Ch 1

• Sustainability - Ability of the earth’s various systems, including human cultural systems and economies, to survive and adapt to changing environmental conditions indefinitely.
• Environment - All external conditions, factors, matter, and energy, living and nonliving, that affect any living organism or other specified system.
• Environmental science - Interdisciplinary study that uses information and ideas from the physical sciences (such as biology, chemistry, and geology) with those from the social sciences (such as economics, politics, and ethics) to learn how nature works, how we interact with the environment, and how we can help to deal with environmental problems.
• Ecology - Biological science that studies relationships between living organisms and their environment.
• Species - Groups of similar organisms. For sexually reproducing organisms, they are a set of individuals that can mate and produce fertile offspring. Every organism is a member of a certain species.
• Ecosystem - One or more communities of different species interacting with one another and with the chemical and physical factors making up their nonliving environment.
• Biosphere - The parts of the earth’s air, water, and soil where life is found.
• Environmentalism - Social movement dedicated to protecting the earth’s life-support systems for us and other species.
• Nutrients - Any chemical an organism must take in to live, grow, or reproduce.
• Biodiversity - Variety of different species (species diversity), genetic variability among individuals within each species (genetic diversity), variety of ecosystems (ecological diversity), and functions such as energy flow and matter cycling needed for the survival of species and biological communities.
• Nutrient cycling - The circulation of chemicals necessary for life, from the environment through organisms and back to the environment.
• Natural capital - Natural resources and natural services that keep us and other species alive and support our economies.
• Natural resources - Materials such as air, water, and soil and energy in nature that are essential or useful to humans.
• Inexhaustible - Essentially inexhaustible resource such as solar energy because it is renewed continuously.
• Renewable resource - Resource that can be replenished rapidly (hours to several decades) through natural processes as long as it is not used up faster than it is replaced.
• Sustainable yield - Highest rate at which a potentially renewable resource can be used indefinitely without reducing available supply.
• Nonrenewable - Resource that exists in a fixed amount (stock) in the earth’s crust and has the potential for renewal by geological, physical, and chemical processes taking place over hundreds of millions to billions of years.
• Ecosystem services - Natural services or natural capital that support life on earth and are essential to the quality of human life and the functioning of the world’s economies.
• More-developed countries - Country that is highly industrialized and has a high per capita GDP.
• Less-developed countries - Country that has low-to-moderate industrialization and low-to-moderate per capita GDP.
• Environmental degradation - Depletion or destruction of a potentially renewable resource.
• Private lands - Lands owned by individuals and businesses.
• Public lands - Lands typically owned jointly by the citizens of a country, but managed by the government.
• Ecological footprint - Amount of biologically productive land and water needed to supply a population with the renewable resources it uses and to absorb or dispose of the pollution and wastes from such resource use.
• Biocapacity - The ability of a productive ecosystem to regenerate renewable resources.
• Exponential growth - Growth in which some quantity, such as population size or economic output, increases at a constant rate per unit of time.
• Poverty - Inability of people to meet their basic needs for food, clothing, and shelter.
• Environmental worldview - Set of assumptions and beliefs about how people think the world works, what they think their role in the world should be, and what they believe is right and wrong environmental behavior.
• Environmental ethics - Human beliefs about what is right or wrong with how we treat the environment.
• Subsidies - Payment intended to help a business grow and thrive; typically provided by a government in the form of a grant or tax break.
• Per capita GDP - Average per person.