1.1 What Is an Environmentally Sustainable Society?

• Nature has sustained itself for billions of years by using solar energy, biodiversity, and nutrient cycling

• Our lives and economies depend on energy from the sun and on natural resources and natural services (natural capital) provided by the earth

• Shift toward living more sustainably by:

  • Applying full-cost pricing, searching for win-win solutions

  • Committing to preserving the earth’s life-support system for future generations

• Environmental Science Is a Study of Connections in Nature

  • Environment: This is everything around us, including living and nonliving things.

  • Environmental Science: Known as an interdisciplinary study of how humans interact with their environment.

    • Natural sciences: ecology, biology, geology, chemistry

    • Social sciences: geography, politics, economics

    • Humanities: ethics, philosophy

  • Organisms are living things

  • Species: A group of organisms with distinctive traits and, for sexually reproducing organisms, can mate and produce fertile offspring

  • Ecosystem: Set of organisms interacting with one another and with their environment of nonliving matter and energy within a defined area or volume

  • Environmentalism: Social movement dedicated to protecting the earth’s life support systems for us and all other forms of life.

  • Biology: Study of living things (ecology, botany, and zoology)

    • Ecology: Study of how organisms interact with one another and with their nonliving environment

  • Chemistry: Study of chemicals and their interactions (biochemistry)

  • Earth Science: Study of the planets as a whole and their nonliving things (climatology, geology, hydrology, and paleontology)

  • Social Sciences: Studies of human society (anthropology, demography, geography, economics, and political science,)

  • Humanities: Study of the aspects of the human condition not covered by the physical and social sciences (history, ethics, and philosophy)

• Sustainability Is The Central Theme

  • Sustainability: The ability of the earth to survive and adapt to changing environmental conditions indefinitely

  • Key components of sustainability

    • Natural Capital: The natural resources and natural services that keep us and other forms of life alive and support our economics

      • Solar Capital: The energy that is gotten from the sun

        • Helps with photosynthesis (plants use this process to get food)

    • Natural Resources: These are materials and energy in nature that are essential or useful to humans

      • Renewable: Air, water, soil, plants, and water

      • Non-renewable: Copper, oil, coal, etc.

    • Natural Services: Functions of nature, such as the purification of air and water. They support human life and economics, and they are provided to us by the ecosystem at no cost.

      • Nutrient cycling (cycle): A significant function in nature that involves the recycling of chemicals from the environment—most notably from soil and water—through organisms and back into the environment.

    • Natural capital can be destroyed and reduced by human activities. If we use up resources faster than they replenish, then it can quickly reduce them.

    • Environmental scientists look for answers to problems such as resource degradation.

      • Ex: Scientific remedies may include stopping the logging of mature, ecologically varied forests and harvesting fish at a rate that does not exceed how quickly they can reproduce. However, putting such proposals into practice could necessitate passing laws and regulations.

    • Trade-offs or compromises: Although people can find scientific solutions for problems there is a legal aspect that needs to be considered.

      • Laws or regulations may be needed to be put in place.

• Environmentally Sustainable Societies Protect Natural Capital and Live Off Its Income

  • Environmentally sustainable society: A society that meets the current and future basic resource needs of people while making sure they do not prevent other generations from meeting their needs. Ultimately this is our goal.

  • Protect your capital and live off the income it provides.

  • Living sustainably = Natural income

    • Natural income: Renewable resources such as plants, animals, and soil that are provided by natural capital.

1.2 How Can Environmentally Sustainable Societies Grow Economically?

• As our ecological footprints grow, we are depleting and degrading more of the earth’s natural capital

• There is a Wide Economic Gap between Rich and Poor Countries

  • Gross Domestic Product (GDP): The annual market value of all goods and services produced by all firms and organizations, foreign and domestic, operating within a country.

  • Per capita GDP: The GDP divided by the total population at midyear.

  • Purchasing power parity (PPP): To help compare countries, economists use this.

  • Per capita GDP PPP: A measure of the number of goods and services that a country’s average citizen could buy in the United States

  • Economic Development: The goal of using economic growth to improve living standards.

