GEE 001

• The ability of ecosystems and human cultural systems to survive, flourish, and adapt together to constantly changing environments over long periods of time is called Sustainability
• Has been sustained for billions of years by solar energy, biodiversity, and chemical cycling
• Ecosystem is a group of organisms in a defined geographic area (terrestrial or marine) that interact with each other and their environment
• Three scientific principles in sustainability is 1. Solar energy which supplies energy directly and indirectly. 2. Biodiversity which provides ecosystem services and adaptability. 3. Chemical/Nutrient Cycling - in nature waste=useful resource.
• Natural Capital consists of: Natural Resources, and Ecosystem Services. Humans degrade this by overusing natural resources and overloading with pollution and waste.
• Corporate Subsidies encourage sustainability, daily individual and local contribution matter.
• Full-cost pricing (economics)

  Win-Win situation (politics)

  Responsibility to future generations (ethics)
• Resource is anything we obtain from environment which are readily available or need technology to acquire.
• Inexhaustible Resource - last long

  Renewable - replenished by natural process

  Non-renewable - fixed quantities that takes long to replenish
• Pollution is contamination of environment by polluting substance or waste.
• Point Source - Identifiable

  Nonpoint Source - Dispersed
• Pollution Cleanup (post-production)

  Pollution Prevention (pre-production)
• Ecological Footprint is the amount of food and water needed to supply a population with renewable resources, as well as the ability to absorb/recycle wastes and pollution produced by resource usage.
• Environmental problems stems from population, unsustainable resource use, poverty, excluding environmental cost, and isolation from nature.
• Affluence causes more pollution but It can make education, and technological solutions
• Three type of world views: Human-centered, Life-centered, and Earth-centered.
• Earth’s life-support system has four spherical components that interact with each other. Life is sustained by the cycling of nutrients and energy between and through these systems
• Atmosphere – composed of the troposphere and the stratosphere

  Hydrosphere – water at or near the earth’s surface (ice, water, and water vapor)

  Geosphere – composed of a hot core, a thick, mostly rocky mantle and a thin outer crust

  Biosphere – wherever life is found within the other three spheres
• Three Factors Sustain the Earth’s Life:

  • The one-way flow of high quality energy

  –Solar energy principle of sustainability

  –Greenhouse effect

  • The cycling of nutrients – Chemical cycling principle of sustainability
  • Gravity
• Ecology: organisms interact with each other and with their non-living environment

  Biotic (living) and abiotic (non-living) parts of the environment exhibit sequential levels of organization

  – Five of these levels: organisms, populations, communities, ecosystems, and the biosphere
• Producers (autotrophs – plants) use photosynthesis to make nutrients

  Consumers (heterotrophs) feed on other organisms or their remains
• Energy flows through ecosystems via movement between trophic levels through food chains and food webs, energy is lost each successive trophic level is reached because much heat is lost
• GPP (gross primary productivity) – The rate that an ecosystem’s producers convert energy into biomass

  NPP (net primary productivity) – The rate that producers use photosynthesis to produce and store chemical energy minus the rate at which they use energy for aerobic respiration
• – Despite low NNP, oceans produce most of the world’s biomass because of their vast size

  – Tropical rainforests have high NPP – much is lost through natural capital degradation

  – Only plant matter represented by NPP is available as nutrients for consumers
• Biogeochemical cycling, driven by incoming solar radiation and earth’s gravity continually, moves nutrients and energy through air, water, soils, rocks, and living organisms
• The hydrologic cycle or water cycle collects, purifies, and distributes the earth’s fixed supply of water
• Atmospheric nitrogen cannot be absorbed or used directly by most organisms – Bacteria convert the nitrogen into a usable form so it becomes a useful plant nutrient
• Phosphorus Cycle - Cycles through soils, rocks, water and plants, but not through the atmosphere – Can be temporarily removed from natural cycling when washed into oceans and trapped in marine sediment
• How does sulfur cycle through the biosphere?

  – Via mining of ore deposits/ocean sediments

  – From active volcanoes

  – as poisonous hydrogen sulfide and sulfur dioxide gases

  – Through decomposition of organic matter in wetlands

  – From sea spray, dust storms, and forest fires

  – Absorption by plant roots
• The key components of acid rain are nitrogen dioxide and sulfuric acid