Apes Miller Ch. 1 Questions

Miller Chapter 1 Reading Questions 1. Three ways that human activities are affecting the environment include our exponential increase in population and our resource consumption, which have degraded the air, water, soil, and species in the natural systems that support our lives and economies. A third way is limiting the access that other species have to resources. 2. The goals of environmental science are to learn how nature works, how the environment affects us, how we affect the environment, and how we can live more sustainably without degrading our life-support system. 3.
Environmentalism is a social movement dedicated to protecting the earth’s life-support systems for us and other species, and is political in nature. Sustainability, also known as durability, is the ability of earth’s various systems to survive and adapt to changing environmental conditions indefinitely. 4. The five steps towards sustainability are understanding the components and importance of natural capital, recognizing that human activities degrade natural capital by using resources faster than they can be renewed, looking for workable solutions, making trade-offs or compromises, and recognizing that individuals matter.
They must be supported by sound science, or the concepts and ideas that are widely accepted by experts in a particular field of the natural or social sciences. 5. Natural capital is the natural resources and services that keep us and other species alive and support our economies. It changes over millions of years in response to environmental changes such as global warming and cooling and huge asteroids hitting the earth. 6. Economic growth is an increase in the capacity of a country to provide people with goods and services.

It’s measured by GDP, the annual market value of all goods and services produced by all firms and organizations, foreign and domestic, operating in a country. It goes up with either a population increase, more production and consumption, or both. Changes in this growth are measured by per capita GDP, or the GDP divided by the total population at midyear. Economic development is the improvement of human living standards by economic growth. The United Nations classifies this based on a country’s degree of industrialization and their per capita GDP. 7. Developed countries are highly industrialized and have high average per capita GDP.
All other nations are developing countries, whether they are middle-income or low-income. Developing countries tend to have the greatest population increases, as well as the greatest disparities between the rich and the poor as far as income goes. 8. 82% of the world’s population comes from developing countries. 9. 1. 5% of the world’s population growth comes from developing countries, as compared to merely 0. 1% in developed countries. 10. The rule of 70 calculates how long it takes to double the world’s population or economic growth at various exponential rates of growth. The formula is 70/percentage growth rate = doubling time in years. 1. The tragedy of the commons is the degradation of renewable free-access resources. The term was coined in 1968 by biologist Garrett Hardin. Basically, the logic is that “if I don’t use it, somebody else will anyway”. On a large scale, this only leads to waste and overconsumption. 12. One solution to the tragedy of the commons is to use free-access resources at rates well below their estimated sustainable yields by reducing population, regulating access to resources, or both. Another solution is to convert free-access resources to private ownership, so investments are protected. 3. Privatization doesn’t always work if a private owner values increasing profit over protecting natural resources that they own. It is also impractical for global common resources that cannot be divided up and converted to private property. 14. An ecological footprint is the amount of biologically productive land and water needed to supply an area with resources and to absorb the wastes and pollution produced by such resource use. The countries with the largest ecological footprint are the United States, the European Union, China, India, and Japan. 5. To shift towards more sustainable consumption, China and India should lower meat consumption (specifically China), limit population growth (including increased access to birth control), and promote and fund research into sustainable living. The United States, Japan, and the European Union should also promote and fund research into sustainable living, as well as lowering oil consumption by supporting alternative energy and promoting a less consumer-centric lifestyle to their citizens. 16. Point sources of pollutants are single, identifiable sources.
An example is a smokestack of a coal-burning industrial plant. Non-point sources are larger, dispersed, and often difficult to identify and therefore much harder and more expensive to control. An example is pesticides sprayed into the air or blown by the wind into the atmosphere. 17. Two basic approaches to dealing with pollution are pollution prevention (input pollution control), which reduces or eliminates the production of pollution, and pollution cleanup (output pollution control), which involves cleaning up or diluting pollutants after they have been produced. 18.
Three problems with relying on pollution cleanup are that it is only a temporary bandage as long as population and consumption levels grow without corresponding improvements in pollution control technology, cleanup often removes a pollutant from one part of the environment only to cause pollution in another, and once pollutants have entered and been dispersed into the environment at harmful levels it usually costs too much or is impossible to reduce them to acceptable levels. 19. Five basic causes of environmental problems are population growth, wasteful resource use, poverty, poor environmental accounting, and environmental ignorance. 0. Poverty causes environmental problems because the poor often deplete forests, soils, grasslands, and wildlife for short-term survival since they don’t have the luxury of worrying about the long-term environment. They also have the most population growth. 21. Affluenza is the unsustainable addiction to overconsumption and materialism exhibited in the lifestyles of many affluent consumers in developed countries and the rising middle class in certain developing countries. It is based on the assumption that buying more things brings happiness. 22.
In the United States, the air is cleaner, most rivers and lakes are cleaner, and drinking water is purer. However, this is because the waste and pollution is transferred to more distant locations. 23. The environmental impact (I) of a population on a given area depends on three key factors: the number of people (P), the average resource use per person or affluence (A), and the beneficial and harmful environmental effects of the technologies (T) used to provide and consume each unit of a resource and control or prevent the resulting pollution and environmental degradation. 4. Three major cultural changes have impacted the environment. The agricultural revolution allowed people to settle in villages and raise crops and domesticated animals. The industrial-medical revolution led to a shift towards urban society using fossil fuels to manufacture material items, agriculture, and transportation. It also used science to improve sanitation and understand and control disease. The information-globalization revolution is based on using new technologies for gaining rapid access to much more information on a global scale. 5. To shift to a sustainable economy, we must shift to a renewable energy-based and reuse/recycle economy with a diversified transport system. This requires restructuring the global economy to sustain civilization, a large effort to eradicate poverty, stabilize population, and restore hope, as well as a systematic effort to restore natural systems. 26. Your environmental worldview is a set of assumptions and values about how you think the world works and what your role in the world should be.
Environmental ethics is concerned with your beliefs about what is right and wrong with how we treat the environment. 27. There are three main types of environmental worldviews. Planetary management worldview holds that nature exists to meet our needs and wants, and that we can use ingenuity and technology to manage the earth’s life-support systems with unlimited economic growth. Stewardship worldview holds that we can manage the earth for our benefit but we have an ethical responsibility to be caring and responsible managers, or stewards, of the earth.
Environmental wisdom worldview holds that we are part of and totally dependent on nature and that nature exists for all species. It calls for encouraging earth-sustaining forms of economic growth. 28. Four basic components of Earth’s nature that we can mimic are reliance on solar energy, biodiversity, population control, and nutrient recycling. 29. Current emphasis needs to be shifted to how the individual matters, working together and communicating for social change, and finding trade-off solutions to environmental problems, in order to achieve sustainable emphasis.