    • Developed countries: United States, Canada, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and most countries of Europe. (Mostly they are highly industrialized and their per capita GDP PPP is high)

    • Developing countries: Every other country has 5.5 billion people.

  • Environmentally sustainable economic development: Involves using political and economic systems to discourage environmentally harmful and unsustainable forms of economic growth that degrade natural capital.

  • Sources of pollution

    • Point sources: single, identifiable source

    • Nonpoint sources: disbursed and difficult to identify

1.3 How Are Our Ecological Footprints Affecting the Earth

• Some Resources are Renewable

  • Resource

    • Anything obtained from the environment to meet our needs and wants

  • Conservation: The control of natural resources so as to prevent resource waste and maintain supply for both present and future generations

  • Perpetual resource: This is also known as solar energy because it is renewed continuously and is expected to last for about 6 billion years.

  • Renewable resource: These can be replenished fairly quickly through natural process as long as it is not used up faster than it is renewed.

    • Examples: Forests, grasslands, fisheries, freshwater, fresh air, and fertile soil

  • Sustainable yield: The highest rate at which a renewable resource can be used indefinitely without reducing its availability.

  • Environmental degradation: When renewable resources are used past their replacement rate the available supply begins to shrink.

• We Can Overexploit Commonly Shared Renewable Resources: The Tragedy of the Commons

  • 3 Types of Property/resource rights

    • Private property: An individual’s right to land, minerals, or other resources.

    • Common property: When big groups of people own the rights to certain resources.

    • Open access to renewable resources→ Owned by no one and available for use by anyone at little or no charge.

  • Garrett Hardin (1915-2003): Biologist that called degradation the tragedy of the commons.

  • Use shared resources at rates well below their estimates of sustainable yields by reducing or regulating the use of the resources

  • Convert open-access resources to private ownership

• Some Resources Are Not Renewable

  • Nonrenewable resource: Exist in a fixed quantity, or stock, in the earth’s crust.

    • Energy resources (coal and oil)

    • Metallic mineral resources (copper and aluminum)

    • Nonmetallic mineral resources (salt and sand)

  • Reuse: Using a resource over and over in the same form

  • Recycling: Collecting waste material and making new things from it.

• Our Ecological Footprints Are Growing

  • Ecological footprint: The amount of biologically productive land and water needed to supply the people in a particular country or area with resources and to absorb and recycle the waste and pollution produced by such resource use.

  • Per capita ecological footprint: The average ecological footprint of an individual in a given country or area

  • Biological capacity: The ability of an ecosystem to get rid of human waste and replenish renewable resources.

  • Ecological deficit: When the ecological footprint is greater than the biological capacity.

• Cultural Changes Have Increased Our Ecological Footprints

  • Culture: The whole of a society’s knowledge, beliefs, technology, and practices, and changes in this can greatly affect the earth.

    • Agricultural revolution: This started 10,000-12,000 years ago, when humans started growing their own food and eating animals for food, clothing, etc.

    • Industrial-medical revolution: It started about 275 years ago and it was when we started inventing machines for goods and we learned how to receive energy from fossil fuels. We also figured out how to make large quantities of food.

    • Information-globalization revolution: It started about 50 years ago and it’s when we developed new technologies for gaining rapid access to more information and resources on a global scale.

  • Environmental scientists say that in order to bring a new environment, revolution, or sustainability we need to decrease our ecological footprint.

1.4 What Is Pollution And What Can We Do About It?

• Pollution Comes from a Number of Sources

  • Pollution: Anything in the environment that can be harmful to the health or survival of organisms.

    • There are multiple ways pollution can get into our environment. It can happen naturally for example a volcano eruption can bring pollution. Or it can happen anthropogenically (human activity) such as through the burning of fossil fuels.

  • 2 types of pollutants we produce

    • Point Sources: Single identifiable sources. Such as a car exhaust pipe.

    • Nonpoint Sources: Dispersed and often difficult to identify. Such as runoff of fertilizers and pesticides from farmlands going into bodies of water.

