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jilliangkenny-blog · 5 years

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An Introduction to the Connections Between Subjects of Environmental Studies

Blog Post #2

Miller and Spoolman define sustainability as “the capacity of the earth’s natural systems and human cultural systems to survive, flourish, and adapt to changing environmental conditions into the very long-term future”. This means that if everyone acted in a sustainable manner, whether it be regarding their personal lives, business lives, or whatever it may be, the environment would be in a condition that lasts for future people to live. The textbook sets up its first chapter by making a definitive stance that there is, indeed, hope for the future. While studying the environment can seem hopeless, at times, I feel as though it’s a good decision to start the textbook off in this manner because it gives purpose to learning the subject and it reminds the reader why it is so important to learn about and spread the message of environmental sustainability.

Although it is important to focus on the positive, there is also a definite warning that needs to be projected to the world in order for change to happen. This is the tone that the “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice” takes on. In the article, they use concrete scientific data to support their claim that, “to prevent widespread misery and catastrophic biodiversity loss, humanity must practice a more environmentally sustainable alternative to business as usual”. This is similar to the textbook’s view, but the evidence it cites gives away how dire the situation is currently.

The environment is everything around us, including living and nonliving things. Environmental science is “an interdisciplinary study of how humans interact with the living and nonliving parts of their environment. Miller and Spoolman reference three specific goals of environmental science: “to learn how nature works, to understand how we interact with the environment, and to find ways to deal with environmental problems and to live more sustainably”.

More Definitions:

- Ecology - the biological sciences that studies how organisms interact with one another and with their environment

- Organisms - living things

- Species - a group of organisms that have a unique set of characteristics that distinguish them from all other organisms and, for organisms that reproduce sexually, can mate and produce fertile offspring

- Ecosystem - a set of organisms within a defined area or volume that interact with one another and with and their environment of nonliving matter and energy

- Environmentalism - a social movement dedicated to protecting the earth’s life-support systems for all forms of life

- Biodiversity - the astounding variety of organisms, the natural systems in which they exist and interact, and the natural services that these organisms and living systems provide free of charge - Provides countless ways for life to adapt to changing environmental conditions

- Chemical cycling (nutrient cycling) - this circulation of chemicals from the environment through organisms and back to the environment is necessary for life - For life to sustain itself, these nutrients must be cycled indefinitely

- Natural capital - the natural resources and natural services that keep us and other forms of life alive and support our human economies

- Natural resources - materials and energy in nature that are essential or useful to humans - Contain renewable resources (air, water, soil, plants, wind) and nonrenewable resources (copper, oil, and coal)

- Natural services - processes in nature, such as purification of air and water and renewal of topsoil, which support life and human economies

- Topsoil - the upper layer of soil in which plants can grow

- Resource - anything that we can obtain from the environment to meet our needs and wants

- Perpetual resource - a resource that is continuous and is expected to last a long time (solar)

- Renewable resource - a resource that takes anywhere from several days to several hundred years to be replenished through natural processes - renewable as long as we do not use it up faster than nature can renew it (forests, grasslands, fish populations, freshwater, fresh air, fertile topsoil)

- Sustainable yield - the highest rate at which we can use a renewable resource indefinitely without reducing its available supply

- Nonrenewable resources - resources that exist in a fixed quantity, or stock, in the earth’s crust (coal, oil, etc)

- Reuse - reusing a resource over and over in the same form

- Recycling - collecting waste materials and processing them into new materials

- Economic growth - an increase in a nation’s output of goods and services

- Economic development - an effort to use economic growth to improve living standards

- Natural capital degradation - how human actions and development cause air pollution, climate change, soil erosion, shrinking forests, decreased wildlife habitats, etc.

