Chapter 1 Notes

1.1 What is an environmentally sustainable society?

- The environment is everything around us. We are utterly dependent on the environment for air,
water, food, shelter, energy, and everything else we need to stay alive and healthy.

- Environmental science is an interdisciplinary study of how humans interact with the

environment of living and nonliving things.

- Environmental science integrates information and ideas from the following areas:
Natural sciences: biology, chemistry, and geology
Social sciences: geography, economics, political science, and demography
Humanities: philosophy and ethics

- Ecology, the study of how organisms interact with their environment and with each other, is a
key subfield of environmental science.

- Important terms related to ecology:

Species: a group of organisms with distinctive traits and, for sexually reproducing organisms,
can mate and produce fertile offspring.
Example: Human being = Homo sapiens sapiens. Homo classifies upright animals with large
brain, language, and extended parental care of young. The first sapiens classifies animals with
sparse body hair, high forehead, and large brain. The second sapiens classifies animals capable
of sophisticated cultural evolution. Usually we would

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

- Environmentalism is not the same as environmental science. Environmentalism is a social

movement dedicated to protecting the earth’s life-support systems for us and all other forms of
life. It is practiced more in the political and ethical arenas than in the realm of science.

- Sustainability is the ability of the earth’s various natural systems and human cultural systems
and economies to survive and adapt to changing environmental conditions indefinitely.

- Natural capital is a critical component of sustainability. It includes the natural resources and
natural services (related to natural processes) that keep us and other forms of life alive and
support our economies.

- Natural resources are materials and energy in nature that are essential or useful to humans.
These resources are divided into two (2) categories:
Renewable: air, water, soil, plants, and wind, etc
Nonrenewable: copper, oil, and coal, etc.

- Natural resources are supported by solar capital (energy from the sun) because it warms the
planet and supports photosynthesis. The direct input of solar energy also produces indirect
forms of renewable solar energy such as wind, flowing water, and biofuels made from plants
and plant residues.
- One vital natural service is nutrient cycling, the circulation of chemicals necessary for life, from
the environment (mostly from soil and water) through organisms and back to the environment.
Example: Topsoil, the upper layer of the earth’s crust, provides the nutrients that support the
plants, animals, and microorganisms that live on land. When they die and decay, they resupply
the soil with these nutrients. No life would exist without this service.

- A second component of sustainability is to recognize that many human activities can degrade
natural capital by using normally renewable resources fast than nature can renew them.
(Related to the Tragedy of the Commons by Garret Hardin)
Example 1: We are clearing of mature forest much faster than nature can replenish them;
Example 2: We are harvesting many species of ocean fish faster than they can replenish
themselves.

- A third component of sustainability is the search of solution by environmental scientists to

problems such as degradation of natural capital. However, scientists’ work is limited to finding
scientific solutions. The implementation of scientific solution usually requires coordination of
political processes and agencies.
Example: Scientific solution for overharvesting of fish is to stop harvesting. Such act requires
government laws and regulations.

- The search for solutions often involves conflicts, usually between scientific community, private
corporations, and government. Dealing with such conflicts often involves making compromises,
which is the fourth component of sustainability.

- Any shift toward environmental sustainability should be based on scientific concepts and
results that are widely accepted by experts in a particular field (more on Chapter 2). In making
such a shift, individuals matter. It ultimately depends on the actions of individuals within that
society.

- Our ultimate goal is to create an environmentally sustainable society – one that meets the
current and future basic resource needs of its people in a just and equitable manner without
compromising the ability of future generations to meet their basic needs.

- “Protect your capital and live off the income it provides.” Deplete or waste your capital, and you
will move from a sustainable to an unsustainable lifestyle.

- Living sustainably means living off natural income, the renewable resources such as plants,
animals, and soil provided by natural capital. This means preserving the earth’s natural capital,
which supplies this income, while providing the human population with adequate and equitable
access to this natural income for the foreseeable future.

- There is a growing body of scientific evidence that we are living unsustainably by waste,
depleting, and degrading the earth’s natural capital at an exponentially accelerating rate. (Think
about future energy shortage by fossil fuel, desertification, and extinctions of valuable species.)

