Envi Sci

• Physical, living, and non-living elements with which the environment has a reciprocal relationship
• Functions of the environment:

  • Source of resource inputs
  • Source of amenity services
  • Provides life support
  • Receptacle for waste
• Ecosystem services:

  • Provisioning services
  • Supporting services
  • Regulating services
  • Cultural services
• Seven principles of environmental science:

  • Nature knows best
  • Everything changes
  • Everything is connected
  • All forms of life are important
  • Everything must go somewhere
  • Ours is a finite Earth
  • Nature is beautiful and humans are stewards
• Global environmental issues:

  • Climate change
  • Clean water access and pollution
  • Air quality
  • Population growth, hunger, and food shortages
  • Biodiversity loss
  • Marine resource depletion
  • Energy resource challenges
• Sustainability:

  • Environmental sustainability
  • Economic sustainability
  • Social sustainability
• Environment: the physical living and non-living surrounding of a society with which it has a reciprocal relationship
• Cultural Services: nonmaterial benefits people obtain from ecosystems
• Provisioning Services: the products directly obtained from ecosystems
• Regulating Services: the benefits obtained from the regulation of ecosystem processes
• Supporting Services: indirect services necessary for the production of provisioning, regulating, or cultural services
• Renewable Resources: natural resources that can be replenished in a short period of time
• Nonrenewable Resources: natural resources that cannot be remade or regrown at a scale comparable to its consumption
• Environmental Sustainability: living within the means of our natural resources
• Economic Sustainability: requires a business of a country to use its resources efficiently
• Social Sustainability: the ability of society to persistently achieve good social well-being
• System: a network of interdependent components and processes with materials and energy flowing from one component to another
• Closed System: no matter exchanges with the surroundings
• Open System: those that receive inputs from their surroundings and produce outputs that leave the system
• Negative Feedback: decreases a process or component, helps stabilize systems
• Positive Feedback: increases a process or component, feedback loops
• Emergent Properties: properties that are entirely unexpected and include emergent phenomena in materials and emergent behavior in living creatures
• Resilience: the ability to return to a previous condition from being in a disturbance
• State shift: adapt to the current condition, not going back to the previous condition
• Equilibrium: a relatively stable state that keeps population sizes within a sustainable range
• Element: substances that cannot be broken down into simpler forms by ordinary chemical reactions
• Atom: the smallest particles that exhibit the characteristics of an element
• Matter: anything that occupies space and has mass
• Principle of Conservation of Matter: matter cannot be created nor destroyed but is recycled over and over again
• Energy: ability to do work
• Potential Energy: stored energy that is available for use
• Kinetic Energy: energy contained in moving objects
• Heat Energy: energy that can be transferred between objects of different temperature
• Thermodynamics: deals with how energy is transferred in natural processes
• 1st Law of Thermodynamics: energy is conserved; it is neither created nor destroyed under normal conditions
• 2nd Law of Thermodynamics: with each successive energy transfer or transformation in a system, less energy is available to do work
• Chemosynthesis: the synthesis of organic compounds by bacteria or other living organisms using energy derived from reactions involving inorganic chemicals, typically in the absence of sunlight
• Extremophiles: organisms that live in extreme environments
• Sun: a fiery ball of exploding hydrogen gas
• Photosynthesis: the process by which green plants and certain other organisms transform light energy into chemical energy