Environmental Science Notes

Analyzing the Tragedy of the Commons

  • Hardin's "Tragedy of the Commons" analyzes how shared resources can be depleted if individuals prioritize personal gain over collective well-being.
  • Hardin suggested privatization and governmental controls on population as solutions but these have limitations and ethical concerns.
  • Overuse and pollution are primary challenges in common areas like oceans, forests and national parks.
  • Overuse leads to decreased fish populations, compacted rangelands and recreational challenges.
  • Pollution results in air, water and noise contamination.
  • Common areas overuse and pollution results in biodiversity loss.

Legislation About the Commons

  • Legislation such as the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, Coastal Zone Management Act, and Public Rangelands Improvement Act attempt to protect common resources.
  • Policy makers include Congress, the Courts, interest groups, and the President.
  • The Kyoto Protocol, an international agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, faced challenges due to conflicting national interests.
  • After a policy has been formulated and made into law, implementation is the next step.
  • The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) requires environmental impact statements (EIS) for proposed federal actions.

Model of How an Environmental Problem Finds a Solution Through Environmental Regulation

  • Endangered Species Act has demonstrated a major impact in recovering species.
  • Public lands in the United States includes virtually all ecosystem types and range from developed areas to totally undeveloped areas.
  • Public lands are managed for multiple use, which includes providing clean water, fish and wildlife habitat, and recreation.
  • Public lands are used for its timber.
  • Clearcutting is not practiced as widely on federal "common" lands as in the past.
  • Usal Redwood Forest manages the forest on a long term basis for the economic stability of the community, as well as restoring the forest habitat, restoring the fish habitat, and also for sequestering carbon, and carbon sequestration is a main part of our operations right now.

Conflicting Philosophies of Public Land Management

  • Conservationists focused on nature's instrumental value or value based on usefulness to humans.
  • Preservationists have focused on nature’s intrinsic value, or value regardless of whether nature is useful to humans.
  • Gifford Pinchot promoted conservation through government involvement, while John Muir advocated for wilderness preservation.
  • Conservation biologists apply scientific knowledge to protect biodiversity.
  • Aldo Leopold's land ethic tied together sound scientific principles with ethical principles into a "land ethic."
  • A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.

Keystone Species

  • Keystone species help maintain the populations of other species in balance and help maintain vital links in the food web.
  • Yellowstone National Park had a fractured food web when wolves were eradicated
  • Wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park.
  • Public lands are managed for multiple use.
  • Public lands' purpose is the protection of natural areas, as well as sites of historical importance from extensive human development.

Agriculture

  • Agriculture is the practice of raising crops and livestock for human use and consumption
  • Pastoralism is defined as the herding of animals that have been domesticated or partly domesticated.
  • Early agricultural areas represented a huge change in how people interacted with the environment
  • Unlike hunter-gatherer and pastoral societies, agricultural societies are sedentary
  • Agriculture has a number of advantages over pastoralism or hunting and gathering.

Disadvantages of Agriculture

  • Dependence on only a few food sources
  • Increased vulnerability to weather variations
  • Dependence on planting and harvesting times and protection of crops
  • Pollution of living areas
  • Population growth
  • Modern agriculture lacks genetic diversity
  • There are different types of agriculture.

Food

  • Industrial agriculture, lacks genetic diversity.
  • There are key reasons why there are food shortages.
  • Farmers have practiced many different methods of preparing soil for crops.
  • Tilling, slash and burn farming, not rotating crops, and the use of fertilizers have all played a part in the environmental damage ensued by agricultural practices.
  • Soil conservation farming (leaving fields untilled) is one way that farmers are combating depletion of soil nutrients.

Fertilizer and Irrigation

  • Fertilizers can be a culprit in environmental damage.
  • There are different types of irrigation that have different impacts.
  • Drip irrigation minimizes evaporation.
  • Sprinklers provide equal water distribution.

Causes of Overfishing

  • 70 percent of the world’s fishing stock is close to or already below recovery levels, in part to specific fishing practices.
    • Commercial fishing fleets are an example of the tragedy of the commons
    • The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) is an international agreement about ocean use that includes restricting overfishing.
    • The Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Reauthorization Act attempted to address overfishing by setting aside 200 nautical miles of an Exclusive Economic Zone of the U.S. coast to be used exclusively by the United States.