  • 2 main types of pollutants

    • Biodegradable pollutants: Materials that can be broken down by natural processes

      • Examples: Human sewage or newspapers

    • Nondegradable pollutants: Materials that natural processes cannot break down.

      • Examples: Lead, mercury, and arsenic

  • 3 types of unwanted effects of pollutants

    1. They can disrupt life support systems for organisms

    2. They can destroy wildlife, human health, and property

    3. They can create bad smells, noise, tastes, and sights.

• We Can Clean Up Pollution or Prevent It

  • 2 solutions to pollution

    • Pollution cleanup or output pollution control: Involves cleaning up or diluting pollutants after have been created

    • Pollution prevention or input pollution control: Gets rid of the production/creation of pollutants

  • 3 problems with relaying primarily on pollution cleanup

    1. Can only be classified as a temporary bandage.

    2. Cleanups often result in the removal of pollutants in one environment and an increase in another.

    3. One pollutant reaches a harmful level in the environment it can be expensive or impossible to reduce to a healthy level.

• Living sustainably

  • Live off the earth’s natural income without depleting or degrading the natural capital that supplies it

• Environmentally sustainable society

  • Meets current needs in a just and equitable manner without compromising future generations’ ability to meet their needs

• Natural income

  • Renewable resources

1.5 Why Do We Have Environmental Problems?

• Experts Have Identified Five Basic Causes of Environmental Problems

  • Causes of environmental problems

    • Population growth

    • Unsustainable resource use

    • Poverty

    • Excluding environmental costs from market prices

    • Trying to manage nature without knowing enough about it

• Poverty Has Harmful Environmental and Health Effects

  • Poverty: When people are unable to get their basic needs met

    • In order to survive people may degrade forests and the environment

  • The more poverty the greater the need for childbirth

  • Pollution can increase poverty

    • Many people who are in poverty die early because of health problems

    • Examples:

      • Malnutrition: lack of protein and nutrients needed for good health

      • Little to no access to sanitation or clean water

      • Respiratory disease from inhaling toxic pollution

• Affluence Has Harmful and Beneficial Environmental Effects

  • Affluence: Having a lot of money or being wealthy

  • People with affluence are rapidly consuming and wasting resources

• People Have Different Views of Environmental Problems and Their Solutions

  • Environmental worldview: Set of assumptions or values reflecting how you think the world works and what you think your role in the world is.

  • Environmental ethics: Our belief about how the environment is to be treated and if what we are currently doing is right or wrong.

    • Ethical question example: Why should we care about the environment

  • Planetary management worldview: Nature exists primarily to satisfy human needs and growing wants, we are separate from nature, and we can govern the earth's life-support systems indefinitely

  • Stewardship worldview: Although we may and should manage the earth for our own advantage, we also have a moral obligation to treat it with care and responsibility.

  • Environmental wisdom worldview: Believes that nature exists for all species, not just for us, and that we are completely dependent on it

• We Can Work Together to Solve Environmental Problems

  • Social capital: Involves getting people with different views and values to talk and listen to one another and to work together to help solve environmental problems. This can help us shift into a more sustainable and economic society.

  • Steps to make an environmental decision

    • Identify an environmental problem

    • Gather scientific information

    • Propose one or more solutions

    • Project the short and long-term environmental and economic advantages and disadvantages of each solution

    • Decide on and implement a solution

    • Evaluate consequences

    • Revise decision if it is needed

1.6 What are the Four Scientific Principles of Sustainability?

• Studying Nature Reveals Four Scientific Principles of Sustainability

  • 4 scientific principles of sustainability

    • Reliance on Solar Energy: The sun warms the planet and supports photosynthesis used by plants to provide food for themselves and for us and most other animals.

    • Biodiversity (biological diversity): The variety of different organisms, the genes they contain, the ecosystems in which they exist, and the natural services they provide allow us to adapt to the environment when it changes.

    • Population Control: competition for limited resources among different species places a limit on how much their population can grow.

    • Nutrient Cycling: Natural process recycles chemicals that plants and animals need to stay alive and reproduce