Environmental Science and Sustainability Foundations

Introduction to the Environment and Sustainability

• Definition of the Environment: The environment encompasses all living and nonliving things with which organisms interact. Examples of nonliving components include air, water, and sunlight.
• Environmental Science: This is defined as an interdisciplinary science that studies the life systems and connections found in nature.
• Significance of Sustainability: Sustainability refers to the capacity of the Earth’s natural systems—which support life, human society, and the economy—to survive, flourish, or adapt to changing environmental conditions indefinitely.
• Chronological Resilience: The Earth has sustained a vast variety of life for approximately $3.8$ billion years, surviving despite drastic shifts in environmental conditions.

The Three Pillars of Sustainability

Sustainability is built upon three intersecting pillars: social, environmental, and economic factors.

• The Environmental Pillar: Focuses on natural resource use, environmental management, and pollution prevention across air, water, land, and waste.
• The Social Pillar: Involves standard of living, education, community development, and equal opportunity.
• The Economic Pillar: Concerns profit, cost savings, economic growth, and research and development (R&D).
• Intersectional Concepts:
  • Social-Environmental: Environmental justice and natural resources stewardship (locally and globally).
  • Environmental-Economic: Energy efficiency and subsidies/incentives for the use of natural resources.
  • Economic-Social: Business ethics, fair trade, and worker's rights.

Scientific Principles of Sustainability

Nature provides three primary "lessons" or principles that explain how life persists over long periods:

1. Dependence on Solar Energy: The sun provides warmth and the energy that plants use to produce nutrients, which are essential for the survival of other species.
2. Biodiversity: This includes genetic, species, and ecosystem diversity. The astounding variety and adaptability of natural systems provide benefits to humans and a mechanism for life to adapt to new environmental conditions.
3. Chemical (Nutrient) Cycling: This is the circulation of chemicals from the environment (soil and water) to organisms and back to the environment. Because there is a finite supply of nutrients on Earth (unlike the constant inflow of solar energy), recycling is essential. In nature, there is no such thing as "waste."

Natural Capital and Resources

• Natural Capital: A collective term representing the Earth’s natural resources plus ecosystem services that keep humans and other species alive and support economies.
• Natural Resources: Useful materials and energy found in nature.
  • Inexhaustible Resources: Resources that will not run out (e.g., solar energy).
  • Renewable Resources: Resources that can be replenished through natural processes (e.g., forests, grasslands).
  • Nonrenewable (Exhaustible) Resources: Resources that exist in fixed quantities (e.g., fossil fuels, minerals).
• Maximum Sustainable Yield: The highest rate at which a renewable resource can be used indefinitely without reducing its available supply.
• Ecosystem Services: Natural processes provided by healthy ecosystems to people at no monetary cost (e.g., nutrient cycling, purification of air and water).

The Three Social Science Principles of Sustainability

Beyond scientific principles, a transition to a sustainable future requires social and economic shifts:

1. Economics: Full-cost Pricing: Market prices of goods and services should include the harmful environmental and health costs associated with their production.
2. Political Science: Win-win Solutions: Solutions to environmental problems should be sought that provide benefits to both people and the environment.
3. Ethics: Responsibility to Future Generations: Humans have an ethical obligation to leave the planet's life-support systems in a condition as good as or better than they are now.

Global Environmental Challenges and Degradation

• Living Unsustainably: Humans are currently wasting, depleting, polluting, and degrading natural capital.
• Human Land Impact: Human activities directly affect approximately $83 \%$ of the Earth’s land surface through urban development, crop and energy production, mining, and timber cutting.
• Marine Impact: Only $13 \%$ of the ocean surface remains as "wilderness" with very low human impact. Human activities impact the majority of global oceans.
• Extinction Rates: Species are currently becoming extinct at a rate at least $100$ times faster than in pre-human times.
• Primary Causes of Environmental Problems:
  • Human population growth.
  • Unsustainable resource use (especially shared renewable resources).
  • Omission of harmful environmental costs in market pricing.
  • Increasing isolation and disconnection from nature.
  • Competing environmental worldviews.

