Environmental Science is a Study of Connections in Nature

The environment is everything around you. It includes all the living things (such as plants and animals) and the nonliving things (such as air, water, and sunlight) with which you inteact. You are part of nature and live in the enviornment. Despite humankind's many scientific and technological advances, our lives depend on sunlight and on the earth for clean air and water, food, shelter, energy, fertile soil, a livable climate, and other components of the planet's life-support system. 

Environmental Science is a study of connections in nature. It is an interdisciplinary study of:

 1. How the earth (nature) works and has survived and thrived. 

 2. How humans interact with the environment. 

3. How we can live more sustainably. 

It strives to answer several questions: 

a. What environmental problems do we face? 

b. How serious are they? 

c. How do they interact?

d. What are their causes? 

e. How has nature solved such problems? 

f. How can we use our understanding of nature to solve such problems? 

To answer such questions, environmental science integrates information and ideas from fields such as biology, chemistry, geology, engineering, geography, economics, political science, and ethics. 

A key component of environmental science is ecology, the branch of biology that focuses on how living organisms interact with the living and nonliving parts of their environment. Each of the earth's organisms belongs to a species, or a group of organisms having a unique set of characteristics that set it apart from other groups. 

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. For example, a forest ecosystem consist of plants (especially trees), animals, and other organisms that decompose organic materials. These organisms interact with one another, with solar energy, and with the chimicals in the forest's air, water, and soil. These ecological interactions take place in the biosphere-the parts of the earth's air, water, and soil where life is found. 

Environmental science and ecology should not be confused with environmentalism or environmental activism, which is a social movement dedicated to protecting the earth's life and its resources. Environmentalism is practiced more in the realms of politics and ethics than in science. However, the findings of environmental scientists can sometimes provide evidence to back the claims and activities of environmentalists. 

Dependence on solar energy: The sun's energy warms the planet and provides energy that plants use to produce nutrients, the chemicals that plants and animals need to survive. 

Biodiversity: The variety of genes, species, ecosystems, and ecosystem process are referred to as biodiversity (short for biological diversity). Interactions among species provide vital ecosystem services and keep any population from growing too large. Biodiversity also provides ways for species to adapt to changing environmental conditions and replace species wiped out by catastrophic environmental changes with new species. 

Chemical cycling: The circulation of chemicals or nutrients needed to sustain life from the environment (mostly from soil and water) through various organisms and back to the environment is called chemical cycling, or nutrient cycling. The earth receives a continuous supply of energy from the sun, but it receives no new supplies of life-supporting chemicals. Through billions of years of interactions with their living and nonliving environment, organisms have developed ways to continually recycle the chemical they need to survive. This means that the wastes and decayed bodies of organisms become nutrients or raw materials for other organisms. In nature, waste=useful resources. 

Sustainability, the integrating theme of the textbook, has several key components that we use as subthemes. One is natural capital-the natural resources and ecosystem services that keep humans and other species alive and that support human economies. Analyze the following picture to show how natural capital=natural resources plus ecosystem services. 

Natural resources are materials and energy provided by nature that are essential or useful to humans. They fall into three categories: inexhaustible resources, renewable resources, and nonrenewable (exhaustible) resources. We depend on a combination of inexhaustible, renewable, and exhaustible (nonrenewable) natural resources. 

Solar energy is viewed as an inexhaustible or perpetual resource because it is expected to last for at least 5 billion years until the death of the star we call the sun. A renewable resource is any resource that can be replenished by natural processes within hours to decades, as long as people do not use the resource faster tahn natural processes can replace it. Examples include forests, grasslands, fertile topsoil, fishes, clean air, and fresh water. The highest rate at which people can use a renewable resource indefinitely without reducing its available supply is called its sustainable yield. 

Nonrenewable or exhaustible resources exist in a fixed amount, or stock, in the earth's crust. They take millions to billions of years to form through geological processes. On the much shorter human time scale, we can use these resources faster than nature can replace them. Examples of nonrenewable resources include fossil fuel energy resources (such as copper and aluminum), and nonmetallic mineral resources (such as salt and sand.) As we deplete nonrenewable resources, sometimes we can find substitutes. 

Ecosystem services are natural services provided by healthy ecosystems that support life and human economies at no monetary cost to us. For example, forest help purify air and water, reduce soil erosion, regulate climate, and recycle nutrients. Thus, our lives and economies are sustained by energy from the sun and by natural resources and ecosystem services (natural capital) provided by the earth.

A vital ecosystem service is nutrient cycling, which is a scientific principle of sustainability. For example, without nutrient cycling in topsoil there would be no land plants, and no humans or other land animals. This would also disrupt the ecosystem services that purify air and water. 

