Environmental Studies & Political Economy Lecture Notes

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering the core concepts of sustainability, market-based environmental mechanisms, political economy, ocean acoustic hazards, and environmental racism.

Sustainability

The co-dependence of social, economic, and environmental systems that support human flourishing across scales ranging from urban to global.

Environmental determinism

The concept that human culture and community identity are determined and shaped by the surrounding climate and physical environment.

Environmental as a backdrop

The perspective that nature is merely a setting for human ingenuity and that human capability can prevail over natural forces.

Sustainability yield

A resource management plan requiring fair social, environmental, and economic systems to ensure future generations can profit and benefit.

Social sustainability

A dimension of sustainability defined by the absence of war and the presence of general social well-being and public safety.

Economic sustainability

The condition of having an absence of crippling debt and mass poverty, alongside the capacity of a society to distribute its wealth equitably.

Environmental sustainability

The future health of the biosphere, measured and monitored against planetary boundaries and biophysical limits.

Greenwashing

Deceitful communication or branding practices that falsely depict an organization or product as environmentally friendly.

Malthusian trap

The theory that exponential population growth inevitably outpaces resource availability unless checked by productivity or moral restraint.

$$I = PAT$$

An environmental formula quantifying environmental impact ($I$) as the product of population ($P$), affluence ($A$), and technology ($T$).

Commodity

An object of utility established within a market system according to public social demand.

Commodification of nature

The process of converting natural elements and ecosystem functions into tradable market goods.

Privatization

The legal mechanism of establishing exclusive private property rights over shared environmental resources, such as water pipelines.

Alienability

The legal and physical separation of an environmental resource from its original social and ecological context so that it can be bought and sold.

Individuation

The conceptual and physical isolation of a specific ecosystem service or discrete natural resource from its broader ecological web.

Abstraction

The process of standardizing individualized resources so they function as interchangeable commodities on the global market.

Valuation

The process by which the market assigns economic worth and exchange value to natural entities and functions.

Carbon market

A trading platform where organizations exchange carbon credits or allowances to remain within government-mandated emissions budgets.

Cap and trade

A market mechanism setting an emissions ceiling and permitting entities operating below the limit to sell surplus permits to over-emitting entities.

Green consumption

A consumer-driven sustainability approach that emphasizes purchasing locally produced, organic materials with positive environmental footprints.

Carbon offset market

A system enabling polluters to purchase compensatory project credits rather than reducing direct emissions, often failing to mitigate immediate ecological harm.

Ecological footprint

A measure of whether a given population size can be sustained by the available land area and natural resources.

Hazard

The inherent capacity of a substance, object, or situation to cause harm to human health, property, or the environment.

Risk

The likelihood that a hazard will produce harm, expressed mathematically by the formula $\text{Risk} = \text{Hazard} \times \text{Exposure}$.

Exposure

The duration or extent to which people, property, or an ecosystem are in contact with an active environmental hazard.

Uncertainty

A situation where an environmental hazard involves unknown mathematical probabilities and unpredictable outcomes.

SOFAR channel

A deep-ocean horizontal layer of water where sound waves travel long distances, utilized by marine life for communication and military equipment for acoustic pings.

Spectrum crowding

A condition in the SOFAR channel where an excess of acoustic transmissions and biological songs overlap, saturating sound frequencies.

Global Energy System Transition (GEST)

The complex structural shift between high- and low-emissions sub-systems designed to curb greenhouse gas emissions and fossil fuel dependence.

Capitalism

An economic system of resource allocation founded on private property, market competition, and continuous expansion via the circuit of capital ($M\text{-}C\text{-}M'$).

Social reproduction

Unpaid household labor, childcare, and community caregiving essential for sustaining the formal wage-labor economy.

Intersectionality

A framework developed by Kimberlé Crenshaw analyzing how intersecting social identities—including race, gender, class, and sexuality—compound systemic oppression.

Environmentalism as romanticism

An 18th- and 19th-century cultural movement that views pristine landscapes as spiritual renewal sources and characterizes environmental degradation as social destruction.

Environmental racism

The structured and disproportionate exposure of communities of color to environmental hazards, rooted in discriminatory planning and resource allocation.

Racial capitalism

The concept that capitalism extracts economic surplus by exploiting socially constructed racial hierarchies rather than operating purely through non-racial wage labor.

Neoliberalism

A political and economic paradigm favoring market-led solutions, widespread deregulation, and the reduction of state economic intervention.

Austerity

Neoliberal policy measures aimed at reducing government budget deficits through extensive spending cuts and tax adjustments.