Chapter Reflections
2.1 Science and the Environment
(Chapter 1)
This first chapter provides a basic introduction to science and the environment through discussions on the state of the planet, sustainability, sound science, stewardship, and moving toward a sustainable future. It emphasizes the paradox of the state of the planet and how as humans have improved well-being while the natural ecosystem’s well-being has declined steadily.
The state of the planet follows four major global trends, human population and well-being, the status of vital ecosystem services, global climate change, and the loss of biodiversity. The world population has continued to grow at a rate of 80 million people per year. A major problem with this is that there is a population capacity for what this planet can support and we have already exceeded that capacity so as the population continues to grow, how long can the planet support human life and this growth? That brings up the idea of the vital ecosystem services and how we manage the natural ecosystems that support human life, especially as it grows at such a high rate, and currently, these resources are being severely mismanaged. Humans need the flow of goods and services from the ecosystem from water, food, shelter, fuel, to things such as the breakdown or waste, the climate, and nutrient cycles. These are the resources that human life requires and as the population grows, the resources available to each person decreases leading to a global environmental crisis. A major byproduct of human life and population is global climate change. The entire human economy runs off fuels that emit carbon dioxide which increases the pressure in the atmosphere and decreases the ozone layer leading to global warming and climate issues from the greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, trapping heat. The final major global trend discussed here is the loss of biodiversity. Biodiversity is the variations of different organisms and the measure of different organisms in an ecosystem. As the human population grows and consumes more resources, it leads to overconsumption of resources and converting of forests and other environments into urban areas leading to the loss of many of the pants and animals that lived in those habitats contributing to the loss of biodiversity and many of the species.
This chapter also discusses the idea of sustainability, sound science, and stewardship. Sustainability is how a sustainable relationship between humans and the environment can be achieved to ensure a future balance and the goal of human interactions with nature. Sound science is our fundamental understanding of how the world works and how human systems interact with it. Stewardship is the actions and programs that manage natural resources and human well-being.
Sustainability comes with the idea of sustainable yields and how much of a resource can be harvested at a time without depleting the resources needed to keep producing the resource. It is the yield rate that can be continued indefinitely. A sustainable society is a society in balance with nature, or a society not exceeding its resource limitations. One concept that was especially interesting to me is the idea of sustainable development and how we can meet present needs without compromising future ones. This idea really stood out because it is challenging to drive anywhere and not see human development. Finding pure natural ecosystems is so rare now and that is unfortunately due to a lack of sustainable development.
Sound science is science that follows the scientific method and is legitimate science. The scientific method relies on observation, constructing models to better understand the observations and peoples understanding of the world from just their senses, experimentation to test a hypothesis or theory, hypothesis where we find questions to learn more about the world, and uncertainty and the understanding that there could be errors and the only way to confirm a hypothesis is to reject the null hypotheses and prove that the other explanations are false. The result of the sound science done is with theories and natural laws, both of which are the result of studies and work together to make up humans knowledge of the world. There is so much uncertainty with science that even with all of these tests, theories and laws can be proved wrong by future scientists or be disagreed on within the scientific community with the introduction of new information, a complex phenomenon, a variety of different perspectives, and each scientist’s individual bias. There is also a lot of junk science presented to the community which is not scientifically valid but is promoted to get people talking or motivate them to do something.
Stewardship is how people protect and sustain the environment through different environmental protection movements from recycling efforts, cleanups, sharing information, and protesting policies. Another form of stewardship is through justice and equity and fair relationships among humans with regards to access to resources and the placement of hazardous industries. Many are located in racially discriminatory ways and a form of stewardship is working to stop those practices and promote the equitable allocation of resources.
Mastering Assignments Report
The above images show my results on the homework assignments and quiz for this chapter. Here you can see I got 100% on both showing my knowledge in the material covered in this chapter, specifically with science and technology within a society, interpreting graphs and data, and the process of science for sustainable solutions. I did work through the quiz twice to practice and ensure full understanding of the content.
2.2 Economics, Politics, and Public Policy
(Chapter 2)
This chapter was on economics, politics, and public policy. It discusses how economics relates to the environmental goods and services, the resources and as wealth in a sustainable society, ethics with regards to the environment and economy, environmental public policy and the cost-benefit analysis of those policies and getting society to agree on a policy. There is a constant conflict between economics and environmentalism since to grow quickly economically usually has a high environmental cost such as in China and how the economic growth lead to extraordinarily high pollution and toxic air.