- Pollution - any presence within the environment of a chemical or other agent such as noise or heat at a level that is harmful to the health, survival, or activities of humans or other organisms

- Pollution comes from two types of sources: - Point sources - single, identifiable sources - Non-point sources - dispersed and often difficult to identify

- Two types of pollutants: Biodegradable pollutants - harmful materials that natural processes can break down over time Nondegradable pollutants - harmful chemicals that natural processes cannot break down (lead, mercury, arsenic)

- Two types of dealing with pollution: Pollution cleanup (output pollution control) - cleaning up or diluting pollutants after we have produced them Pollution prevention (input pollution control) - reduces or eliminates the production of pollutants

- Tragedy of the Commons - when natural resources are not owned by any one person in particular, it takes away the incentive for people to take care of it and not degrade these resources. This is the root cause for the exploitation of many resources such as air, water, etc.

- Ecological footprint - the amount of biologically productive land and water needed to provide the people in a particular country or area with an indefinite supply of renewable resources and to absorb and recycle the wastes and pollution produced by such resource use

- Per capita ecological footprint - the average ecological footprint of an individual in a given country or area

- Ecological tipping point - time delays can allow an environmental problem to build slowly until it reaches this threshold, which often causes an irreversible shift in the behavior of a natural system

- Three potential tipping points - collapse of certain populations of fish because of overfishing, premature extinction of many species resulting from humans over hunting them or reducing their habitats, and long-term climate change caused in part by the burning of coal and oil

- Culture - the whole of a society’s knowledge, beliefs, technology, and practices - Human cultural changes have had profound effects on the earth

- Exponential growth - occurs when a quantity such as the human population increases at a fixed percentage per unit of time - starts off slowly, but causes the quantity to double again and again and grows into enormous numbers

- Affluenza - an eventually unsustainable addiction to buying more and more stuff

- Poverty - occurs when people are unable to fulfill their basic needs for adequate food, water, shelter, health, and education

- Environmental worldview - your set of assumptions and values reflecting how you think the world works and what you think your role in the world should be

- Environmental ethics - beliefs about what is right and what is wrong regarding how we treat the environment - Why should we care about the environment? Are we the most important beings on the planet or are we just one of the earth’s millions of different life forms? How do we promote sustainability?

- Planetary management worldview - holds that we are separate from and in charge of nature, that nature exists mainly to meet our needs and increasing wants, and that we can use our ingenuity and technology to manage the earth’s life-support systems, mostly for our benefit, indefinitely

- Stewardship worldview - holds that we can and should manage the earth for our benefit, but that we have an ethical responsibility to be caring and responsible managers, or stewards, of the earth; we should encourage environmentally beneficial forms of economic growth and development and discourage environmentally harmful forms

- Environmental wisdom worldview - holds that we are part of, and dependent on, nature and that nature exists for all species, not just for us; according to this view, our success depends on learning how life on earth sustains itself and integrating such environmental wisdom into the ways we think and act

- Environmentally sustainable society - one that meets the current and future basic resource needs of its people in a just and equitable manner without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their basic needs

- Natural income - the renewable resources such as plants, animals, and soil provided by the earth’s natural capital

- Social capital - building this involves getting people with different views and values to talk and listen to one another, to find common ground based on understanding and trust, and to work together to solve environmental and other problems facing our societies

Three components of sustainability: Natural capital (as defined above) - if we think if capital in the way that it is used in economic terms, it is a form of wealth that gives us the ability to sustain life, by purchasing everything that we need (water, food, etc). Natural capital can do the same for the whole world, as long as sustainable practices are used. This works in the same way that money capital is used - if you spend it too quickly, you won’t be able to sustain your own life. This applies to natural capital on a global scale. Human activity can “degrade natural capital by using normally renewable resources faster than nature can restore them, and by overloading natural systems with pollution and wastes”. This includes the destruction of forests faster than we can regrow them, as well as pollution of rivers and other bodies of water faster than they can clean themselves. Solutions - environmental scientists are committed to finding scientific solutions to the problem of human activity degrading the environment. In order to implement these scientific solutions, though, politicians must be the ones who create policies that alter the laws that change the way people act. Scientists cannot do this. There is often conflict when searching for these scientific solutions because trade-offs must be made.