Ecological Footprints and Economics

• Ecological Footprint: A measure of the total environmental impact of a human population. It is calculated as the amount of biologically productive land and water needed to supply a population with renewable resources and to recycle their wastes.
• Biocapacity: The ability of a specific area's ecosystems to regenerate renewable resources and absorb the resulting waste and pollution.
• Ecological Deficit: This occurs when a population's ecological footprint exceeds the biocapacity of the area, leading to the depletion of natural capital.
• Economic Disparity:
  • More-developed Countries: Industrialized nations with high average income. They represent $17 \%$ of the world’s population but utilize $70 \%$ of natural resources.
  • Less-developed Countries: Comprise $83 \%$ of the population but utilize only about $30 \%$ of natural resources.

The Tragedy of the Commons

• Definition: The degradation of commonly shared renewable resources that are not owned by anyone and are accessible to almost everyone (e.g., atmosphere, open oceans, fish stocks, forests, streams, and aquifers).
• Mechanism: The cumulative effect of many individuals exploiting a shared resource leads to its ultimate exhaustion or ruin.
• Solutions:
  • Regulating access and use.
  • Mutual agreements.
  • Privatizing the resource.
  • Using the resource at or below the maximum sustainable yield.

Environmental Worldviews and Ethics

Worldviews represent beliefs about how the natural world works and the appropriate role of humans within it.

• Human-Centered Worldviews:
  • Planetary Management: Humans are the most important species and should manage the Earth for their own benefit. Nature is valued based on its utility to people.
  • Stewardship: Humans have an ethical responsibility to be caring managers of the Earth, encouraging environmentally beneficial economic growth.
  • Criticisms: Humans may lack the knowledge to manage the complex Earth system; civilizations historically decline; we have exceeded planetary boundaries.
• Life-Centered Worldview: Asserts that all forms of life have inherent value regardless of their utility to humans and that we should avoid hastening extinctions.
• Earth-Centered (Environmental Wisdom) Worldview: Holds that humans are part of a community of life and must learn how the Earth has sustained itself for $3.8$ billion years to live sustainaby. Earth care is viewed as self-care.
• Environmental Ethics: Beliefs regarding right and wrong behavior toward the environment. Environmental justice is a key social expression of this ethics.

The Scientific Method and Environmental Science

Environmental science relies on a rigorous, structured process to test ideas:

• Tools of Science: Observations, quantitative measurements (data), experimentation, and models (simplified representations of complex systems).
• Steps of the Scientific Method:
  1. Identify a problem.
  2. Conduct a literature search to find what is already known.
  3. Ask a specific question.
  4. Propose a hypothesis.
  5. Use the hypothesis to make testable projections.
  6. Perform experiments to collect data and test projections.
  7. Analyze data for patterns.
  8. Accept or revise the hypothesis based on results.
• Scientific Theory: A well-tested and widely accepted hypothesis.
• Scientific Law (Law of Nature): A well-tested, widely accepted description of something that happens repeatedly in the same way (e.g., the law of gravity).
• Quality Control: Scientists publish details of their methods and results, which then undergo peer review for validation and self-correction.

Core Case Study: Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest

• Location: New Hampshire.
• Research Question: What is the effect of forest cover on watersheds and nutrient retention in topsoil?
• Experimental Design: A controlled experiment comparing two watershed drainages over 3 years. One was an uncut forest (control site) and the other was stripped of vegetation (experimental site).
• Results for the Deforested Site:
  • Increased runoff by $30-40 \%$
  • Increased soil erosion.
  • Increased dissolved nutrient loss ($6-8$ times the loss seen in the undisturbed control site).

Sustainability Research and Education at FSU

• Relevant Program: The Environment & Society (BS) major is the closest degree program to sustainability studies at Florida State University.
• Resources: FSU Sustainable Campus office provides resources including:
  • Sustainability Course Guide: https://sustainablecampus.fsu.edu/resources/sustainability-course-degree-guide/sustainable-course-guide
  • Degree Programs: https://sustainablecampus.fsu.edu/resources/sustainability-degree-programs
  • Student Engagement: https://sustainablecampus.fsu.edu/students
• UN Goals: Students are encouraged to look toward the United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda, which features $17$ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) established in 2015 to end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure prosperity.