This document discusses environmental problems, their causes, and sustainability. It explains that human activities can degrade natural capital by overusing renewable resources. Environmentally sustainable societies must protect natural capital and live within its limits to ensure resources are available for future generations. The main causes of environmental degradation are population growth, unsustainable resource use, poverty, and the exclusion of environmental costs from market prices.

1. Environmental Problems, Their Causes, and
Sustainability

2.  Study of connections in nature.
 Environment includes all living and nonliving
thing with which an organism interacts.
 Living = biotic
 Nonliving = abiotic
 ES studies how the earth works, our interaction
with the earth, and the methods/procedures we
use to deal with environmental problems.
 Environmentalism is a social movement
dedicated to protecting life support systems for
ALL species.

3.  Life depends on natural capital- the natural
resources and services that keep life forms
alive.

4.  Life depends on solar energy and natural
capital.
 Human activities can degrade natural capital.
 Environmentally sustainable societies protect
natural capital and live off its income.
 Plan for future generations.
 http://news.discovery.com/videos/earth-
urban-agriculture-blooms.html

5.  1968, biologist Garrett Hardin called the
degradation of openly shared resources the
tragedy of the commons.
 http://www.mindbites.com/lesson/6964-
tragedy-of-the-commons

6.  Perpetual resource is continuously renewed
and expected to last (solar energy).
 Renewable resource is replenished in days to
several hundred years through natural
processes (forests, fish populations,
freshwater, etc.)
 Environmental Degradation occurs when the
available supply of renewable resources
declines (forests cut down faster than
growing back, soil erosion, climate change.)

7.  Sustainability of Life depends on:
 Reliance on solar energy.
 Protect Biodiversity.
 Stop interfering with natural Chemical
Cycling.

8.  Represents the amount of biologically
productive land and water needed to
indefinitely supply the people in a particular
country or area with renewable resources and
to absorb and recycle the wastes and
pollution produced by such resource use.
 Large Footprints: United States, European
Union.
 Small Footprints: India and Japan.
 Footprints can be expressed in number of
Earth’s needed to support consumption (3 ½)

9.  Exist in fixed quantities.
 Exhaustible energy (coal and oil)
 Metallic Minerals (copper and gold)
 Nonmetallic Minerals (salt and sand)
 Sustainable Solution: Reduce, reuse, recycle
(order is important)
 1. Reduce means to use less of the resource.
 2. Reuse means to use resource over and
over. (using empty butter tub for leftovers)
 3. Recycle means to collect waste materials
and process them into new materials.

10.  High Income like United States and Canada
 Only 18% of world’s population
 Use 88% of world’s resources
 Produce 75% of world’s waste
 Larger Ecological Footprint

11.  Low Income (some are middle-income) like
China, India, Nigeria, Haiti.
 82% of world’s population.
 Use 12% of world’s resources.

12.  Point Sources: single, identifiable source
(smokestack)
 Nonpoint Sources: spread out and difficult to
identify (lawn runoff puts chemicals into
water ways).
 Prevention vs. Cleanup
 Prevention reduces or eliminate production of
pollutants
 Cleanup is more expensive and less effective.

13.  Climate change
 Acid rain
 Decreased biodiversity
 http://news.discovery.com/videos/earth-
acid-rain-eating-washington-dc.html

14.  4 causes:
 Population Growth
 Unsustainable resource use
 Poverty
 Excluding environmental cost from prices

15.  Exponential (J-shaped curve)
 2009 – 6.8 BILLION people on the planet
 Estimated to be 9.3 Billion by 2050
 http://planetgreen.discovery.com/videos/foc
us-earth-too-many-people.html

16.  Basic needs are not met.
 Basic needs: food, water, shelter, health and
education.
 1 in 5 live in extreme poverty.
 Premature death due to malnutrition
 Inadequate sanitation (waste removal, clean
water)

17.  Better Education  Damage to
 Scientific Research environment from
 Technological consumption
solutions  Environmental
degradation
 Pollution
Beneficial Harmful

18.  Increase reliance on renewable energy (solar,
wind)
 Protect Biodiversity (endangered species and
land protection, reduce pollution)
 Do not disrupt natural chemical cycles
(carbon cycle, water cycle, climate, etc).