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APES Chapter 1
Environmental Problems, Their Causes and Sustainability
Discussion Questions
1. What are the major themes of the book?
2. What keeps us alive? What is an environmentally sustainable society?
3. How fast is the human population growing?
4. What is the difference between economic growth, economic development,
and environmentally sustainable economic development?
5. What are the earth’s main types of resources? How can they be depleted
or degraded?
6. What are the principal types of pollution, and what can we do about
pollution?
7. What are the basic causes of today’s environmental problems, and how
are these causes connected?
8. What are the harmful effects of poverty and affluence?
9. What three major cultural changes have take place since humans arrived?
10. What are the fours scientific principles of sustainability and how can they
help us build more environmentally sustainable and just societies?
I.
Core Case Study - Living in a Sustainable Age: Life in the Fast Lane
A. Chess between kings
B. Exponential growth – a quantity increases at a fixed percentage per unit of
time.
1. Starts slow but…… (Fig. 1-1)
a. 10 000 YA – 5 million people
b. present – 6.6 billion humans
c. 2100 – 8-10 billion
C. Human activities cause major changes to earth’s systems.
1. Mass extinctions (0.1-1% per year) – forests, grasslands, wetlands,
coral reefs, and topsoil vanish or degrade.
a. Human ecological footprint spreads exponentially across
the globe.
2. Climate change is also due to exponential growth of human activities
a. Can negatively effect
i. Water supply
ii. Agriculture
iii. Biodiversity
iv. Economies
II.
Living More Sustainably
A. What is environmental science (ES)?
1. Studies how earth works, how we interact w/ the earth, and how to
deal w/ environmental problems.
2. Environment – sum of all living things that affect organisms.
a. Living things can also influence the environment.
i. Exponential increase in human population is
accompanied by an exponential increase in
consumption  degradation/depletion of
air, water, soil, and biodiversity.
ii. Continuation of this trend can threaten longterm sustainability of our societies.
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3. ES is interdisciplinary study integrating (Fig. 1.2)
a. Natural sciences (Bio, Chem, Geol)
b. Social Science (Economics, Politics, Ethics)
4. Goal of ES
a. Learn how natural systems works
b. How environment affects us
c. How we affect the environment
d. How we can live sustainably w/o degrading our lifesupport system.
5. Basic tool of ES, ecology – study of the relationships between
organisms and their environment.
6. Environmentalism (not the same as ES or Ecology)
a. Social movement for protecting earth’s life-support
system for us and other species.
b. Political in nature
i. Pass and enforce laws
ii. Promote solutions to environmental
problems
iii. Protest harmful environmental actions
B. Sustainability: The Integrative Theme of This Book
1. Fig 1-3
2. Sustainability – ability of earth’s systems (including human cultural
systems and economies) to survive and adapt to changing
environmental conditions indefinitely.
a. Natural capital (Fig. 1.4)
b. Natural capital degradation
i. Use of normally renewable resources faster
than nature can renew them.
c. Solutions
d. Individuals matter
3. Sound science – concepts and ideas that are widely accepted by
experts in fields of natural and social sciences.
C. Environmentally Sustainable Societies: Protecting Natural Capital and
Living off its Income.
1. Meets current and future needs of its people for basic resources in a
just and equitable manner w/o compromising the ability of future
generations to meet their needs.
2. Living sustainably – living off natural income replenished by soils,
plants, air and water and not depleting or degrading the earth’s natural
capital that supplies this income.
3. Economic Capital
a. 10 % annual interest and one million dollars
b. Spend $100 000 a year – sustainable
c. Spend $200 000 a year – gone in 7th year
d. Spend $110 000 a year – gone in 18th year
e. Lesson, protect capital and live on income
4. Same lesson should be applied to earth’s natural capital.
III. Population Growth, Economic Growth, and Economic Development
A. Human Population Growth: Slowing but Still Rapid
1. Population increasing exponentially, faster in poor countries.
2. As of 2006, increasing by 1.23 %
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a. 81 million in 2006
b. or, 222 000 day-1
c. 9250 h-1
d. 2.6 sec-1
3. Exponential increase in population is accompanied by an exponential
increase in use of natural resources.
a. Less time to find solutions to environmental problems.
B. Economic Growth and Economic Development
1. Economic growth – increase in goods and services.
a. Requires more producers and consumers (i.e., population
growth);
b. and/or, more production and consumption per person.
2. Gross domestic product (GDP) – annual market value of all goods and
services produced by all firms and organizations, foreign and
domestic, operating w/in a country.
a. Growth, measured by percent change in GDP.
