Transcript geog415_lecture 1 - Cal State LA

Geog415 Perspectives on Environment
Dr Hengchun Ye
Critical Thinking
Involves developing skills to help you analyze and evaluate the validity
of information and ideas you are exposed to and to make decisions
What to believe and not to believe?
Facts versus opinion
Evidence versus arguments
Take and defend an informed position on issues, integrate information
and see relationships, and apply your knowledge to dealing with
new and different problems
How?
Question about everything and everybody
Identify and evaluate your personal biases and beliefs
Be open-minded, flexible, and humble
• Environment: is everything that affects a living organism (any unique
form of live)
• Environmental study: a study of how the earth works, how we
interact with the earth, and how to deal with environmental
problems
• Resources: Sun, air, water, soil, energy, and minerals
• An environmentally sustainable society: meets the current needs of
its people for food, clean water, clear air, shelter, and other basic
resources without compromising the ability of future generations to
meet their needs
• Living sustainably: living off natural income replenished by soil,
plants, air, and water and not depleting or degrading the earth’s
natural capital that supplies this income.
Population growth
Annual growth rate is
1.25% or 219 people per
day based on 2004
population
Economic growth: an increase in capacity of a country to
provide people with goods and services (required
population growth for producers and consumers, more
production and consumption per person, or both)
It is measured by percentage changes in a country’s gross
domestic products (GDP)
GDP: the annual market value of all goods and services
produced by all firms and organizations, foreign and
domestic, operating within a country. Per capita GDP
measures changes in a country’s living standard
Developed countries: include US, Canada, Japan,
Australia, New Zealand, and the countries of Europe.
Most are highly industrialized and have a high average
per capita GDP (1.2 Billion people)
In developing countries: Africa, Asia, and Latin
America. Some are middle-income moderately
developed countries and others are low-income
countries.
About 97% increase in world population occurs
in these countries.
Resources
A resource: is anything obtained from the environment to meet human needs
and wants (food, shelter, manufactured goods, transportation,
communication, and recreation)
Three classes:
1.
Perpetual resource: renewed continuously at a human time scale. Such
as
solar energy (will last 6 billion year)
2. Renewable recourse: can be replenished fairly rapidly (hours to several
decades) through natural processes as long as it is not used up faster
than replaces. Such as
forests, grass lands, wild animals, fresh water, fresh air, and fertile soil.
3. Nonrenewable resources: exists in a fixed quantity or stock in the earth’s
crust. It can be economically depleted to the point where it costs too
much to obtain what is left. Such as
energy sources of coal, oil, natural gas, metallic mineral resources of iron,
copper, aluminum and nonmetallic mineral resources of salt, clay, sand,
and phosphates that are too difficult or too costly to recycle.
Resources-continue
Sustainable yield: the highest rate at which a renewable resource can
be used indefinitely without reducing its available supply.
Opinion: free renewable resources can be degraded. Common or free
access such as clean air, open ocean and its fish, migratory birds,
wildlife species, gases of the lower atmosphere, and space.
“if I do not use it, someone else will use it”.
“The little bit I use or pollute is not enough to matter, it is renewable”
Solutions:
(1) To use at rates well below their estimated sustainable yields by
reducing population, regulating access to the resources or both
(laws, international treaties)
(2) Convert free-access resources to private ownerships.
Problems: not always protect natural resources when this conflicts with
protecting their financial capital or increasing their profits. Example:
sell timber, sell land for more money than sustaining it. Also, not
everything can be privatized.
Per capita ecological footprint: the amount of biological productive land and
water needed to supply each person with the renewable resources they
use and to absorb the wastes from such resource use.
Humanity’s ecological footprint per person exceeds the earth’s biological
capacity by 15%. Or a resource of 1.15 earth is needed to support our
current use. It would take the land area of about 4 more planet earths for
the rest of the world to reach US levels of consumption with existing
technology.
Solutions:
Find more
Recycle or reuse existing supplies
Waste less
Develop a substitute
Or wait millions of years for more to be
produced
pollution: the presents of chemicals at high enough levels
in air, water, soil, or food to threaten the health, survival,
or activities of human or other organisms.
Natural: volcanic eruption, forest fire, desert windstorms,
etc.
Human: burning of fossil fuel, etc
Point source: single, identifiable source. Example:
smokestack of a coal burning power plant; drainpipe of a
factory; exhaust pipe of an automobile
Nonpoint sources: dispersed and often difficult to identify.
Example: pesticides sprayed into the air, blown by wind,
runoff of fertilizers and pesticides from farmlands, golf
courses and suburban lawns and gardens into streams,
lakes.
Issue: what can we do about pollutant?
1.
Clean up
(a) may be temporary relieve, population continues to grow and so is
the consumption level (example: adding catalytic converters to
car exhaust system to reduce air pollution)
(b) Move a pollutant from one part of the environment only to cause
another. Example: garbage is collected: burned (air pollution and
produce ash); dump into streams, lakes, oceans (water pollution);
buried (soil and ground water pollution)
2. prevention: input pollution control
More emphasis on prevention because it worked better and cheaper
than cleanup. Benjamin Franklin said: “one ounce of prevention is
worth a pound of cure”
Environmental and
resource problems
are interconnected
Five major causes for environmental
problems:
1. Population growth
2. Wasteful resource use
3. Poverty
4. poor environmental accounting; and
5. Ecological ignorance (inadequate
understanding of how the earth works)
Issue:
Poverty is a major threat to human
health and the environment
Many world’s poor do not have access
to the basic necessities for a
healthy, productive, and decent life
(1) Desperate for land to grow food
(deplete and degrade forests, soil,
grasslands, and wildlife for shortterm survive
(2) Gave many children as a form of
economic security (work and help
old aged parents)
Problem with developed countries
Affluenza: unsustainable addiction to over consumption
and materialism exhibited in the lifestyle of affluent
consumers (in search for fulfillment and happiness)
Positive side of affluent countries: have more money for
improving environmental quality. Money for technology
development to reduce pollution, environmental
degradation and resource waste (changes in US and
other countries since 1970)
Average US citizen consumes about 35 times as much as
the average citizen of India and 100 times as much as
the average person in the world’s poorest countries.
Two opposite opinions about our environmental sustainability (good things we have done:
increasing life expectancy, reducing infant mortality, increased food supplies,
reducing many forms of pollution)
1. Technology optimism: human ingenuity, technological advances, and economic
growth will allow us to clean up pollution to acceptable levels, find substitutes for any
resources that become scarce, and keep expanding the earth’s ability to support
more humans, as we do in the past. They accuse others of exaggerating the
seriousness of the problems and failing to appreciate the progress we have made in
improving quality life and protecting the environment.
2. Environmental pessimists: our degrading and disrupting the earth’s life support
system for us and other species at an accelerating rate. We need to use the earth
in a way that is more sustainable for present and future human generations and
other species that support us and other forms of life.
Environmentally sustainable economic development: reward (tax breaks, government
subsides) environmentally beneficial and sustainable activities and discourages
(government faxes and regulation) environmentally harmful and unsustainable
activities.
Most serious environment problems: poverty, malnutrition, unsafe drinking water,
smoking, air pollution, infectious disease (AIDS, TB, malaria, and hepatitis B), water
shortages, climate change, and loss and degradation of biodiversity