Overfishing Regulations and Meat Production

  • Solutions to overfishing consists of the following measures:
    • limiting the number of fish that can be caught per day at any given location
    • restricting fishing boats to only a few days per month
    • restricting access to zones of the ocean to allow for recovering of populations
    • using nets with bigger mesh so juvenile fish can escape, monitoring fishing activities by satellite
    • exploring alternative sources of income for fishermen
    • Global demand for meat has quadrupled over the past 50 years.
    • Methods of meat production include free-range grazing and concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), also called feedlots.

Metallic and Nonmetallic Minerals

  • Resources mined or extracted from Earth’s crust include metallic minerals, nonmetallic minerals, and fossil fuels.
  • Surface mining involves removing minerals near the surface of the Earth
  • Minerals can also be extracted by underground mining.
  • Metallic minerals tend to be hard, conductive, dense, and have a shiny or metallic luster
  • The external costs and impact to the environment have to be considered for both metallic minerals and nonmetallic miners.
  • The Federal Mine and Safety Act of 1977 consolidated health and safety regulations of the mining industry.

Human Health

  • Human health is impacted by living near a mine, can carry with it substantial health risks, including exposure to heavy metals in the surface water, groundwater, and soil
  • The lack of public policy on land use contributes to urbanization and sprawl as well
  • Sustainable urban land use is based on acknowledgement of limited resources, especially limited land resources.
  • Sustainable land use policies address human needs for urban land.

Measuring Ecological Footprint

  • An ecological footprint represents the total area of land and water needed to dispose of waste and provide needed resources for an individual, country, or entire world.
  • Global hectares (gha) measure the amount of biocapacity in biologically productive land or water, which can change for various reasons from year to year.
  • If a country has an ecological deficit, it means they are exceeding the regenerative capacity and biocapacity of their land and ocean resources.

Sustainability

  • In a general sense, sustainability is the ability to maintain a state of being.
  • An increase in consumption of resources may result in a scarcity of critical resources, including food, land, water, and fuel.
  • The Earth is made of many systems: the biosphere (living things), lithosphere (the land), atmosphere (the air), hydrosphere (the water), and sub sphere of the hydrosphere, the cryosphere (ice).
  • The sustainable yield of a resource is the amount that can be removed or harvested without compromising the ecosystem or initial natural capital.

Environmental Economics

  • Internal costs are the cost of the components.
  • External costs are related to pollution or other forms of degradation of the environment.
  • Market economy relies on the marketplace where buyers and sellers interact to determine allocation of goods and services and to set prices.
  • GDP = consumption + gross investment + government spending + (exports – imports)
    Gross National Product is the value of goods and services produced by a country's citizens, regardless of location.
  • Sustainable development is the concept that sustainable methods for meeting human needs and wants are possible.

Sustainable Agriculture

  • The main goal of sustainable agricultural practices is to prevent soil erosion.
  • Traditional agriculture involve terracing methods.
  • Approximately one third of the world’s population lives in semi-arid conditions.
  • There are regeneration techniques can allow large areas of barren land to be reclaimed.
  • Most traditional agriculture crops can be grown with alley cropping.
  • Significance of forests in climate change.

Sustainable Forest Management (SFM)

  • Forest management plans currently attempt to negotiate the tension between the consumption of forest lumber and the preservation of forests.
  • Use of forest products and sustainable management approaches are important for future generations.
  • Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI) initiated by forest industry
  • Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) initiated by environmental groups.
  • There is an importance of setting Prescribed burns in order to reduce wildfires.

Pests and Pesticides

  • Pesticides have both advantages and disadvantages
  • Pesticides may kill species they don’t intend to kill.
  • They may persist in the ecosystem or they may bioaccumulate and biomagnify.
  • Integrated pest management (IPM) aims to reduce pest quantities while having the smallest possible negative impact on the environment.
    -Genetically engineered crops may increase their resistance to pests and diseases.

DDT and EPA

  • DDT remains a classic example of a pesticide with severe environmental consequences
  • Pesticides also affect human beings in significant ways, depending on the pesticide, concentration, and exposure.
  • Environmental Protection Agency officials would like to share with people is to make sure they are dealing with reputable, licensed pest control services.