Terms : Hide Images
| 192299916 | aesthetic justification | An argument for the conservation of nature on the grounds that nature is beautiful and that beauty is important and valuable to people. | |
| 192299917 | carrying capacity | The maximum abundance of a population or species that can be maintained by a habitat or ecosystem without degrading the ability of that habitat or ecosystem to maintain that abundance in the future. | |
| 192299918 | ecological justification | An argument for the conservation of nature on the grounds that a species, an ecological community, an ecosystem, or Earth's biosphere provides specific functions necessary to the persistence of our life or of benefit to life. | |
| 192299919 | Gaia hypothesis | The idea that the surface environment of Earth, with respect to such factors as the atmospheric composition of reactive gases, the acid-alkalinity of waters, and the surface temperature, are actively regulated by the sensing, growth, metabolism and other activities of the biota. | |
| 192299920 | megacities | Urban areas with at least 8 million inhabitants. | |
| 192299921 | moral justification | An argument for the conservation of nature on the grounds that aspects of the environment have a right to exist, independent of human desires, and that it is our moral obligation to allow them to continue or to help them persist. | |
| 192299922 | Precautionary Principle | The idea that in spite of the fact that full scientific certainty is often not available to prove cause and effect, we should still take cost-effective precautions to solve environmental problems when there exists a threat of potential serious and/or irreversible environmental damage. | |
| 192299923 | sustainability | Management of natural resources and the environment with the goals of allowing the harvest of resources to remain at or above some specified level, and the ecosystem to retain its functions and structure. | |
| 192299924 | sustainable ecosystem | An ecosystem that is subject to some human use, but at a level that leads to no loss of species or of necessary ecosystem function. | |
| 192299925 | sustainable resource harvest | An amount of a resource that can be harvested at regular intervals indefinitely. | |
| 192299926 | utilitarian justification | An argument for the conservation of nature on the grounds that the environment, an ecosystem, habitat, or species, provides individuals with direct economic benefit or is directly necessary to their survival. |
