1. Environmental and Sustainability

Vocabulary flashcards based on lecture notes about humans and sustainability.

Environmental Sustainability

The ability to maintain an ecological balance in our planet's natural environment and conserve natural resources to support the wellbeing of current and future generations.

Environment

Everything that affects an organism during its lifetime; includes energy, living things, non-living things, and humankind's scientific & technological advances.

Ecology

Branch of biology that focuses on how living organisms interact with living and non-living parts of their environment.

Ecosystem

A biological community of organisms within an area of land or volume of water that interact with one another and with the nonliving chemical and physical factors in their environment.

Biodiversity

The variety of genes, species, ecosystems, and ecosystem processes.

Chemical Cycling (Nutrient Cycling)

The circulation of nutrients from the environment through various organisms and back to the environment.

Full Cost Pricing

Economics finding ways to include market prices for harmful environmental and health costs of producing and using goods and services.

Win-Win Solution

Political scientists urging to look for solutions to environmental problems based on cooperation and compromise, benefiting both people and the environment.

Responsibility to Future Generations

An ethical principle stating we have a responsibility to leave the planet's life support system in a condition as good as or better than what we inherited for the benefit of future generations and other species.

Environmental Worldviews

Sets of assumptions and values about how the natural world works and how people think they should interact with the environment, determined partly by environmental ethics.

Planetary Management Worldview

A human-centered worldview that holds humans are separate from and in charge of nature and that society should manage the earth for the benefit of humans.

Stewardship Worldview

A human-centered worldview that adds to planetary management the idea that people have a responsibility to be caring and stewards of the planet for current and future human generations.

Life-Centered Worldview

A worldview where all species have value of their ecological roles, regardless of their potential use to humans.

Earth-Centered Worldview

A worldview where people are part of or dependent on nature and the earth's natural capital exists for all species, not just humans.

Abiotic Factors

Non-living parts of an environment.

Biotic Factors

Living parts of an environment.