Chapter 1: Environmental Problems, Their Causes, and Sustainability

This chapter is supposed to scare you into wanting to act…it did me! It starts with exponential growth…how would you describe that?

Exponential Growth Read story in text about kings playing chess and

loser giving grain by exponential growth (1 grain of wheat on the first square of board; double that for each square; so 4 grains on 3rd square all the way to square 64; how many grains of wheat there?)…bad deal for the loser king!

Exponential Growth is defined as quantity increases at a fixed percentage per unit of time…starts off slowly but grows to enormous numbers; so often it doesn’t seem so dangerous at the start

The effect of Human Population Growth on our Earth, Resources, and Future

Yikes! 8-10 billion people on planet Earth by 2100?

Not everyone lives like us though…in fact 53% of people in world try to survive on a daily income of <$2…and 1 in 6 survive on <$1/ day!

Poverty affects environmental quality because to survive many of poor must deplete and degrade local forests, grasslands, soils, water, and wildlife.

Human activities are estimated to cause premature extinction of species at an exponential rate of 0.1 to 1% per year…an irreversible loss

Is our exponential growth in human activities changing the earth’s climate? Ruining farmlands? Shifting water supplies? Altering and reducing biodiversity? Disrupting economies in parts of the world? What does the future look like if human pop keeps growing?

So what can we do about our growing population and needs?

Here’s the silver lining to this scenario: there are some things we can do to protect the environment upon which we all rely for our physical sustenance.

Enter: Environmental Science which is the relatively new study of how the earth works, how humans interact with the earth, and how to deal with environmental problems

In AP Environmental Science (APES), we will focus on indentifying and dealing with the problems. In order to do that, you need to know the background information about the earth (natural science) and human societies (social science). This means you MUST keep up with your readings and assignments on all this background info…such as these powerpoints, online assignments and quizzes. Any questions?

10 Big Questions for chapter 1 The remainder of this powerpoint will

address the 10 background questions for APES

We will address each question in much more detail as we move through our text…however, a brief look now starts us all off on roughly the same foot.

You might start a separate page of notes for each question to be revisited at later moments in the course

1. What are the major themes of AP Environmental Science?

Environment: biotic and abiotic/ limited resources/ the earth is one interconnected system

Ecology: relationships between living organisms and their environment/ all of these relationships are based on energy transformations

Sustainability: using resources in such a way as to survive indefinitely/ human activity alters natural systems so people must consciously move to sustainability in order for the human race to survive in this limited, interconnected environment

Environmentalism: social and political movement to protect the earth’s life support systems/ this is both cultural and social in nature/ science is a process so we’re developing answers for sustainability as we identify the problems

Concept Map of Environmental Science

Environmental Science

Ecosystems:Ecology

Matter CyclingEnergy Flow

Human Systems:Politics/ Economics

PopulationsSustainable Societies

Resource Use

Resources:Energy ResourcesMatter Resources

(land, water, air, food)Renewable/nonrenewable

2. What keeps us alive? What is an environmentally sustainable society?

Simply stated: sustainability is the ability of earth’s various systems, (including the human cultural systems and economies) to survive and adapt to changing environmental conditions indefinitely

An environmentally sustainable society meets basic resource needs of its people in a just and equitable manner without degrading or depleting the natural capital that supplies these resources

Steps to Sustainability1. Start with environment…understand our

natural capital: energy and matter

2. Recognize human activities degrade natural capital by using normally renewable resources faster than nature can renew them

3. Find some workable solutions to preserve natural capital for each resource we need

4. Know that solutions (changes in the way we do things) involve some conflicts…and we all must make trade offs or compromises to reach solutions

5. In the search for solutions individuals matter…whether it’s the scientist that designs a more efficient engine or the community group that teaches about recycling…we all are part of the solution

3. How fast is the human population growing?

Exponential growth of world population has slowed (from 22% in 1963 to 1.23% in 2006)…but now it is unequally distributed between rich and poor countries

A quick way to calculate doubling time is rule of 70: 70÷percentage growth rate. So 70/1.23=57 years world population will double

If you haven’t done so before, check out the really amazing world population clock from the Office of Population Research at Princeton University. Its synchronized with US Census Bureau and provides an estimation of world population.

http://opr.princeton.edu/popclock/

What can we surmise about the country from its population pyramid?

4. What is the difference between economic growth, economic development, and environmentally sustainable economic development?

