Miller LITE 17ed chapter 1 vocabulary on environmental problems, their causes, and sustainability.
Terms : Hide Images
| 373943599 | environment | everything living and nonliving around us which we interact in a complex web of relationships that connect us to one another and to the world we live in. | 0 | |
| 373943600 | environmental science | an interdisciplinary study of how humans interact with the living and nonliving parts of their environment. | 1 | |
| 373943601 | ecology | the biological science that studies how organisms interact with one another and with their environment. | 2 | |
| 373943602 | organism | a single living thing. | 3 | |
| 373943603 | species | a group of organisms that have a unique set of charcteristics that distinguish them from all other organisms and, for organisms that reproduce sexually, can mate and produce fertile offspring. Ex.: homo sapiens sapiens | 4 | |
| 373943604 | ecosystem | a set of organisms with a defined area or volume that interact with one another and with their environment of nonliving matter and energy. Ex.: a forest | 5 | |
| 373943605 | solar energy | energy from the sun. It warms the planet, supports photosynthesis and powers wind and flowing water. | 6 | |
| 373943606 | biodiversity | the astounding variety of organisms, the natural systems in which they exist and interact, and the natural services they provide. | 7 | |
| 373943607 | chemical cycling or nutrient cycling | the circulation of chemicals from the environment through organisms and back to the environment. | 8 | |
| 373943608 | natural capital | the natural resources and natural services that keep us and other forms of life alive and support our human economies. | 9 | |
| 373943609 | natural resources | materials and energy in nature that are essential or useful to humans. Ex. water | 10 | |
| 373943610 | natural services | processes in nature, such as purification of air and water and renewal of topsoil, which support life and human economies. | 11 | |
| 373943614 | resource | anything that we can obtain from the environment to meet our needs and wants. | 12 | |
| 373943615 | perpetual resource | a resource that has a continuous supply that can last at least 6 billion years. Ex.: the sun | 13 | |
| 373943616 | renewable resource | a resource that takes anywhere from several days to several hundred years to be replenished through natural processes, as long as we do not use it up faster than nature can renew it. Ex.: fish populations, forests | 14 | |
| 373943617 | sustainable yield | the highest rate at which we can use a renewable resource indefinitely without reducing its available supply. | 15 | |
| 373943618 | nonrenewable resource | resources that exist in a fixed quantity, or stock, in the earth's crust. It takes millions to billions of years to renew. Ex.: copper, coal | 16 | |
| 373943619 | reuse | using a resource over and over in the same form. | 17 | |
| 373943620 | recycling | involves collecting waste materials and processing them into new materials. | 18 | |
| 373943621 | economic growth | an increase in a nation's output of goods and servicese. Percentage of change in a country's GDP. | 19 | |
| 373943622 | gross domestic product (GDP) | the annual market value of all goods and services produced by all businesses, foreign adn domestic, operating within a country. | 20 | |
| 373943623 | per capita GDP | the GDP divided by the total population. | 21 | |
| 373943624 | economic development | an effort to use economic growth to improve living standards. | 22 | |
| 373943626 | More-developed Countries (MDC) | countries with high average income. Ex.: U.S., Canada, Japan, Ausstralia, New Zealand, and most European countries. | 23 | |
| 373943627 | Less-developed Countries (LDC) | countries with low-income to middle income. Ex.: most from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. | 24 | |
| 373943628 | pollution | any presence with the environment of a chemical or other agent such as noise or heat at a level that is harmful to the health, survival, or activities of humans or other organisms. | 25 | |
| 373943629 | Point sources | single, identifiable sources of pollution. Ex.: drainpipe of a factory. | 26 | |
| 373943630 | non-point sources | dispersed and often difficult to identify sources of pollution. Ex.: runoff from fertilizers. | 27 | |
| 373943631 | pollution cleanup or output pollution control | involves cleaning up or diluting pollutans AFTER we have produced them. | 28 | |
| 373943632 | pollution prevention or input pollution control | reducing or eliminating the production of pollutants. | 29 | |
| 373943633 | Tragedy of the Commons | when many common-property and open-access renewable resources are degraded. Ex.: depleting the world's oceans of fish. | 30 | |
| 373943634 | affluence | wealth | 31 | |
| 373943635 | ecological footprint | the amount of biologically productive land and water needed to provide the people in a particular country or area with an indefinite supply of renewable resources and to absorb and recycle the wastes and pollution produced by such resource use. | 32 | |
| 373943636 | per capita ecological footprint | the average ecological footprint of an individual in a given country or area. | 33 | |
| 373943638 | IPAT | a simple model showing how population size, affluence, and the beneficial and harmful environmental effects of technologies help to determine the environmental impact of human activities. | 34 | |
| 373943639 | time delays | can allow an environmental problem to build slowly until it reaches a threshold level, or ecological tipping point. | 35 | |
| 373943640 | ecological tipping point | the point at which we reach an irreversible shift in behavior of a natural system. | 36 | |
| 373943641 | culture | the whole of a society's knowledge, beliefs, technology, and practices. | 37 | |
| 373943646 | sustainability revolution | an ideal cultural change involving how to reduce our ecological footprints and to live more sustainably. | 38 | |
| 373943647 | exponential growth | when a quantity such as the human population increases at a fixed percentage per unit of time, such as 2% per year. It starts off slowly, but eventually doubles again and again. | 39 | |
| 373943648 | affluenza | an eventually unsustainable addiction to buying more and more stuff. | 40 | |
| 373943649 | extreme poverty | people who live on less than $1.25 per day. | 41 | |
| 373943652 | environmental worldview | your set of assumptions and values reflecting how you think the world works and what you think your role in the world should be. | 42 | |
| 373943653 | environmental ethics | beliefs about what is right and wrong with how we treat the environment. | 43 | |
| 373943654 | planetary management worldview | holds that we are separate from and in charge of 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 to our benefit, indefinitely. | 44 | |
| 373943655 | stewardship worldview | holds that we can and should manage the earth fo our benefit, but that we have an ethical responsibility to be caring and responsible managers, or stewards, of the earth. | 45 | |
| 373943656 | environmental wisdom worldview | holds that we are part of, and dependent on, nature and that nature exists for all species, not just for us. | 46 | |
| 373943657 | environmentally sustainable society | a society 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. | 47 | |
| 373943658 | natural income | a type of income from the renewable resources such as plants, animals, and soil provided by the earth's natural capital. | 48 | |
| 373943659 | social captial | an asset that involves getting people with different views and values to talk and listen to one another, to find common ground based on understanding and trust, and to work together to solve environmental and other problems facing our societies. | 49 |
