GEE Reviewer
Sustainability and the Greening of American Campuses
Colleges across the United States are actively incorporating sustainability into their infrastructure and academic priorities.
This includes the implementation of green building designs and the promotion of material reuse.
Environmental science curriculums are being expanded to educate the campus community on sustainable practices.
Sustainability is defined as the ability of both ecosystems and human cultural systems to survive, flourish, and adapt together in the face of constantly changing environments over long periods of time.
Principles of Sustainability
Life on Earth has been successfully sustained for billions of years through three primary factors:
Solar energy.
Biodiversity.
Chemical cycling.
The preservation of life depends on the energy provided by the sun and the natural capital provided by the Earth.
Transitioning toward sustainability involves shifting to full-cost pricing and seeking win-win solutions that benefit both people and the environment.
Environmental science is an interdisciplinary study of our interactions with the world with three specific goals:
To learn how life on Earth has survived and thrived.
To understand our interactions with the environment.
To find methods to address environmental problems and live more sustainably.
Scientific Principles of Sustainability: Lessons From Nature
The three scientific principles of sustainability demonstrate that life is sustained by interdependence rather than independence:
Dependence on Solar Energy: The sun supplies nutrients directly and indirectly to life forms.
Biodiversity: A wide variety of life provides essential ecosystem services and the ability for systems to adapt to changes.
Chemical (Nutrient) Cycling: In natural systems, there is no waste; the waste of one organism becomes a useful resource for another.
Components and Degradation of Natural Capital
Natural Capital: This consists of natural resources and ecosystem services that keep humans and other species alive and support human economies.
Natural Resources: Materials and energy in nature that are essential or useful to humans. Examples include:
Inexhaustible/Renewable energy: Sun, wind, and water flows.
Renewable resources: Air, water, soil, and life (biodiversity).
Nonrenewable minerals: Iron and sand.
Nonrenewable energy (fossil fuels): Natural gas, oil, and coal.
Ecosystem Services: Natural services provided by healthy ecosystems that support life and economies at no monetary cost. Examples include:
Air purification, climate control, and UV protection (facilitated by the ozone layer).
Water purification and waste treatment.
Population control and pest control.
Soil renewal, food production, and nutrient recycling.
Natural Capital Degradation: This occurs when human activities degrade normally renewable natural resources. Examples include:
Climate change.
Air pollution.
Shrinking forests and degraded wildlife habitats.
Species extinction.
Soil erosion.
Water pollution and aquifer depletion.
Declining ocean fisheries.
Humans degrade natural capital by using renewable resources faster than nature can restore them and by overloading resources with pollution and waste.
Social Science Principles of Sustainability
Sustainable solutions require crossing disciplines to include economic, political, and ethical perspectives:
Full-Cost Pricing (Economics): Including the harmful environmental and health costs of goods and services in their market prices.
Win-Win Solutions (Political Science): Focusing on solutions that benefit the largest number of people as well as the environment.
Responsibility to Future Generations (Ethics): Accepting the moral obligation to leave the planet's life-support systems in as good a condition as what we inherited.
Corporate subsidies can be used to encourage sustainability, and individual or local contributions are vital for long-term success.
Classification of Resources
A resource is anything obtained from the environment to meet human needs and wants.
Inexhaustible Resources: Resources that are perpetually available and expected to last for billions of years (e.g., solar energy).
Renewable Resources: Resources that can be replenished by natural processes within hours to centuries, provided they are not used up faster than they can be replaced. The limit of use is known as their sustainable yield.
Nonrenewable (Exhaustible) Resources: Resources that exist in a fixed quantity in the Earth's crust. They can be renewed only through long-term geologic processes over millions to billions of years.
Sustainable resource use revolves around three practices:
Reduce.
Reuse.
Recycle.
Global Resource Use and Environmental Impact
Industrialized Countries: Comprise approximately of the world’s population. These include the United States, Canada, and Western Europe.
Developing Countries: Comprise approximately of the world’s population.
Middle income, moderately developed countries: China, India, and Brazil.