3. per capita GDP – GDP divided by the total population at midyear.
a. Six largest economies in 2006 – US, Japan, Germany,
UK, France, and China.
4. Economic development – improvement of human living standards by
economic growth.
a. Classification depends on degree of industrialization and
per capita GDP-PPP.
b. Developed countries – 1.2 billion. US, Canada, Japan,
Australia, New Zealand, and most of Europe.
c. Developing countries – 5.4 billion. African, Asian, and
Latin American
i. Moderately developed countries – China,
India, Brazil, and Mex.
ii. About 97% of projected population increase
will be from developing countries (Figs. 1.5
and 1.6).
5. Environmentally sustainable economic development
C. Doubling Time and Exponential Growth: The Rule of 70.
1. Doubling time can be calculated with the following:
70
t double 
%GR
IV. Resources
A. What is a resource?
1. Anything obtained from the environment to meet our needs (and
wants).
a. Food, water, shelter, and metals
2. Some directly available, others indirectly
a. Directly – sun, fresh air, wind, fresh surface water, fertile
soil, and wild edible plants.
b. Indirectly – petroleum, ground water, iron, and modern
crops.
i. Such resources require human capital (and
ingenuity) and natural capital.
B. Perpetual and Renewable Resources
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1. Perpetual resources – continuously renewable on a human timescale
2. Renewable resource – can be replenished fairly rapidly as long as it is
not used faster than it can be replaced.
a. Forests, grasslands, wildlife, fresh air and water, and
fertile soil
3. Sustainable yield – highest rate a renewable resource can be used
without degrading or depleting.
4. Environmental degradation – when natural replacement rate is
exceeded.
a. Urban sprawl, topsoil erosion, pollution, clearing forests,
depleting groundwater, reduction of biodiversity because
of habitat loss.
C. Tragedy of the Commons
1. Overuse of common-property (or free access resources).
a. Clean air, open ocean, migratory birds, freshwater
2. Degradation of renewable free access resources, called tragedy of the
commons by biologist Garrett Hardin.
a. Example: collapse of fisheries.
3. Solutions to preventing such degradation.
a. Use free access renewable resources at rates below
sustainable yields.
b. Convert free-access resources to private ownership.
D. Ecological Footprint – the amount of biologically productive land and
water needed to supply an area with resources and to absorb the wastes
and pollution produced from such resource use.
1. per capita ecological footprint (Fig. 1.7).
2. Humanity’s ecological footprint is estimated to be 39% above earth’s
ecological capacity.
a. US, EU, China, India and Japan together use 74% of
earth’s ecological capacity.
b. The US outdoes every other country by at least two-fold.
c. If China and India were to catch up to present US
consumption, they would need two require two planet
earths.
3. Three factors that have the greatest ecological footprint: agriculture,
transportation, and heating and cooling buildings.
E. Nonrenewable Resources
1. Includes energy resources, metallic mineral resources, and
nonmetallic mineral resources.
2. Fossil fuels would be exhausted as there is exponential growth in their
use.
3. Recycling and reusing metals and non-metallic minerals
V.
Pollution
A. Sources of Harmful Effects of Pollutants
1. Pollution – the presence of chemicals a t high enough levels in air,
water, soil, or food to threaten the health, survival, or activities of
humans or other living organisms.
a. Point sources (Fig. 1.9)
b. Non-point sources
2. Three types of unwanted effects:
a. Disrupt or degrade life-support systems
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b.
c.
Damage wildlife, human health, and property
Create nuisances, noise and unpleasant smells, tastes, and
sights.
B. Solutions: Prevention versus Cleanup
1. Pollution prevention (input pollution control)
2. Pollution cleanup (output pollution control)
a. Problems with relying on cleanup
i. Temporary bandage
ii. Removes pollutants from one part of the
environment causing pollution elsewhere.
iii. Once pollutants are at harmful level, too
expensive or impossible to reduce them to
acceptable levels.
VI. Environmental Problems: Causes and Connections
A. Key Environmental Problems and Their Basic Causes
1. Problems are mostly the result of exponential population growth and
resource use (Fig. 1.10).
2. Underlying causes (Fig. 1.11)
a. Three other likely causes:
i. Global trade policies that undermine
environmental protection.
ii. Influence of money and politics.
iii. Failure to provide inspiring and positive
visions of a more sustainable and durable
economic future.