- In 2005, the United Nations released its Millennium Ecosystem Assessment that states human
activities are degrading or overusing about 62% of the earth’s natural services. It warns,
“human activity is putting such a strain on the natural functions of Earth that the ability of the
planet’s ecosystems to sustain future generations can no longer be taken for granted.”
1.2 How can environmentally sustainable societies grow economically?

- Economic growth is an increase in nation’s output of goods and services. It is usually measured
by the percentage of change in a country’s 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.

- In the United States, the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) performs the calculation of GDP.
The BEA is part of the U.S. Department of Commerce. GDP data is released quarterly in January,
April, July, and October. The recent release was on July 30, 2010. The GDP for the second
quarter (from April to June) is estimated at an annual rate of +2.4%. In the first quarter of 2010,
the real GDP increased at an annual rate of 3.7%.

“Real gross domestic product -- the output of goods and services produced by labor and
property located in the United States -- increased at an annual rate of 2.4 percent in the
second quarter of 2010, (that is, from the first quarter to the second quarter), according to
the "advance" estimate released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. In the first quarter,
real GDP increased 3.7 percent.

The Bureau emphasized that the second-quarter advance estimate released today is based on
source data that are incomplete or subject to further revision by the source agency (see the
box on page 3). The "second" estimate for the second quarter, based on more complete data,
will be released on August 27, 2010.”

- Economic statistician Julius Shiskin (1975) proposed a definition that defined recession as two
consecutive quarters of negative GDP or real economic growth. The recent recession started in
2008 Q4 (GDP: -7.9%) and lasted until 2009 Q2 (GDP: -0.4%).

- Unlike recession, the term “depression” does not have a technical definition. There are a few
proposed definitions: 1. a decline of real GDP exceeding 10%, or 2. a recession lasting two (2) or
more years.

- Changes in a country’s economic growth per person are measured by per capita GDP: the GDP
divides by the total population at midyear.

- Different countries have different currencies and each currency has its own purchasing power.
To compare countries with the consideration of purchasing power, economists use a tool called
purchasing power parity (PPP). It combines per capita GDP and PPP for any given country to
generate a term per capita GDP PPP, a measure of the amount of goods and services that a
country’s average citizen could buy in the United States.

- The United Nations (U.N.) classifies the world’s countries as economically developed or
developing based primarily on their degree of industrialization and their per capita GDP PPP.

The developed countries (with 1.2 bn people) include the United States, Canada, Japan,
Australia, New Zealand, and most countries of Europe. Most are highly industrialized and have a
high per capita GDP PPP.

All other nations are classified as developing countries, most of them in Africa, Asia, and Latin
America.
Middle-income, moderately developed countries: China, India, Brazil, Turkey, Thailand, and
Mexico
Low-income, least developed countries where per capita GDP PPP is steadily declining.
 There are a total of 49 countries in this category with 11% of the world’s population. The
countries include Angola, Congo, Belarus, Nigeria, Nicaragua, and Jordan.

- About 97% of the projected increase in the world’s population between 2008 and 2050 is
expected to take place in developing countries, which are least equipped to handle such large
population increases.

- More than half of the people in the world live in extreme poverty and try to survive on a daily
income of less than USD$2. And one of every six people, classified as desperately poor, struggle
to survive on less than USD$1 a day.

- There are two major directions to create solutions against poverty.

1. Continuing conventional economic growth: helped to increase food supplies, allowed
people to live longer, and stimulated mass production of an array of useful goods and services
for many people.

2. Environmentally sustainable economic development: using political and economic

systems to discourage environmentally harmful and unsustainable forms of economic growth
that degrade natural capital, and to encourage environmentally beneficial and sustainable
forms of economic development that help sustain natural capital.

1.3 How are our ecological footprints affecting the Earth?

- A resource is anything obtained from the environment to meet our needs and wants.
Conservation is the management of natural resources with the goal of minimizing resource
waste and sustaining resource supplies for current and future generations.

- Resources directly available for use: solar energy, fresh air, wind, fresh surface water, fertile
soil, and wild edible plants

Resources that become useful only with some effort and technological ingenuity: petroleum,
iron, groundwater, cultivated crops

- Solar energy is called a perpetual resource because it is renewed continuously and is expected
to last at least 6 billion years as the sun completes its life cycle. The sun can last such long
period of time because it is fueled by nuclear reactions, specifically fusion reaction of hydrogen
atoms. If the energy comes from combustion reaction (like burning of fossil fuel), the lifetime of
the sun will be very short.

