to meet our needs and wants.
Some resources, such as surface water, trees, and
edible wild plants, are directly available for use.
• Resourcescan be classified as inexhaustible,
renewable, or nonrenewable (exhaustible).
Inexhaustible Resources
• Also
known as Perpetual
Resources.
• These resources are continuous
supplied and is expected to last
for at least 6 billion years until
the sun dies.
• Example of these resources are
solar energy, wind, geothermal
and water.
Renewable Resources
• A renewable resource is one that can
be replenished by natural processes
within hours to centuries, as long as
we do not use it up faster than natural
processes can renew it.
• Examples include forests, grasslands,
fishes, fertile topsoil, clean air, and
freshwater.

NOTE: The highest rate at which we


can use a renewable resource
indefinitely without reducing its
available supply is called its
sustainable yield.
Nonrenewable Resources
• Also know as Exhaustible or Depletable
Resources.
• Are resources that exist in a fixed quantity, or
stock, in the earth’s crust.
• Such exhaustible stocks include energy
resources such as oil and coal, metallic mineral
resources such as copper and aluminum, and
nonmetallic mineral resources such as salt and
sand.

NOTE: As we deplete such resources, human ingenuity


can often find substitutes. However, sometimes there is no
acceptable or affordable substitute for a widely used
nonrenewable resource.
Pollution
• One major environmental problem is pollution.
• It is contamination of the environment by any chemical or
other agent such as noise or heat to a level that is harmful
to the health, survival, or activities of humans or other
organisms.
• Polluting substances, or pollutants, can enter the
environment naturally, such as from volcanic eruptions, or
through human activities, such as the burning of coal and
gasoline, and the dumping of chemicals into rivers, lakes,
and oceans.
Sources of Pollution
The pollutants we produce come from two types of sources:

• Pointsources are single, identifiable


sources.
• Nonpoint sources are dispersed and often
difficult to identify.
Point source

Nonpoint source
Pollution Control
There are two different ways of dealing with pollution:

• Pollution cleanup or Output pollution control


– which involves cleaning up or diluting
pollutants after we have produced them.
• Pollution prevention or Input pollution control
– involves reducing or eliminating the
production of pollutants.
Ecological Footprint
• Is the amount of land and water needed to supply a population or an area with
renewable resources and to absorb and recycle the wastes and pollution
produced by such resource use.
• Theper capita ecological footprint is the
average ecological footprint of an individual in a
given country or area.
• If
the total ecological footprint for a city, a
country, or the world is larger than its biological
capacity to replenish its renewable resources and
absorb the resulting wastes and pollution, it is
said to have an ecological deficit.
IPAT
In the early 1970s, scientists Paul Ehrlich and John
Holdren developed a simple model showing how
population size (P), affluence (A), or wealth, as
measured by rates of resource consumption per
person, and the beneficial and harmful environmental
effects of technologies (T) help to determine the
environmental impact (I) of human activities

Impact (I) = Population (P) × Affluence (A) × Technology (T)


Causes of Environmental Degradation

According to a number of environmental and social scientists, the major causes of the
environmental problems we face are (1) population growth, (2) wasteful and unsustainable resource
use, (3) poverty, (4) failure to include the harmful environmental and health costs of goods and
services in their market prices, and (5) increasing isolation from nature.
Different views about Environmental Problems
and their Solutions
• Environmental ethics: what is right and wrong with how
we treat the environment
• Planetarymanagement worldview: We are separate
from and in charge of nature
• Stewardship worldview: Manage earth for our benefit
with ethical responsibility to be stewards
• Environmentalwisdom worldview: We are part of nature
and must engage in sustainable use
According to most environmental scientists,
our ultimate goal should be to achieve an
environmentally sustainable society—one that
meets the current and future basic resource needs of
its people in a just and equitable manner without
compromising the ability of future generations to
meet their basic resource needs. This is in keeping
with the future generations principle of
sustainability.
Three Big IDEAS
• A more sustainable future will
require that we rely more on
energy from the sun and other
renewable energy sources, protect
biodiversity through the
preservation of natural capital, and
avoid disrupting the earth’s vitally
important chemical cycles.
Three Big IDEAS
• A major goal for becoming
more sustainable is full-cost
pricing—the inclusion of
harmful environmental and
health costs in the market
prices of goods and services.
Three Big IDEAS
• We will benefit ourselves and
future generations if we
commit ourselves to finding
win-win solutions to our
problems and to leaving the
planet’s life-support system in
a condition as good as or
better than what we now
enjoy.
John Edward R. Gerondio
TED Faculty
General Education, Philippine Women's College of Davao, Inc.
Facebook: John Edward Gerondio Contact #: 09489719032/ 09061548422
Instagram: @jhn_dwrd Gmail: johnnygerondio@gmail.com
Twitter: @jhn_dwrd School email: jegerondio_f23@pwc.edu.ph

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