A second component of sustainalbilty- and another subtheme- is that human activities can degrade natural captial. We do this by using renewable resouces faster than nature can restore them, for example, by depleting fisheries faster than the fish can reproduce or by overloading the earth's normallyu renewable air, water, and soil with pollution and wastes. These are both examples of the tragedy of the commons. People in many parts of the world are replacing forests with crop plantations that require large inputs of energy, water, fertilizer, and pesticides. WE also add pollutants to the air and dump chemicals and wastes into rivers, lakes, and oceans faster than they can be cleaned through natural processes. Many of the plastics and other synthetic materials people use poison wildlife and disrupt nutrient cycles because they cannot be broken down and used as nutrients by other organisms. 

This leads us to a third component of sustainability: creating solutions to the environmental problems we face. For example, a solution to the loss of forests is to stop burning or cutting down mature forests. This cannot be done unless governemtns and citizens are aware of the ecosystem services forests provide and citizens pressure goverments to pass laws to protect mature forests. Overfishing might be reduced by instituting fishing quotas or by issuing permits limiting the number of fish that can be taken by commercial fishing fleets so that fisheries have a chance to recover. 

Conflicts can arise when environmental protection has a negative economic effect on groups of people or certain industries. Dealing with such conflicts often involves both sides making compromises or trade-offs. For example, a timber company might be persuaded to plant and harvest trees in an area that it had already cleared or degraded instead of clearing an undisturbed mature forest area. In return, the governnment may subsidize (pay part of the cost) of planting the new trees. 

Each of us can play an important role in learning how to live more sustainably. Thus, individuals matter-another sustainability subtheme. 

Economics, politics, and ethics can provide us with three additional principles of sustainability: 

• Full-cost pricing (from economics): 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, called full-cost pricing, would give consumers information about the harmful environmental impacts of products. 

• Win-win solutions (from political science): Political scientists often look for win-win solutions to environmental problems based on cooperation and compromise that will benefit the largest number of people as well as the environment. 

• Responsibility to future generations (from ethics): Ethics is a branch of philosophy devoted to studying ideas about what is right or wrong. According to environmental ethicists, we should leave the planet's life-support systems in a condition that is as good as or better than it is now as our responsibility to future generations. 

The six principles of sustainability can serve as guidelines to help us move toward a future that is more sustainalbe ecologically, economically, and socially. 

Sustainablility is the capacity of the earth's natural systems that support life and human social systems to survive or adapt to changing environmental conditions indefinitely. Sustainability is the big idea and will be the integrating theme this year. 

Some of the resources we use are renewable and can be used on a sustainable basis repeatedly. Examples are the air in atmosphere and the fishes of the sea. 

We are alive because natural processess purify the earth's air as long as we do not add pollutants to the air faster than the earth's natural processes can dilute or remove them. Populations of commercially valuable fish species such as Atlantic cod are renewable and sustainable as long as we do not remove them faster than the remaining fish can reproduce and replenish the population. 

Both of these renewable resources are not owned by anyone and can be used by almost anyone. Air pollution and depletion of Atlantic cod can occur when each user of these open-access renewable resources reasons, "the little bit of pollution that I add to the air or the number of Atlantic cod that I catch in my fishing boat is not enough to matter, and anyway, they are renewable resources." 

When the level of use is small, this logic works. Eventually, however, the cumulative effect of large numbers of people trying to exploit a readily available renewable resource can degrade it and eventually exhaust or ruin it. Then no one benefits and everyone loses. Biologist Garrett Hardin called such degradation of open-access renewable resources the tragedy of commons. 

For centruies, commercial fishing boats have been removing Atlantic cod from the fishing grounds off the coast of Newfoundland. However, in the 1960s and 1970s advances in commercial fishing technology greatly increased catches of the cod. By the 1990s, populations of Atlantic cod were so low that the Grand Banks fishing industry collapsed. 

Directions: In your composition notebook you will have a heading with Journal Entry#1 on the left hand side and Name and Block on the right hand side of your notebook. Then complete the following vocabulary and question(s). Please note even though you are asked to only answer one question, you will need to know this information and can expect to see this on your first test. 

Define Essential Vocabulary: Biodiversity, Ecosystem, Environment, Species, Sustainability, Sustainable yield (any other vocabulary words you did not know for this reading assignment. 

Answer one of the following questions in a CER format: 

1. Explain why chemical (nutrient) cycling is essential for maintaining life on earth. 

2. Explain why biodiversity is important to ecosystem services. 

3. Under what circumstance might a renewable resource become nonrenewable? 

4. Identify several human or social factors that can enhance sustainability.