Economics deals with the production, consumption, and distribution of goods and services. This chapter discovers the relationship between economics and the environment and the cost of economic activity. Producing and distributing goods often produces a lot of carbon dioxide and significantly. The three factors of production are land, labor, and capital and land is a major environmental cost. With rapid economic growth causing pollution, it has become more noticeably necessary to create a sustainable economy rather than one that is depleting its resources and leading to pollution, global warming, rising sea levels, and loss of biodiversity. There needs to be a transition from a brown economy to a green one. More environmental costs are the materials and energy used, the ecosystem services, and the production of heat energy and waste.
A nation’s wealth is measured in produced capital (goods and services), natural capital (natural resources), and intangible capital (skills, culture, and knowledge). It is measured in a gross national product which is the sum of all of those types of capital in a country but some things such as farming in developing countries are not measured leading to inaccurate measurements of the natural services provided by the ecosystems and also does not account for the depreciation of natural capital. There are other ways of measuring the wealth of a country, but all are flawed in one way or another and the GDP is the most commonly used one.
Another misconception is that having natural capital means it’s distributed among everyone in a society. Those in rural poverty usually live in more polluted areas near hazardous plants and often can not afford many of the quality natural resources due to the high cost. In fact, many farmers in Guatemala grow food that they cannot afford to eat. The resources also need to be managed to not only support the well being of current people but also of future generations. Another main issue is waste. In the US about 40% of the food produced is thrown away. There are laws requiring food to be thrown out once served at restaurants even if never touched.
The legislative branch is responsible for establishing laws and policies and Congress has the responsibility to enforce environmental public-policy laws. They have made a variety of regulations to regulate pollution, and polluters are required to meet those requirements. There are also market based policies where polluters can make their own environmental standards with a market-based approach and there are incentives to lower pollution. Policies must go through 4 stages, recognition of the issue, formulation of the policy, implementation, and control. Policies also go under a cost-benefit analysis where the need for the regulation is examined, and then alternative approaches considered and the estimated cost of the different approaches to decide whether or not the policy would be implemented. Policy makers do not often consider the cost of a policy completely nor do they consider the cost of doing nothing. Then comes the biggest challenge of actually getting society to agree on and pass a policy. Environmental concerns are often battles between a variety of special interest groups with different opinions on how to solve the problems.
The above images show my results on the homework assignments and quiz for this chapter. Here I did miss some topics on the homework assignment but I was able to learn them fully before the quiz. Here I excelled at GDP and GPI, supply and demand, and the tragedy of the commons and red deer in Spain and had to work on environmental policy and the economy and the environment sections. I did work through the quiz twice to practice and ensure full understanding of the content.
Mastering Assignments Report
2.3 Basic Needs of Living Things
(Chapter 3)
Chapter three explores the basic needs of living things with topics like organisms in their environment, environmental factors, matter in living and nonliving systems, matter and energy, and the cycling matter in ecosystems.
Ecology is the study of all of the processes influencing the abundance of organisms and their distribution and how living things interact with their environment. Each community is represented by a population within a species. This population is part of the species in the area that make up the reproducing group. Biotic communities are all types of organisms that live in an area. An ecosystem is an interaction of different communities and the environment affecting them in an area. A landscape is a cluster of ecosystems, and a biome is a large area of Earth’s surface that shares a similar climate and vegetation. A biosphere is the interconnection of all of the ecosystems on earth.
Different kinds of species thrive in different environments with different climates, resources, and other factors. The range of tolerance is the entire span that allows any growth of an organism. The limits of tolerance are the high and low endpoints of that curve. And the zones under the curve bout outside of the optimal range are called zones of stress. There is a law of limiting factors in an environment. A limiting factor is a factor that limits growth. The law of limiting factors is when any factor is outside of the optimal range, it will cause stress and will limit the growth and survival of a population. A limiting factor can be too much of a factor or too little.