Economic Growth is an increase in the capacity of a country to provide people with goods and services. Economic growth is measured by the percentage change in the country’s gross domestic product (GDP). GDP is the annual market value of all goods and services produced in the country. To see the GDP per person its called per capita GDP. An additional measure for GDP is called PPP or Purchasing Power Parity. This measures the value of goods and services based on exchange rates of different currencies. In terms of GDP-PPP, the world’s 6 largest economies in 2006 were, in order, US, China, Japan, India, Germany and France

ID which items are consumer goods and services (C ), government purchases of goods and services (G), or investment goods (I)

Public Library Expansion

Canned fruits and vegetables

Frozen meats and fish Dresses and suits Park maintenance Video rentals Laundry services Furniture

New fruit and vegetable warehouses

New meat and fish freezing machines

New roads, bridges and schools

Books Construction equipment Police and fire protection New housing

Compute the GDP for this year…Then calculate the GDP percentages for C, G, I

Library: 2,500 rolas Canned fruits 19,300 rolas Frozen meats 5,700 rolas Dresses and suits 23,600 rolas Park maintenance 8,200 rolas Video rentals 5,200 rolas Laundry services 4,100 rolas New fruit warehouses 8,900 rolas New meat freezing machines 3,200

rolas

New roads, bridges and schools 12,100 rolas

Books 9,600 rolas Construction equipment

2,400 rolas Police and fire protection

2,500 rolas New housing 1,800 rolas Furniture 1,900 rolas

Economic Development is the improvement of human living standards by economic growth.

Developed Countries U.S., Canada, Japan, Australia, New

Zealand, and most European countries Roughly 1.2 billion people live in these

developed countries Developed countries contrast to

developing countries not only in increased wealth and income, but also in decreased population growth, increased resource use and increased pollution and waste produced

Developing Countries Most of the nations in Africa, Asia,

and Latin America. Some of these countries are considered moderately developed such as China, India, Brazil and Mexico. These countries have primarily middle income earners. The others are considered low income countries.

An estimated 5.4 billion people live in these countries

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

Environmentally Sustainable Economic Development

Use political and economic systems to “encourage” environmentally beneficial and sustainable forms of economic development

If you are a developing country, however, you don’t have the economic power and sometimes lack the political system to effectively move towards environmentally sustainable economic development.

4. What is the difference between economic growth, economic development, and environmentally sustainable economic development?

Answer this question in 3 paragraphs. Include a description of terms and appropriate use of per capita

GDP and PPP, a comparison of developed and developing countries, discussion on exponential growth of some developing

countries (for instance China’s economy has been growing at an astonishing rate of 9.5% per year since 1985. How long until it doubles its economic output? How might this affect sustainable practices?), and

Specific examples of how citizens of developing countries may choose to continue non-sustainable practices to earn a living

5. What are the earth’s main types of resources? How can they be depleted or degraded?

From a human standpoint, a resource is anything obtained from the environment to meet our needs and wants.

Resources are classified as perpetual (sunlight), renewable (water, wood, soil, animals, fresh air), and nonrenewable (fossil fuels)

Resources can also be directly available (such as wind, surface water) or not directly available, such as fossil fuels, groundwater and modern bioengineered crops

Renewable vs. non-renewable… of which do you use more?

Renewable resources: on a human time scale can be replenished fairly quickly… (hours to decades) through natural processes.

Renewable resources are not used faster than they can be replaced

Can be depleted or degraded by using too quickly, but conversely, can be used indefinitely by reducing available supply to a “sustainable yield”

Non-renewable resources exist in a fixed quantity or stock in the earth’s crust.

Non-renewable resources can be replenished but only on a time scale of millions to billions of years by geological processes

Examples: energy resources such as coal, oil, natural gas; metallic mineral resources such as copper, iron and aluminum; and nonmetallic mineral resources such as salt, clay, sand and phosphates

These often become “economically depleted” then the costs of extracting and using them exceeds its economic value

Tragedy of the Commons

Biologist Garrett Hardin in 1968 named this degradation of free-access resources the “Tragedy of the Commons”. People think “if I don’t use this, someone else will…the little bit I pollute won’t matter”

Solutions to “tragedy of the commons” could be Regulation of access or

use of these resources (usually by government)

Convert to private ownership (but will all owners protect resources as an investment?)

One cause of environmental degradation of renewable resources is the overuse of common-property or “free-access” resources

Ecological Footprints The ecological footprint

is the amount of biologically productive land and water needed to supply an area with resources and to absorb the wastes and pollution produced by such resource use.