B. Poverty and Environmental Problems
1. Poverty – is the inability to meet one’s basic economic needs and is
concentrated mostly in the southern hemisphere.
a. Many desperate for basic needs (Fig. 1.12)
i. Deplete or degrade forests, soil, grasslands,
and wildlife for short-term survival
ii. Don’t have luxury of worrying about longterm environmental quality
2. Poor people often have many children as a form of economic security
3. 7 million die prematurely each year
a. Malnutrition
b. Depressed immunity
c. Lack of clean drinking water
d. Respiratory disease from inhaling indoor pollutants
C. Resource Consumption and Environmental Problems
1. Prosperous over-consume
2. Affluenza – term coined to describe the unsustainable addiction to
over-consumption and materialism exhibited in the lifestyles of many
affluent consumers in the US and other developed countries and the
rising middle class in China and India.
a. Has enormous environmental impact
b. Large amounts of pollution, environmental degradation,
and wastes.
3. Expert on the growth and decline of civilizations Arnold Toynbee
a. True measure of growth – law of progressive
simplification – shift from material to nonmaterial
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developing culture, compassion, sense of community, and
strength of democracy.
D. Beneficial Effects of Affluence on Environmental Quality
1. Money for developing cleaner and more efficient technologies.
2. Affluence financed improvements in the US since the 1970s
3. Downside
a. Clean up by transferring wastes and pollution to more
distant locations
b. Obtain resources from anywhere in the world w/o seeing
harmful environmental impacts of high-consumption life
styles.
E. Connections between Environmental Problems and Their Causes
1. Three factor model (Fig. 1-14)
a. Impact = Population  Affluence  Technologies
b. In US, per capita resource use is up to 100 times greater
than the world’s poorest countries.
c. Some technologies are environmentally harmful, others
beneficial.
VII. Cultural Changes and the environment
A. Human Cultural Changes
1. Homo sapiens sapiens – 90 to 195 thousand y.a.
a. Agricultural revolution – 12 000 y.a.
b. Industrial-medical revolution – 275 y.a. (Fig. 1.15)
c. Information-globalization revolution – 50 y.a.
i. Living conditions are better, but progress
has put a strain on earth’s natural capital.
B. Eras of Environmental History in the US
1. Tribal era, at least 10 000 years before European settelers
2. Frontier era, 1607-1890
3. Early conservation era, 1832-1870
4. Modern environmental era, 1870 to present – government and private
citizens in resource conservation, public health, and environmental
protection.
VIII. Sustainability and Environmental Worldviews
A. Are Things Getting Better or Worse? A Millennium Assessment
1. Two schools of thought:
a. Technological advances will allow us to keep growing.
b. Global economy is outgrowing the capacity for earth to
support it.
2. The 2005 UN’s Millennium Ecosystem Assessment
a. 1360 experts from 95 countries
b. Human activity degrading or using unsustainably about
60 % of world’s free natural services.
c. Report also says we have the tools to preserve earth’s
natural capital.
d. Challenge: not to get trapped into confusion and inaction
by listening primarily to either two:
i. Technological optimists
ii. Environmental pessimists
3. Sustaining our current global civilization depends on:
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a.
b.
c.
d.
B.
C.
D.
E.
Shifting to a renewable energy-base;
a reuse/recycle economy;
and a diversified transport system.
Making the transition requires:
i. restructuring a global economy to sustain
civilization;
ii. an all-out effort to eradicate poverty,
stabilize population, and restore hope; and
iii. a systematic effort to restore natural
systems.
Environmental Worldviews and Ethics
1. Differing views on the state of the environment depends on
environmental worldview and environmental ethics.
2. Environmental worldview – set of assumptions and values about how
you think the world works and what you think your role in the world
should be.
a. Planetary management worldview – separate from the
natural world
b. Stewardship worldview – manage earth for our benefit,
stewardship
c. Environmental wisdom worldview – part of and totally
dependent on nature; nature exists for all species.
3. Environmental ethics – beliefs about what is right and wrong w/ how
we treat the environment.
Four Scientific Principles: Copy Nature
1. Four basic components of the earth: natural sustainability
a. Reliance on solar energy
b. Biodiversity – genes, species, ecosystems, and ecological
processes
c. Population control
d. Nutrient recycling
2. Fig. 1-17
3. The four scientific principles of sustainability as a guide could lead to
an environmental revolution (Fig. 1-18).
Building Social Capital: Talking and Listening to One Another
1. Social capital – positive force created when people w/ different views
and values find common ground and work together to build
understanding, trust and informed shared visions of what their
communities, states, nations, and world could and should be.
2. Stakeholders of all sides have some legitimate and useful insights.
a. Social capital can be built by finding trade-off solutions.
b. Individuals matter – 5 to 10% of population can bring
major social change.
Case Study: Chattanooga, Tennessee
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