1. Geog415 Perspectives on Environment
Dr Hengchun Ye

2. Critical Thinking
Involves developing skills to help you analyze and evaluate the validity of information and ideas you are exposed to and to make decisions
What to believe and not to believe?
Facts versus opinion
Evidence versus arguments
Take and defend an informed position on issues, integrate information and see relationships, and apply your knowledge to dealing with new and different problems
How?
Question about everything and everybody
Identify and evaluate your personal biases and beliefs
Be open-minded, flexible, and humble

3. Environment: is everything that affects a living organism (any unique form of live)
Environmental study: a study of how the earth works, how we interact with the earth, and how to deal with environmental problems
Resources: Sun, air, water, soil, energy, and minerals
An environmentally sustainable society: meets the current needs of its people for food, clean water, clear air, shelter, and other basic resources without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs
Living sustainably: living off natural income replenished by soil, plants, air, and water and not depleting or degrading the earth’s natural capital that supplies this income.

4. Annual growth rate is 1.25% or 219 people per day based on 2004 population
Population growth

5. Economic growth: an increase in capacity of a country to provide people with goods and services (required population growth for producers and consumers, more production and consumption per person, or both)
It is measured by percentage changes in a country’s gross domestic products (GDP)
GDP: the annual market value of all goods and services produced by all firms and organizations, foreign and domestic, operating within a country. Per capita GDP measures changes in a country’s living standard
Developed countries: include US, Canada, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and the countries of Europe. Most are highly industrialized and have a high average per capita GDP (1.2 Billion people)

6. In developing countries: Africa, Asia, and Latin America
In developing countries: Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Some are middle-income moderately developed countries and others are low-income countries.
About 97% increase in world population occurs in these countries.

7. Resources
A resource: is anything obtained from the environment to meet human needs and wants (food, shelter, manufactured goods, transportation, communication, and recreation)
Three classes:
Perpetual resource: renewed continuously at a human time scale. Such as
solar energy (will last 6 billion year)
2. Renewable recourse: can be replenished fairly rapidly (hours to several decades) through natural processes as long as it is not used up faster than replaces. Such as
forests, grass lands, wild animals, fresh water, fresh air, and fertile soil.
3. Nonrenewable resources: exists in a fixed quantity or stock in the earth’s crust. It can be economically depleted to the point where it costs too much to obtain what is left. Such as
energy sources of coal, oil, natural gas, metallic mineral resources of iron, copper, aluminum and nonmetallic mineral resources of salt, clay, sand, and phosphates that are too difficult or too costly to recycle.

8. Resources-continue
Sustainable yield: the highest rate at which a renewable resource can be used indefinitely without reducing its available supply.
Opinion: free renewable resources can be degraded. Common or free access such as clean air, open ocean and its fish, migratory birds, wildlife species, gases of the lower atmosphere, and space.
“if I do not use it, someone else will use it”.
“The little bit I use or pollute is not enough to matter, it is renewable”
Solutions:
To use at rates well below their estimated sustainable yields by reducing population, regulating access to the resources or both (laws, international treaties)
Convert free-access resources to private ownerships.
Problems: not always protect natural resources when this conflicts with protecting their financial capital or increasing their profits. Example: sell timber, sell land for more money than sustaining it. Also, not everything can be privatized.

9. Per capita ecological footprint: the amount of biological productive land and water needed to supply each person with the renewable resources they use and to absorb the wastes from such resource use.
Humanity’s ecological footprint per person exceeds the earth’s biological capacity by 15%. Or a resource of 1.15 earth is needed to support our current use. It would take the land area of about 4 more planet earths for the rest of the world to reach US levels of consumption with existing technology.

10. Solutions:
Find more
Recycle or reuse existing supplies
Waste less
Develop a substitute
Or wait millions of years for more to be produced

11. pollution: the presents of chemicals at high enough levels in air, water, soil, or food to threaten the health, survival, or activities of human or other organisms.
Natural: volcanic eruption, forest fire, desert windstorms, etc.
Human: burning of fossil fuel, etc
Point source: single, identifiable source. Example: smokestack of a coal burning power plant; drainpipe of a factory; exhaust pipe of an automobile
Nonpoint sources: dispersed and often difficult to identify. Example: pesticides sprayed into the air, blown by wind, runoff of fertilizers and pesticides from farmlands, golf courses and suburban lawns and gardens into streams, lakes.

12. Issue: what can we do about pollutant?
Clean up
(a) may be temporary relieve, population continues to grow and so is the consumption level (example: adding catalytic converters to car exhaust system to reduce air pollution)
(b) Move a pollutant from one part of the environment only to cause another. Example: garbage is collected: burned (air pollution and produce ash); dump into streams, lakes, oceans (water pollution); buried (soil and ground water pollution)
2. prevention: input pollution control
More emphasis on prevention because it worked better and cheaper than cleanup. Benjamin Franklin said: “one ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”

13. Environmental and resource problems are interconnected

14. Five major causes for environmental problems:
Population growth
Wasteful resource use
Poverty
poor environmental accounting; and
Ecological ignorance (inadequate understanding of how the earth works)

15. Issue:
Poverty is a major threat to human health and the environment
Many world’s poor do not have access to the basic necessities for a healthy, productive, and decent life
Desperate for land to grow food (deplete and degrade forests, soil, grasslands, and wildlife for short-term survive
Gave many children as a form of economic security (work and help old aged parents)

16. Problem with developed countries
Affluenza: unsustainable addiction to over consumption and materialism exhibited in the lifestyle of affluent consumers (in search for fulfillment and happiness)
Positive side of affluent countries: have more money for improving environmental quality. Money for technology development to reduce pollution, environmental degradation and resource waste (changes in US and other countries since 1970)
Average US citizen consumes about 35 times as much as the average citizen of India and 100 times as much as the average person in the world’s poorest countries.

17. Two opposite opinions about our environmental sustainability (good things we have done: increasing life expectancy, reducing infant mortality, increased food supplies, reducing many forms of pollution)
Technology optimism: human ingenuity, technological advances, and economic growth will allow us to clean up pollution to acceptable levels, find substitutes for any resources that become scarce, and keep expanding the earth’s ability to support more humans, as we do in the past. They accuse others of exaggerating the seriousness of the problems and failing to appreciate the progress we have made in improving quality life and protecting the environment.
Environmental pessimists: our degrading and disrupting the earth’s life support system for us and other species at an accelerating rate. We need to use the earth in a way that is more sustainable for present and future human generations and other species that support us and other forms of life.
Environmentally sustainable economic development: reward (tax breaks, government subsides) environmentally beneficial and sustainable activities and discourages (government faxes and regulation) environmentally harmful and unsustainable activities.
Most serious environment problems: poverty, malnutrition, unsafe drinking water, smoking, air pollution, infectious disease (AIDS, TB, malaria, and hepatitis B), water shortages, climate change, and loss and degradation of biodiversity