Overall, humanity’s ecological footprint exceeds by 39% earth’s biocapacity to replenish renewable resources and absorb waste and pollution

To determine your own ecological footprint and educate yourself…check out the following websites: http://www.myfootprint.org/en/ http://www.earthday.net/footprint/inde

x.html

Strategy for conserving resources:

Reduce: First and easiest strategy to conserve…just don’t use as much of a particular resource. List 3 ways you can reduce use of nonrenewable resources.

Reuse: Listed second because requires some energy but not as expensive as last strategy…how can you reuse nonrenewable resources?

Recycle: May cost some, but not as degrading as continuing to extract and use nonrenewable resources. What do you recycle?

5. What are the earth’s main types of resources? How can they be depleted or degraded?

Now that you’ve learned a little about types of resources and how they are depleting…guess what?

Right! Write about it! Answer question 5 in two parts. In the first part describe types of resources and who has access to these resources. In part 2, describe how or why nonrenewable resources are being depleted, who is depleting these resources and how we can address this problem.

6. What are the principal types of pollution, and what can we do about pollution?

Pollution is the presence of chemicals at high enough levels in air, water, soil, or food to threaten the health, survival, or activities of humans or other living organisms.

Pollution can: Enter environment naturally or by human

activity Contaminate area where its produced or be

carried to other areas by water or wind

Most human pollution is caused by urban areas, industrial areas, or industrialized agriculture.

Pollutants we produce come from 2 sources:

A. Point source pollutants have single identifiable sources such as a smokestack, drainpipe or exhaust pipe

B. Non-Point source pollutants have a larger, dispersed and often difficult to identify source, such as pesticides sprayed into air, runoff of fertilizer, erosion into waterways

Three unwanted effects of pollutants

1. Disrupt or degrade life-support systems for humans and other species

2. Damage wildlife, human health, and property

3. Create nuisances such as noise, unpleasant smells, tastes, and sights

Solutions for Pollution: Prevention vs. Cleanup

Prevention/ Input Pollution Control: Technology Government

incentives Cost benefit

ratio for investors

Better for environment

Cleanup/ Output Pollution Control: Only temporary if not working on

technology to reduce output Cleanup often removes one

pollutant and puts others into environment

Once pollutants have entered environment, impossible to truly remove all of them…even to acceptable levels.

7. What are the basic causes of today’s environmental problems, and how are these causes connected?

Most of today’s environmental and resource problems are a result of: Exponential growth of population Unsustainable resource use Poverty Not including the environmental costs of

economic goods and services in market prices Trying to manage and simplify nature with too

little knowledge of how it works

How are these causes connected? Economy! Culture!

Others way to look at the issue:

or

Note the introduction of social and economic equity or “justice” into the quest to sustainable growth and environmental resource protection

8. What are the harmful environmental effects of poverty and affluence?

Poverty is defined as the inability to meet one’s basic economic needs.

Many people in poverty are homeless

Their daily lives focus on getting enough food, water and fuel for cooking and heating to survive

They are desperate for land to grow food and deplete and degrade forests, soil, grasslands, wildlife all for short-term survival

They do not have the luxury of worrying about long-term environmental quality or sustainability

Poverty affects population growth

Poor people have many children as a form of economic security. Children can: Help gather fuel Haul drinking water Tend crops and livestock Work or beg for money Help parents survive in old age

before death (in 50s for poorest countries)

Many poor die prematurely from four preventable health problems: Malnutrition (kwashiorkor) Susceptibility to normally

nonfatal infectious diseases such as diarrhea and measles

Lack of access to clean drinking water

Severe respiratory disease from inhaling indoor air pollutants by burning wood or coal in open fires or poorly vented stoves for heating and cooking

* So what does the overall population look like in a poor country with these characteristics?

Affluenza

This is the new term to describe the unsustainable addiction to overconsumption and materialism exhibited in the lifestyles of many affluent consumers in the United States and other developed countries and rising middle class in countries such as China and India

“Too many people spend money they haven’t earned to buy things they don’t want, to impress people they don’t like” Will Rogers

Effects of Affluenza on Environmental Resources

Pros Provides money for

developing technologies to reduce pollution, environmental degradation, resource waste

Cleaner water & food supply

Reduce waste with recycling

Cons Huge ecological

footprints!...means we use lots or resources and subsequently create lots of waste and pollution

Often clean up immediate environments and end up transferring waste and pollution to distant locations where we don’t need to think about it

Formula to compare impact on environment by countries

Population x Consumption per person x

Technological impact per unit of consumption =

Environmental impact of population

P x A x T = I

Average Family in Developed Country: Parents and 2 children

Average Family in Developing Country: Parents and 5 children

P x A x T = I helps us with quantitative analysis

The average US citizen consumes about 100x as much as the average person in the world’s poorest countries (those big ecological footprints!)