- Renewable resource can be replenished fairly quickly on a human time scale, from hours to
hundreds of years through natural processes as long as it is not used up faster than it is
renewed.

- Environmental degradation is a process where we exceed a renewable resource’s natural

replacement rate – the available supply begins to shrink.

- The highest rate at which a renewable resource can be used indefinitely without reducing its
available supply is called its sustainable yield.
- Three types of property or resource rights:
1. Private property
Individuals or firms own the rights to land, minerals, or other resources.

2. Common property
The rights to certain resources are held by large groups of individuals. Example: Land that
belongs to a whole village can be used by anyone for activities such as grazing cows or sheep.

3. Open access renewable resources

Owned by no one and available for use by anyone at little or no charge. Example: clean air, open
ocean and its fish, and groundwater.

- Many common property and open access renewable resources have been degraded. One solution
is to use shared resources at rates well below their estimated sustainable yields by reducing use
of the resources, regulating access to the resources, or doing both.
Example: governments can establish laws and regulations limiting the annual harvests of
various types of ocean fish that are being harvested at unsustainable levels in their coastal
waters.

- Another solution is to convert open-access resources to private ownership. The reasoning is

that if you own something, you are more likely to protect your investment. This approach,
however, is not practical for global open-access resources – such as the atmosphere, the open
ocean, and most wildlife species – that cannot be divided up and converted to private property.

- Nonrenewable resources exist in fixed quantity in the earth’s crust. Geological processes can
renew such resources on a time scale of millions to billions of years. But on the much shorter
human time scale of hundreds to thousands of years, these resources can be depleted much
faster than they are formed. Examples of exhaustible resources include energy resources (such
as coal and oil), metallic mineral resources (such as copper and aluminum), and nonmetallic
mineral resources (such as salt and sand).

- We can often find substitutes for the nonrenewable resources. We have been developing the use
of renewable energy resources such as wind, the sun, flowing water (hydroelectric), and the
heat in the earth’s interior (geothermal) to reduce our dependence on nonrenewable fossil fuels
such as oil and coal. However, there may not be an acceptable or affordable substitute for
nonrenewable resources.

- Reuse is using a resource over and over in the same form. Example: glass bottles can be
collected, washed, and refilled many times. Reusing resources takes less energy and other
resources and produces less pollution and environmental degradation than recycling does.

- Recycle involves collecting waste materials and processing them into new materials. Example:
discarded aluminum cans can be crushed and melted to make new aluminum cans or other
aluminum products. Recycling nonrenewable metallic resources takes much less energy, water,
and other resources and produce much less pollution and environmental degradation than
exploiting virgin metallic resources.

- Ecological footprint is 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 wastes
and pollution produced by such resource use. The per capita ecological footprint is the
 average ecological footprint of an individual in a given country or area.

- If a country’s, or the world’s, total ecological footprint is larger than its biological, or
ecological, capacity to replenish its renewable resources and absorb the resulting waste
products and pollution, it is said to have an ecological deficit. Since the late 1980s, the world’s
ecological footprint has exceeded the ecological capacity and is expected to continuously
increase in the future. The U.S. has the world’s largest ecological footprint. If we follow the
current trend, by 2050, humanity will be trying to use twice as many renewable resources as
the planet can supply.

- Culture is the whole of a society’s knowledge, beliefs, technology, and practices, and human
cultural changes have had profound effects on the earth.

- Three revolutions that have impacted the human society dramatically:

1. Agricultural revolution (10,000 – 12,000 years ago)
Humans learned how to grow and breed plants and animals for food, clothing’s, and other
purposes.

2. Industrial-medical revolution (~275 years ago)

People invented machines for the large-scale production of goods in factories. This involved
learning how to get energy from fossil fuels, such as coal and oil, and how to grow large
quantities of food and in efficient manner.

3. Information-globalization revolution (~50 years ago)

Humans developed new technologies for gaining rapid access to much more information and
resources on a global scale.

- Each of these cultural changes gave us more energy and new technologies to alter and control
more of the planet to meet our basic needs and increasing wants. They allowed expansion of
human population, because of increased food supplies and longer life spans, and caused greater
resource use, pollution, and environmental degradation as our ecological footprints expanded.