IMPORTANT: individuals matter! Each individual person can help the world shift to a sustainable one. If everyone put forth their talents to changing the way the world operates. “Sustainability begins at personal and local levels”. Additionally, the book points out that countries differ in how sustainable they are based on economic prosperity and development. Countries that are more developed use much more resources than less developed countries. According to the UN Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, “human activities have degraded about 60% of the earth’s natural resources”. Most of this occurred in the past 50 years.

While pollution cleanup is important, there are several problems with this method of dealing with pollution. First, it is a temporary solution to a problem that keeps growing faster than we can clean it up. Second, by removing one pollutant from the environment, it often introduces a new pollutant to the environment (ex - burning garbage pollutes the air). Third, it is very costly to remove pollutants. For all of these reasons, it is important to clean up pollution, but also prevent it in the first place.

Ways to deal with the tragedy of the commons: 1) “use a shared renewable resource at a rate well below its estimated sustainable yield by using less of the resource, regulating access to the resource, or doing both”, 2) “to convert open-access renewable resources to private ownership”.

According to the Ecological Footprint Network, we would need 2.7 earths if everyone lived like me. This is a very large number, and obviously problematic because we only have one earth. I am also a vegetarian, so this is probably a little bit lower than the typical college student. That said, a lot of the survey is out of my control as a college student, such as the type of energy used in my dorm room. The largest section of my energy pie chart is my carbon footprint, which means that a lot of my activities require carbon emission. My ecological footprint in hectares is 4.6, and the average hectare per person is about 1.7. This shows the problem - people living in developed countries are used to this lifestyle of affluence. The problem becomes harder to change once the lifestyle is implemented into our culture.

Influence = Population x Affluence x Technology (IPAT). This environmental impact is “a rough estimate of how much humanity is degrading the natural capital it depends on”. There is an exception to this - sometimes technology can be environmentally beneficial.

Three major cultural changes: 1) agricultural revolution; 2) industrial-medical revolution - invention of machines, getting energy from fossil fuels; 3) information-globalization revolution - began about 50 years ago when we developed new technologies for getting information.

Affluence can have large-scale effects. We can look at the United States as an example of this, since American affluence causes environmental degradation on a daily basis. According to certain ecological footprint calculators, the typical American requires 27 tractor-trailer loads of resources per year. According to the WWF, the US is responsible for “almost half of the global ecological footprint”. There are upsides to affluence, such as access to education about environmental degradation, but primarily it just damages the environment further.

In the case of poverty, it can increase environmental degradation, and pollution can also influence the lives of the poor. Malnutrition is a common problem that arises from increased degradation of air and water quality.

This idea of overlapping and escalating problems does not exist for poverty alone. We can see how environmental degradation can be a worsening cycle with a new study released from Indiana University. In this study, it has been revealed that “trees influence whether soil can remove or emit gases that cause smog, acid rain and respiratory problems”. This means that certain trees are emitting these gases currently. Since forests are changing from trees that do not emit these gases to trees that do, this is worsening the problem of climate change. This shows how every human action, even if it may seem that it is not harmful, affects other parts of the environment. It is always important to remember that the environment is an interconnected system, and we still do not know every one of its connections. If we do our best to change our effect on the rest of the environment, we can reduce unexpected results like these gases from trees. This is also evident in the list of ecosystem goods and services from Annex 2.

The textbook also discusses externalities, although it does not call it by this name. Externalities in an environmental sense are when companies provide goods using resources, but they do not have to pay for the effects that they have on these resources. For example, air pollution is a negative externality to burning garbage. If we included “the harmful environmental costs of the goods and services we use” into market prices, that would be considered more sustainable living.

On a larger scale, an environmental problem is that people do not all agree on how to solve environmental problems, or that environmental problems even exist. There is an endless amount of possibilities for how to address these problems, and this makes it increasingly difficult to agree on anything regarding environmental policy. There’s also the issue that environmental policy often involves putting a lot of money into growing a specific industry, which many people have a hard time getting on board with. This causes extreme measures to how people act regarding the environment. An example of this is eco-fascism, which is when a government implements environmental policy from the top down, and forces people to follow the policy. This can be seen as an infringement upon freedoms if they are extreme policies, and it can also force people to act environmentally before their environmental worldview has changed. This is why worldviews are so important: once people are on board with eco-policy, implementing it becomes so much easier and more voluntary.