This means that poor parents in such developing countries would need 60-200 children to reach the same lifetime family resource consumption level as 2 children in a typical US family

9. What three major human cultural changes have taken place since humans arrived?

Many scientists interpret fossil evidence to suggest that Homo sapiens sapiens have walked on earth between 90,000 to 150,000 years…not long compared to a 3.7 billion old earth.

Man started out as hunter-gatherers. First come agricultural revolution (10,000 to 12,000 years ago)

during which people settled in villages and raised crops and livestock

Next the industrial-medical revolution, (275 years ago) led to shift from rural villages and animal-powered agriculture to urban society using fossil fuels for manufacturing, agriculture and transportation. In addition science helped improve sanitation and control disease

Finally, the information-globalization revolution, (started 50 years ago until today) uses new technology to gain rapid access to much more information on a global scale.

Each “cultural revolution” has its trade-offs

Advantages Mass production of

useful and affordable products

Higher standard of living for many

Lower infant mortality Longer life expectancy Increased urbanization Lower rate of population

growth

Disadvantages Increased air pollution Increased water pollution Increased waste

production Soil depletion and

degradation Groundwater depletion Habitat destruction and

degradation Biodiversity depletion

Eras of US Environmental History

Tribal era Native Americans occupied North America for at least

10,000 years before European settlers Frontier era (1607-1890)

The “frontier environmental worldview” was that North America was a continent of vast resources to be conquered and managed

Early Conservation era (1832-1870) Some people become alarmed at scope of resource

depletion, such as Henry David Thoreau, but little response Present Day Conservation era (1870 to present)

Increased role in federal government and private citizens in resource conservation, public health and environmental protection.

So Where Are We Now? Are things getting better or worse?

Experts disagree about how serious our population and environmental problems are…and what we should do about them.

Some suggest human ingenuity and technology will allow us to clean up pollution to acceptable levels and find substitutes for scarce resources

Others disagree and believe that our global economy is outgrowing the capacity of the earth to support it.

The answer to whether things are getting better or worse is really…both. Don’t rest in either technological optimism or environmental pessimism.

Environmental Worldviews and Ethics

Your worldview is a set of assumptions and values about how you think of the world works and what you think your role in the world should be.

Environmental Ethics concern your beliefs about what is right and wrong with how we treat the environment.

People with different worldviews and ethical beliefs can take the same data, be logically consistent, and arrive at very different conclusions.

Some questions to ponder

1. Why should we care about the environment?

2. Are we the most important species on the planet or are we just one of the earth’s millions of species?

3. Do we have an obligation to see that our activities do not cause the premature extinction of other species? Should we try to protect all species or only some? How do we decide which species to protect?

Questions continued

4. Do we have an ethical obligation to pass .on to future generations the extraordinary natural world we have inherited in as good condition, if not better, as we inherited it?

5. Should every person be entitled to equal protection from environmental hazards regardless of race, gender, age, national origin, income, social class, or any other factor? This is the central ethical and political issue for what is known as the environmental justice movement

Three Environmental Worldviews

1. Planetary Management WorldviewNature exists to meet human needs and we can use technology to manage earth’s systems

2. Stewardship WorldviewWe can manage earth for our benefit but we have an ethical responsibility to be good stewards of the earth’s resources

3. Environmental Wisdom WorldviewWe are part of and totally dependent on nature and nature exists for all species, not just us. Our success depends on learning how the earth sustains itself and integrating this wisdom into the ways we think and act.

10. What are 4 scientific principles of sustainability and how can they help us build more environmentally sustainable and just societies?

We can live more sustainably by copying nature. Below are four basic components of Earth’s natural sustainability: Reliance on Solar Energy

Who’s at the bottom of the energy pyramid?

Biodiversity A great variety of genes, species, ecosystems and processes

provide many ways to adapt to changing environments

Population Control Competition for limited resources limits population growth

Nutrient Recycling Natural processes recycle all chemicals and nutrients. There is

little waste in nature.

Taking Steps towards Sustainabilitity

Many scientists interpret data to indicate that we have perhaps 50 – 100 years to make a cultural change for sustainable living

One key to this is “building social capital”…this involved getting people with different views and values to work together and find trade-off solutions

Another important key is grassroots “individuals matter” action. “Never dobut that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” Margaret Mead

Story of Chattanooga and Vision 2000

Before and After Signs along Tennessee River

Chattanooga is a great example of what can happen for the environment when you build human capital