Matter is anything that has mass or takes space and is made up of atoms. The different structures of atoms found in nature are called elements. The law of Conservation of Matter says that matter is never lost, only transferred between forms and organisms. Molecules and compounds are combinations of at least two atoms and compounds are at least two different kinds of atoms. Earth’s environment is made of these molecules and compounds and can be separated into 4 spheres, the atmosphere, hydrosphere, lithosphere, and biosphere. The atmosphere is a mixture of oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide, the hydrosphere is a source of carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen. The lithosphere is a source of minerals and crystals. All of the different spheres interact and pass the different elements back and forth in different forms.
Energy, in the most basic definition, is the ability to move matter. There is kinetic energy, energy in motion, and potential energy, energy in storage. Those are the two most well-known, but there is also chemical energy. Energy can be transferred between forms and converted from one type to another but the Law of Conservation of Energy states that energy is never created or destroyed. Producers gain energy through photosynthesis and transforming sunlight into energy they can use and consumers gain energy for movement and growth from consuming producers or other consumers and absorbing and breaking down their organic matter. Energy flows one way in an ecosystem in a circular matter through consumers, producers, and decomposers.
Some important cycles in the ecosystems are carbon, phosphorous, nitrogen, and sulfur. These cycles will be further explained in the worksheet below, but they are all one-directional cycles and interact with each other. All four cycles are critical to the environment and have human and pollution impacts.
Biogeochemical Cycle Activity
The above images show the worksheets discussing the processes, storage pools, human impacts, and intersections with other cycles for the Carbon, Nitrogen, Sulfur, and Phosphorous cycles. We did an activity in class where we got into groups and learned one of the cycles really well and then sent ambassadors to the other groups to learn about their cycles while we taught the other groups ambassadors about ours. Then our group came back together and the ambassadors shared the information with the group about the cycle they just learned. It was very interesting to see how each of the cycles were connected and how they amplified each others pollution impacts.
Mastering Assignments Report
The above images show my results on the homework assignments and quiz for this chapter. Here you can see I got 100% on both showing my knowledge in the material covered in this chapter, specifically with the carbon cycle, biogeochemical cycles, and the input of nitrogen to Earth's ecosystem. I did work through the quiz three times to practice and ensure full understanding of the content.
2.4 Populations and Communities
(Chapter 4)
Chapter 4 discusses populations and communities and the dynamics of natural populations, limits on populations, community interactions, evolution as a force of change, and implications for management by humans.
The members of each species in a certain ecosystem and reproducing group in an area make up the population and the different populations of the different species in the area make up a community. Populations change depending on different factors and scientists like to track the births and deaths in a population to track the change in the numbers of individuals in a population. Population growth is the measure of the change in the size of a population and can be calculated using the equation:
change in population growth = (births + immigration) - (deaths + emigration).
If there is no change or very little change in the population size, then the population is in equilibrium. The population growth rate can be found by finding the change in population growth and dividing it by the change in time. In a natural environment, the growth of a population can follows a constant rate, a j-curve, or an s-curve seen in the graph below. A population carrying capacity varies based on different conditions. Favorable conditions could lead to an increase in carrying capacity and a decrease in less favorable conditions. There are even cases of exponential increase in the carrying capacity and super-fast and big growths are called population explosions – represented by the J-curve. The biotic potential of a species is the rate at which members of a species reproduce when under unlimited conditions. There are different kinds of reproductive strategies. R-strategists have a short lifespan and very high reproduction rate. K-strategists have a much lower reproductive rate but they care for their young until their young are old enough to compete.
The carrying capacity of an area is how big a population can be sustained based on the limiting factors. These limiting factors play a much greater role where there is a higher population density. Density-dependent limitations are when the population that can be sustained of one species is dependent on the population of another species. A populations critical number is the minimum population base for survival.
There are many different community interactions within species such as a symbiotic one, where the species are closely connected. There are predation relations where one species benefits and the other is harmed such as parasitism, herbivory, and carnivory. Competition is the relationship between two species that rely on the same resource and mutualism is where both species benefit from each other. There is also commensalism where one species benefits and the other is unaffected and amensalism where one species is harmed and the other is unaffected. Keystone species are critical to the survival of an ecosystem but each of these relationships affect the populations and population growth of the species involved.
The above images show my results on the homework assignments and quiz for this chapter. Here you can see I got 100% on both showing my knowledge in the material covered in this chapter, specifically with natural selection, mechanisms of evolution, population ecology, species interactions, and population growth. I did work through the quiz three times to practice and ensure full understanding of the content.
