Living in the environment
CHAPTER 1 – THE ENVIRONMENT AND SUSTAINABILITY
1.1 What are some key principles of sustainability?
Life on earth has been sustained for billions of years by solar energy, biodiversity and chemical
cycling.
Our lives and economies depend on energy from the sun and on natural resources and ecosystem
services (natural capital) provided by the earth.
We could live more sustainably by following six principles of sustainability.
Environment: everything around you. All living things and the nonliving things with which you
interact.
Environmental science: study of connections nature:
- How the earth (nature) works and has survived and thrived
- How humans interact with the environment
- How we can live more sustainably.
Ecology: the branch of biology that focuses on how living organisms interact with the living and
nonliving parts of their environment.
Species: a group of organisms having a unique set of characteristics that set it apart from other
groups.
Ecosystem: 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.
Environmentalism/environmental activism: a social movement dedicated to protecting the earth’s
life and its resources.
The scientific principles of sustainability:
1. 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.
2. BIODIVERSITY: the variety of genes, species, ecosystems and ecosystem processes.
3. CHEMICAL CYCLING: the circulation of chemicals or nutrients needed to sustain life from the
environment through various organisms and back to the environment.
Waste = useful resources
Natural capital: the natural resources and ecosystem services that keep humans and other species
alive and that support human economies.
Natural resources: materials and energy provided by nature that are essential or useful to humans.
- Inexhaustible resources
, - Renewable resources
- Nonrenewable resources
Sustainable yield: the highest rate at which people can use a renewable resource indefinitely
without reducing its available supply.
Ecosystem services: natural services provided by healthy ecosystems that support life and human
economies at no monetary cost to us.
Humans can degrade natural capital.
Three additional principles of sustainability:
1. FULL-COST PRICING: to include the harmful environmental and health costs of producing and
using goods and services in their market prices.
2. WIN-WIN SOLUTIONS: based on cooperation and compromise that will benefit the largest
number of people as well as the environment.
3. RESPONSIBILITY TO FUTURE GENERATIONS
More-developed countries: industrialized nations with high average incomes per person.
1.2 How are our ecological footprints aff ecti ng the earth?
Humans dominate the earth with the power to sustain, add to, or degrade the natural capital that
supports all life and human economies.
As our ecological footprints grow, we deplete and degrade more of the earth’s natural capital that
sustains us.
Environmental degradation/natural capital degradation: we waste, deplete and degrade much of
the earth’s life-sustaining natural capital.
There are scientific, economic and political solutions to these problems that could be implemented
within a few decades.
Tragedy of the commons: degradation of shared and open-access renewable resources.
The cumulative effect of large numbers of people trying to exploit a widely available or shared
renewable resource can degrade it and eventually exhaust or ruin it.
Ecological footprint: the amount of biologically productive land and water needed to supply a
population in an area with renewable resources and to absorb and recycle the wastes and pollution
such resource and produces.
Biocapacity: the ability of its productive ecosystems to regenerate the renewable resources used by
a population, city, region, country or the world and to absorb the resulting wastes and pollution
indefinitely.
The per capita ecological footprint is the average ecological footprint of an individual in a given
country or area.
If the total ecological footprint is larger than its biocapacity, the area is said to have an ecological
deficit.
,IPAT model:
- I: impact of human activities
- P: population size
- A: affluence (resource consumption per person)
- T: technologies
I=P x A x T
Three major cultural changes:
1. Agricultural revolution
2. Industrial-medical revolution
3. Information-globalization revolution
Sustainability revolution: we could learn to live more sustainably during this century.
1.3 What problems causes environmental problems and why do they persist?
Basic causes of environmental problems are population growth, wasteful and unsustainable resource
use, poverty, avoidance of full-cost pricing, increasing isolation from nature and different
environmental worldviews.
Our environmental worldviews play a key role in determining whether we live unsustainably or more
sustainably.
Major causes of environmental problems:
- Population growth
- Wasteful and unsustainable resource use
- Poverty
- Omission of the harmful environmental and health costs of goods and services in market
prices
- Increasing isolation from nature
- Competing environmental worldviews
Exponential growth occurs when a quantity increases at a fixed percentage per unit of time.
As total resource consumption and average resource consumption per person increase, so does
environmental degradation, wastes and pollution from the increase in environmental footprints.
Poverty: a condition in which people lack enough money to fulfill their basic needs for food, water,
shelter, health care and education.
This people are too desperate for short-term survival to worry about long-term environmental
quality or sustainability.
Malnutrition: lack of protein and other nutrients needed for good health.
, Because the prices of goods and services do not include most of their harmful environmental and
health costs, consumers have no effective way to know the harm caused by what they are buying.
Two ways to implement full-cost pricing over the next two decades:
1. To shift from environmentally harmful government subsidies to environmentally beneficial
subsidies that sustain or enhance natural capital.
2. To increase taxes on pollution and wastes that we want less of and reduce taxes on income
and wealth that we want more of.
Your environmental worldview is your set of assumptions and values concerning how the natural
world works and how you think you should interact with the environment.
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.
Three major categories of environmental worldviews:
- Human-centered: sees the natural world as a support system for human life. Variants:
- planetary management and stewardship worldview.
- Life-centered: all species have value in fulfilling their particular role within the biosphere,
regardless of their potential or actual use to humans.
- Earth-centered: we are part of, and depend on, nature and the earth’s natural capital exists
for all species, not just for humans.
1.4 What is an environmental sustainable society?
Living sustainably means living on the earth’s natural income without depleting or degrading the
natural capital that supplies it.
An environmentally sustainable society protects natural capital and lives on its income.
Living sustainable means living on natural income, which is the renewable resources such as plants,
animals, soil, clean air and clean water, provided by the earth’s natural capital.
Living sustainably means:
- Learning from nature
- Protecting natural capital
- Not wasting resources
- Recycling and reusing nonrenewable resources
- Using renewable resources no faster than nature can replenish them
- Incorporating the harmful health and environmental impacts of producing and using goods
and services in their market prices
- Preventing future ecological damage and repairing past damage
- Cooperating with one another to find win-win solutions to the environmental problems we
face
- Accepting the ethical responsibility to pass the earth that sustains us on to future
generations in a condition as good as or better than what we inherited.
