ENVS 1200 Exam 1 Review

Ecological Footprint

• How much land it takes to provide for a lifestyle

• Average American: 24 acres of productive land

start of colonial period

Europeans coming to America Perceived unlimited resources

• Creation of the “public domain” - land owned by everyone -1781 & 1803

  • Louisiana Purchase contributed largely

  • “Western” lands given up by the Colonies to become US public domain

  • Thomas Jefferson’s intent: land to promote settlement and development

George Perkins Marsh

• Humans modified the ecosystem so much that it practically collapsed and ruined their ability to thrive there

• Late 1800s- people starting to notice and perceive resource scarcity

  • 1870-american fisheries society formed to halt depletion of fishery resources

  • Oct. 8, 1871- three major fires

    • Chicago Fire - 300 dead, major rebuilding, heavy demands on forests

    • Peshtigo Fire- 1500 dead, 1.3 mil acres burned

  • Bureau of Forests created in DC

Theodore Roosevelt (progressive era)

• Active government

• White house conference on natural resources

• National conservation commission

  • Natural resources inventory

Gifford Pinchot (progressive era)

• 1st chief of US Forest Service

• Experts: professional forestry

• Efficiency: not profligate (using up things and moving on without thinking of the future) waste

• Promoted use and conservation of resources for public benefit

• Resources should be managed for:

  • “The greatest good for the greatest number for the longest time”

John Muir (progressive era)

• 1892 founder of Sierra Club

• Author, story-teller, naturalist, theologian

• Preservationism - preserve nature as it is, popularized wilderness, not doing anything to it

Hetch Hetchy Valley (progressive era)

• Muir: wildlands is for human enjoyment and spiritual renewal

  • DON’T build the dam

• Pinchot: wildlands are enjoyable, but this must be balanced against use

  • BUILD the dam to serve the people

New Deal Era

• “Dust bowl” (1934-35) on the great plains

  • Unsustainable farming practices and drought caused tremendous soil losses

  • Problems plainly visible to society

• The great depression (1933-1941)

New deal program under FDR (new deal era)

• CCC (civilian conservation corps)

• SCS (soil conservation service)

• TVA (tennessee valley authority)

Aldo Leopold (new deal era)

• “We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it and respect it”

• Convinced the forest service to establish to Gila wilderness area

• Wrote the book Game Management (1933)

WWII (1939-45) end of new deal era

Skyrocketing demand for wood products and natural resources

Post-war period/Ecological era

• Realized not enough resources to meet demand unless something improved

• Conservation→starts to become “environmentalism”

  • Middle class wanted amenities

  • Suburbs boom after the war

    • More money, more leisure time

• People were sick of pollution

Richard Nixon

signed important environmental acts and legislation

Rachel Carson- scientist, oceanographer

• Why did birds fail to return in the spring?

  • Looked into this and wrote Silent Spring, 1962

    • Pesticides carried unseen costs

      • DDT - colorless tasteless insect pesticide - widespread use

      • bioaccumulates/biomagnifies- bad for organisms at the top of the food chain

        • Weaken bird egg shells→nesting failures

  • Citizen activism

  • A revolution in public awareness

  • 1972- ban on DDT

Sustainable era

• NGOs

• Managing ourselves

• 1992 Earth Summit, Rio

  • Countries around world beginning to work together

Ethics

 Standards of conduct to govern individual and social actions

“An ethic, ecologically, is a limitation on freedom of action in the struggle for existence.” (Leopold, 1933 The Land Ethic)

• Ethics can be thought of as a list of rights or wrongs (codes of conduct)

• Our focus is ethical frameworks/overarching philosophies and schools

Anthroprocentric (3 major ways of viewing world)

1. Humans at center

   1. Preserving nature or wilderness for humans is still anthropocentric because it is human centered and the land is for the people to enjoy, even if its not actively being harmed

Biocentric (3 major ways of viewing world)

1. Each living thing matters (vegans, animal rights)

   1. Gradations of this could value different subsets of living entities, but the focus remains on the individual, and every living thing is an individual

Ecocentric (3 major ways of viewing world)

The system is what matters. “See the forest for the trees”

Frontier ethics (4 major schools of thought)

• Anthropocentric- Humans above nature

• Dominion over the earth

• Plants and animals exist solely for the use of humans

• individual/property rights are top priority

• No need to worry about population

• Our systems can solve any problem

• Dominant ethic that has shaped much of U.S. development

Utilitarian ethics (4 major schools of thought)

• Added concept of wise use of resources and conservation

• “Use it, but don’t abuse it”

Stewardship ethics, or conservation ethics (4 schools of thought)

• Somewhat of a middle ground between utilitarian and ecocentric

• Ethic of many of today’s natural resource professionals

• Earth to be tended and nurtured, used sustainably

Ecological/ecocentric ethics (4 schools of thought)

• All life has an inherent right to existence

• The earth is an organic whole

• Humans should work with, not against, nature

• Community rights over individual rights

• Science and technology often cause problems (more harm than good)

• Preservation efforts today try to set aside areas where humans don’t dominate

A-B cleavage (ALDO LEOPOLD)

• A

  • Land is soil, grows crops

  • Trees are crops

• B

  • Land is a complex system

  • Living, interconnecting community

Supply

how much of a good or service there is

Demand

the public’s desire for a good or service or its willingness to pay

Price

“sticker price”

Cost

• the total of resources, money, lost opportunities, etc. that goes into producing a good or service

  • ex. buying organic vs non organic groceries, non organic has a higher cost because of impacts of pesticides, etc.