Low income, least developed countries: Nigeria, Bangladesh, and Haiti.
Pollution Sources and Management
Pollution: The contamination of the environment by chemical, noise, or heat substances (pollutants) at levels that are harmful to the health, survival, or activities of humans or other organisms.
Sources of Pollution:
Point Sources: Single, identifiable origins (e.g., a factory smokestack).
Nonpoint Sources: Dispersed and difficult to identify sources (e.g., pesticides blown from the land into the air or trash washed from several lands into streams).
Dealing with Pollution:
Pollution Cleanup: A post-production effort involving the dilution or reduction of pollutants after they have been released.
Pollution Prevention: A pre-production effort that reduces or eliminates the production of pollutants altogether.
The Tragedy of the Commons
This concept describes the cumulative degradation of commonly shared or open-access renewable resources due to overuse.
Shared Resources: Grasslands, forests, and streams.
Open-Access Resources: The atmosphere, open oceans, and fish.
The degradation occurs because individuals incorrectly believe that their small impact is negligible, often thinking, "The little bit that I use or pollute is not enough to matter, and anyway, it’s a renewable resource."
Ecological Footprints and Impact Modeling
Ecological Footprint: The amount of land and water needed to supply a population or geographic area with renewable resources and to absorb or recycle the wastes and pollution produced by that resource usage.
Ecological Deficit: This occurs when a population's total ecological footprint is larger than the biological capacity of the area to replenish resources and absorb wastes.
The IPAT Model: Developed in the early 1970s to determine the environmental impact of human activities:
= Environmental Impact.
= Population size.
= Affluence (resource consumption per person).
= Technology (beneficial or harmful environmental effects).
Primary Causes of Environmental Problems
There are five fundamental causes of the environmental problems we face:
Population Growth: Unchecked growth leads to natural capital degradation.
Unsustainable Resource Use: Habitual waste and high consumption.
Poverty: Desperate short-term survival needs lead to the degradation of forests, topsoil, and wildlife. It also results in malnutrition and lack of access to clean water and sanitation.
Excluding Environmental Costs from Market Prices: Consumers remain unaware of the damage caused by their purchases.
Increasing Isolation from Nature: More than half the world's population lives in urban environments and is unaware of the origins of their resources or the wastes generated by their production.
The Influence of Affluence and Poverty
Harmful Effects of Affluence:
High levels of consumption and waste.
Increased air and water pollution.
Acquisition of resources without regard for environmental consequences.
Beneficial Effects of Affluence:
Funding for better education.
Support for scientific research.
Development of technological solutions to improve environmental quality, such as providing safe drinking water.
Poverty and Health:
Survival requirements often lead to the degradation of grasslands and fisheries.
Health impacts include high rates of malnutrition and exposure to indoor and outdoor air pollution.
Environmental Worldviews and History
An environmental worldview is a set of assumptions and values reflecting how an individual thinks the world works and what their role should be.
Major Categories of Worldviews:
Human-centered: Includes planetary management and stewardship worldviews.
Life-centered: All species have value regardless of their use to humans.
Earth-centered: Focuses on the preservation of the Earth's systems.
Historical Schools of Thought in the U.S.:
Preservationist School (John Muir): Advocated for leaving wilderness areas on public lands entirely untouched.
Conservationist School (Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot): Advocated for managing public lands scientifically and wisely to provide resources for people.
Creating an Environmentally Sustainable Society
Living sustainably means living off the natural income provided by the Earth's natural capital without depleting or degrading the capital itself.
Natural income includes renewable resources such as plants, animals, soil, clean water, and air.
Most degraded environments can recover if given enough time, though some may take hundreds or thousands of years.
Societal change can happen faster than expected; often, only of a population needs to change their behavior to make a significant difference.
Case Study: The Eco-City of Tianjin, China
Tianjin is a sustainable community developed on non-arable land in a region facing water shortages.
It serves as a model for reducing, reusing, and recycling resources in one of China's fastest-growing regions.
The development of such eco-cities reflects the application of the three big ideas: using natural capital/resources, utilizing full-cost pricing, and finding win-win solutions.