1.4 What is pollution and what can we do about it?

- Pollution is any in the environment that is harmful to the health, survival, or activities of
humans or other organisms. Pollutants can enter the environment naturally, such as from
volcanic eruptions, or through human activities, such as burning coal and gasoline and
discharging chemicals into rivers and the ocean.

- The pollutants we produce come from two types of sources:

1. Point sources are single, identifiable sources. Examples: the smokestack of a coal-burning
power or industrial plant, the drainpipe of a factory, and the exhaust pipe of an automobile.

2. Nonpoint sources are dispersed and often difficult to identify. Examples: pesticides blown
from the land into the air and the runoff of fertilizers and pesticides from farmlands, lawns,
gardens, and golf courses into streams and lakes.

It is much easier and cheaper to identify and control or prevent pollution from point sources
than from widely dispersed nonpoint sources.
- There are two main types of pollutants.
1. Biodegradable pollutants are harmful materials that can be broken down by natural
processes. Example: human sewage and newspapers.

2. Nondegradable pollutants are harmful materials that natural processes cannot break down.
Examples: toxic chemical elements such as lead, mercury, and arsenic.

- There are two ways to solve the pollution problem: Prevention and Cleanup
Pollution prevention (or input pollution control) reduces or eliminates the production of
pollutants.

Pollution cleanup (or output pollution control) involves cleaning up or diluting pollutants
after they have been produced.
However, we cannot rely on cleanup to solve the pollution problem. First, it is only a temporary
solution as long as population and consumption levels grow without corresponding
improvements in pollution control technology. Second, removing a pollutant from one part of
the environment often causing pollution in another. Third, it is too difficult to reduce them to a
safety level when they are dispersed in the environment.

- Environmental and social scientists have identified the major causes of environmental
problems: 1. population; 2. unsustainable resource use; 3. poverty; 4. failure to include the
harmful environmental costs of goods and services in their market prices; and 5. insufficient
knowledge of how nature works.

- Poverty occurs when people are unable to meet their basic needs for adequate food, water,
shelter, health, and education. Desperate for short-term survival, some of these people deplete
and degrade forests, soil, grasslands, fisheries, and wildlife, at an ever-increasing rate. While
poverty increase some types of environmental degradation, pollution and environmental
degradation have a severe impact on the poor and can increase poverty.

- Poverty affects population growth because having more children can increase the population’s
workforce and increase the chance of survival. The current problems for the poor population
are malnutrition, limited access to adequate sanitation facilities and clean drinking water, and
severe respiratory disease and premature death from inhaling indoor air pollutants produced
by burning wood or coal in open fires or in poorly vented stoves for heat and cooking.

- The lifestyle of many affluent consumers in developed countries and in rapidly developing
countries such as India and China are built upon high levels of consumption and unnecessary
waste of resources. Such affluence is based mostly on the assumption that buying more and
more things will bring happiness.

- The United States has far fewer people than India, the average American consumes about 30
times as much as the average citizen of India and 100 times as much as the average person in
the world’s poorest countries.

- Environmental Worldview is a set of assumptions and values reflecting how you think the
world works and what you think your role in the world should be. There are three major
worldviews:

Planetary management worldview holds that we are separate from nature, that nature exists
 mainly to meet our needs and increasing wants, and that we can use our ingenuity and
technology to manage the earth’s life-support systems, mostly for our benefit, indefinitely.

Stewardship worldview holds that we can and should manage the earth for our benefit, but
that we have an ethical responsibility to be caring and responsible managers, or stewards, of
the earth.

Environmental wisdom worldview holds that we are part of, and totally dependent on, nature
and that nature exists for all species, not just for us. Our success depends on learning how life
on earth sustains itself and integrating such environmental wisdom into the ways we think and
act.

1.6 What are four scientific principles of sustainability?

1. Reliance on solar energy: the sun (solar capital) warms the planet and supports photosynthesis
used by plants to provide food for themselves and for use and most other animals.

2. Biodiversity (or biological diversity): the astounding variety of different organisms, the genes
they contain, the ecosystems in which they exist, and the natural services they provide have
yielded countless ways for life to adapt to changing environmental conditions throughout the
earth’s history.

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

4. Nutrient cycling: natural processes recycle chemicals that plants and animals need to stay alive
and reproduce. There is little or no waste in natural system.