Environmental Science Long Exam

• Environment; from French word "environner"; to surround.
• Environment; the physical, living and non-living, SURROUNDING OF A SOCIETY with which it has a reciprocal relationship.
• FUNCTIONS OF ENVIRONMENT

  • Source of Resource Inputs
  • Source of Amenity Services
  • Provides Life Support
  • Receptacle for Waste
• Provisioning Services; the products directly obtained from ecosystems.

  • Food
  • Raw Materials
  • Water
  • Medicine
• Cultural Services; nonmaterial benefits people obtain from ecosystems

  • Recreation and Health and Physical Health
  • Tourism
  • Aesthetic Appreciation and Inspiration for Culture, Art and Design
  • Spiritual Experience and Sense of Place
• Regulating Services; the benefits obtained from the regulation of ecosystem processes

  • LOCAL CLIMATE AIR QUALITY
  • CARBON SEQUESTRATION AND STORAGE
  • MODERATION OF EXTREME EVENTS
  • WASTE WATER TREATMENT
  • EROSION PREVENTION AND MAINTENANCE OF SOIL FERTILITY
  • POLLINATION
  • BIOLOGICAL CONTROL
  • REGULATION OF WATER FLOW
• Supporting Services; indirect services, as they are necessary for the production of provisioning, regulating or cultural services

  • HABITAT FOR SPECIES
  • MAINTENANCE OF GENETIC DIVERSITY
• Renewable Resources; Natural resources that can be replenished in a short period of time.

  • Solar
  • Wind
  • Water
  • Geothermal
  • Biomass
• Nonrenewable Resources; Natural resource that cannot be re-made or re-grown at a scale comparable to its consumption.

  • Nuclear Energy
  • Coal
  • Petroleum
  • Natural Gas
• SEVEN ENVIRONMENTAL PRINCIPLES

  1. Nature knows best
  2. All forms of life are important
  3. Everything is connected to everything else
  4. Everything changes
  5. Everything must go somewhere
  6. Ours is a finite Earth
  7. Nature is beautiful and that humans are the stewards of God
• Environmental Science; The use of scientific approaches TO UNDERSTAND THE COMPLEX SYSTEMS in which we live.
• ENVIRONMENTALISM; A social movement or an ideology focused on the welfare of the environment, environmentalism seeks to protect and conserve the elements of earth's ecosystem.
• 4th Century B.C.; Plato had noticed the adverse effects of deforestation.
• The pioneering British plant physiologist Stephen Hales, suggested that conserving green plants preserves rainfall.
• Pierre Poivre, an early French governor of Mauritius, an island in the Indian Ocean, was horrified at the destruction of wildlife (such as the flightless dodo) and the felling of ebony forests on the island by early European settlers.
• Many historians reflect the publication of Man and Nature in 1864 by geographer George Perkins Marsh as the source of environmental protection in North America
• In 1905 Theodore Roosevelt, who was the populist Progressive movement leader, moved forest management into the Department of Agriculture.
• Gifford Pinchot, who was the first American born professional forester, became the first chief of the new Forest Service
• Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot recognized the framework of the national forest, park, and wildlife refuge system and naturalists and activists such as John Muir
• John Muir, amateur geologist, famous author, and first president of the Sierra Club, strenuously opposed Pinchot’s utilitarian policies. He argued that nature deserves to exist for its own sake, regardless of its usefulness to us.
• Working together with his children, Aldo Leopold planted thousands of trees in a practical experiment in restoring the health and beauty of the land. “Conservation,” he wrote, “is the positive exercise of skill and insight, not merely a negative exercise of abstinence or caution.”
• Silent Spring, in 1962 was published by Rachel Carson.
• Barry Commoner was principally interested in environmental health, which is especially urgent for low-income, minority, and inner-city residents. Many of these individuals grew up in workingclass families, so their sympathy with social concerns is not surprising.
• In 1977, Dr. Wangari Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement in her native Kenya to organize poor rural women and restore their ecosystem. Organizing communities for selfdetermination, justice, equity, poverty reduction, and environmental conservation and have planted more than 30 million trees.
• Global Environment Issues:

  1. Climate Change
  2. Clean Water
  3. Air Quality
  4. Human Population and Well-being
  5. Biodiversity Loss
  6. Marine Resources
  7. Energy Resources
• Tragedy of the Commons; In the journal Science, this was published in 1968 by ecologist Garret Hardin. In this classic framing of the problem, he argues that population growth leads inevitably to overuse and the destruction of shared resources—such as shared pastures, unregulated fisheries, freshwater, land, and clean air.
• A system is a network of interdependent components and processes, with materials and energy flowing from one component of the system to another
• A system is in a stable state, and we say it is in equilibrium.
• Often there are thresholds or tipping points, where rapid change suddenly occurs if you pass certain limits.
• Open System; those that receive inputs from their surroundings and produce outputs that leave the system
• Close System; A system that is not open to the environment and is not connected to the outside world.
• Positive Feedback Loops; increase a process or component
• Negative Feedback Loops; decrease a process or component
• DISTURBANCE to the standard feedback loops:

  1. FIRE
  2. FLOODING
  3. INVASION OF NEW SPECIES
  4. CLIMATE CHANGE
  5. DESTRUCTIVE HUMAN ACTIVITIES
• EMERGENT PROPERTIES; properties that are entirely unexpected and include emergent phenomena in materials and emergent behavior in living creatures.
• Resilience; is 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
• 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