Externality

costs not reflected in the price/costs not borne by the producer or consumer, but passed to others

Demand Curve

how desire/willingness to pay shifts as the price of the good or service increases/changes

Elasticity

• a measure of how affected a good or service is to changes in price or supply

  • do you (the economy) buy more chocolate when it is on sale/less when price goes up (elastic) or the same amount regardless of price (linelastic)

Normal Goods

as income rises, purchases of normal goods rises

—fancier cars, more meat, bigger housing

Inferior Goods

as income rises, purchases of inferior goods decreases (eat less ramen (or better ramen at least))

Sin taxes, et al.

trying to drive down demand by increasing price

Property —> at the heart of economics

• When ownership is clear, authority over the owned thing is clear:

  • if someone can charge for its use, they can control access, set rules and limits

  • when it is not clear, its hard or impossible to set limits

• Four property regimes have been identified in environmental policy:

  1. open access - nobody owns it

     1. natural resources

  2. private - owned by individuals or corporations

     1. picking from someones raspberry bush in their backyard - thats private

  3. Common - owned by many individuals

  4. State - owned by the public but managed and controlled by the state - state - meaning government

Economic Systems

• free market

• centralized (command)

• mixed system

Measures of “success”

• Traditionally we use GDP or GNP

  • GDP - gross domestic product

  • GNP - gross national product

Addressing externalities

1. Command and control

   1. laws that prohibit or require certain actions or limits on actions

   2. pros:

      1. morally most straightforward

      2. sets a clear ceiling

      3. ends justify the means

   3. cons:

      1. not economically efficient

      2. does not set a clear floor

2. Taxes

   1. most classically argued for by A.C. Pigou

      1. 1920: The Economics of Welfare

      2. place a tax on emissions, etc. above a certain amount

   2. pros:

      1. ethically, the right to avoid the bad thing belongs to the public/collective

      2. places an incentive to reduce emission, and continue to reduce

      3. more efficient than C and C

   3. cons:

3. Tradable permits

   1. put forward classically by Ronald Coase in 1960

   2. the issue with externalities is no one owns them, so no one can charge for them

   3. so, assign clear property ownership and allow affected parties to charge a fee

   4. typically this means issuing permits to cause the externality and allow for trading between polluters (and polluted)

Ecology

• The study of the interactions of living organisms with each
  other and with their environment.

• The study of the structure and function of ecosystems.

Biotic (living)

• Primary producers: autotrophs - use sunlight through photosynthesis to make its own food

  • automatic- it all starts with autotrophs

  • Consumers: heterotrophs
    —herbivores (plants)
    —carnivores (meat)
    —omnivores (both)

    • detritivores/decomposers

      • detritus: dead organic material

Abiotic (non-living)

• Physical factors: solar energy, wind, terrain, temperature, water currents, etc.

• Chemical factors: all the elements and compounds in the atmosphere, lithosphere, and hydrosphere that affect org

Types of production:

• Gross Primary Productivity (GPP)

  • total rate of photosynthesis

• Net Primary Productivity (NPP) - what we usually care about the most

  • what’s left after plants use their share for cellular processes (like cellular respiration)

• GPP - R (respiration) = NPP (what energy is left for growth or reproduction)

• Annual Net Primary Production

Ecosystem structure

the types of organisms found in a particular ecosystem and the patterns of interrelationships among these organisms

Ecosystem function

how energy flows and materials cycle through ecosystems. Processes.

First law of thermodynamics

energy can be converted from one form to another but cannot be created nor destroyed

Second law of thermodynamics

when energy is converted from one form to another, a portion is “lost” as heat

Albedo

how much of the suns rays a surface reflects

• surface with high albedo- reflects a lot of light

  • ex. snow, light colored things

• surface with low albedo- absorbs and turns into heat

  • dark asphalt becomes hot, grass, forests

More COMPLEXITY=

More STABILITY

As you go up a trophic level- only __% of energy/calories is transferred

10% of energy transferred, 90% lost

Carbon Cycle

• nutrient pool for carbon is in the atmosphere

• co2 increase partly compensated for by:

  • increased photosynthesis

  • conversion to carbonic acid in oceans

• but humans… putting more into atmosphere than it can get rid of

  • continued massive inputs from fossil fuel burning

  • and deforestation

Nitrogen Cycle

• nitrogen-triple bond-hard to break

  • can break with bacteria or large forces like lightning

    • denitrifying bacteria - breaks down nitrogen to be taken up by plants “nitrogen-fixing bacteria”

  • some plants rely on the bacteria so much that they house it in their roots

• humans use fertilizers w/ a lot of nitrogen for plants

  • rainwater washes nitrogen into bodies of water, algae takes over because it has so many nutrients to form

    • this is called Eutrophication (over-nourishment of bodies of water)

  • algae bloom —> algae dies —> decomposers break it down and suck out oxygen from water —> fish die

    • this is called Hypoxia

    • nitrogen fertilizers on Iowa crops —> Mississippi river which runs all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico —> large amount of nutrients dumped —> creates what is known as the “dead zone”

      • (occurs all around the world)

Phosphorous Cycle

• slow cycle (relies on erosion)

• phosphorous moves from rocks —> soil —> water —> living things

Physical diversity drives…

biodiversity

the only constant is CHANGE (you can never step on the same thing twice, things are always changing)