Ch. 25 Guided Notes

Chapter 25 Guided Notes
Central Themes of Environmental Science
• Building a sustainable society: We must use our resources in a way that allows them to still be around for future generations. We do this to preserve biological and cultural diversity. We must evaluate the damage of our actions and limit it to a level that the environment can handle indefinitely.
• Respecting and caring for the community of life: We are part of earth’s biological web and we must protect it. We get most of our medicine, food, materials, and energy from the environment so we must protect it in order to help ourselves. We need the ecosystem services provided by the environment.
• Improving the quality of human life: The goal of development is to improve the quality of life of humans, but most of the world’s people still live in poverty. These people face malnutrition, high infant mortality rates, disease, and poverty. There are many U.N. programs devoted to aiding the world’s poor.
• Conserving Earth’s vitality and biological diversity: Human expansion and development is destroying the environment. Agriculture causes erosion, air pollution, water pollution, and soil pollution. Restoration ecology seeks to return ecosystems to their former pristine states.
• Keeping within Earth’s carrying capacity: The earth can only support a population of humans that is a certain size. Overpopulation is causing poverty and environmental destruction. Full cost accounting is the process of evaluating the benefits and costs of various alternatives.
• Changing personal attitudes and practices: Consumption overpopulation is when individuals consume too large a share of resources. We must all work to achieve sustainable consumption. People must be educated about what they can do to reduce waste and help preserve the earth.
• Enabling communities to care for their own environments: We dump limitless amounts of pollution into the environment. Communities must be taught how to protect their own environments, because nobody wants live in a dump. They must have access to resources and education in order to protect their own individual environments.
• Building a national framework for integrating development and conservation: National governments must work together to balance development and environmental conservation. The different parts cannot be at odds with each other or they will not be able to function efficiently to protect the environment.
• Creating a global alliance: Once conservation has been established on a national level, countries must work together to create a worldwide network of conservation. International treaties and agreements can be used to ensure the world’s countries will all work together to save the earth because, even if one country wants to help the environment, if the rest of the world does nothing then the environment will still be destroyed.