These are the three big ideas of this chapter: 1) we should be relying more on perpetual resources like the sun in order to reduce the amount of other resources we use, 2) we should protect biodiversity by preventing degradation of the world’s species, and 3) we should reduce the amount of waste we produce by the processes of reducing, reusing and recycling, and taking preventative measures to pollution rather than just clean-up methods.

Word Count: 2569

Question: How can we balance the development of third world countries while still aiming to keep environmental control over the development? Are developed countries now entitled to control how these countries develop, since we did not have this same barrier during our development?

#ENST 1000

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shirlleycoyle · 4 years

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NASA: Alien Life is ‘Highest Planetary Protection Priority’ for Mars Missions

The dream of landing humans on Mars stretches back more than a century, and NASA hopes to finally achieve this ambitious spaceflight goal within the next few decades. As inspiring as it would be for astronauts to leave footprints on another planet, however, scientists worry about a scenario in which Martian microbes (assuming they exist) manage to hitch a ride back to Earth, where they break loose—a threat known as “backward contamination.”

NASA made it clear that “safeguarding the Earth from potential back[ward] contamination is the highest planetary protection priority in Mars exploration,” in a NASA Interim Directive (NID) released last week that reforms the agency’s previous policies on this issue. As for what the agency is worried about, the NID mentions “extraterrestrial life and bioactive molecules” such as prions, which are pathogenic misfolded proteins that cause neurological disease in humans and animals.

NASA’s two new NIDs, which address Moon missions as well as human exploration on Mars, build on several decades’ worth of research about interplanetary contamination and implement some of the recommendations from a report issued by the Planetary Protection Independent Review Board last October.

Nobody knows if Mars hosts life, though most scientists think that the Martian surface is probably too cold, dry, and irradiated to be inhabited. However, Mars had some of the right conditions to support life billions of years ago, and indigenous Martians, perhaps in the form of bacteria, may persist deep under its icecaps or in subterranean water reservoirs. Even the most remote chance of bringing alien life, or any extraterrestrial substances that could cause harm, back to Earth is a cause for serious concern.

“Why wouldn’t we go ahead and be cautious, given that we only have this one biosphere and we like it here?” said John Rummel, a former NASA Planetary Protection Officer and Senior Scientist for Astrobiology, who is now a principal partner of Friday Harbor Partners, LLC, in a call.

“We don’t know anything about potential pathogens on Mars, only that we think they’re unlikely,” he added. Unlikely, but still worth planning for.

Cosmic cross-contamination

Planetary protection is written into the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, the foundational document of international space law. The treaty prohibits the pollution of alien worlds with Earth organisms, which is known as “forward contamination,” as well as “adverse changes in the environment of the Earth resulting from the introduction of extraterrestrial matter,” referring to backward contamination.

The threat of forward contamination has been a contentious issue for Mars missions dating all the way back to the Viking landers, which became the first probes to operate on the planet’s surface in the 1970s. Several landers and rovers have reached the terrain of Mars since then, all of which underwent sterilization before they were launched to space.

That said, Earth is home to countless extremophiles, which are microbes that can endure intense conditions. It's possible that some of these hardy bugs could survive the trip to Mars and contaminate any alien ecosystems that might exist on the planet. For this reason, robotic missions have not been permitted to land in so-called Special Regions of Mars, which are areas that are more likely to support life, be it Martian or Earthling.

“The idea about Special Regions, in terms of keeping them off-limits, is so that if you have some biological potential there, you don’t trample all over it with Earth organisms and lose track,” explained Rummel. “You don’t want to go ahead and destroy the life that you’re looking for.”

NASA’s plan to send humans to Mars required reforms to these planetary protection protocols, because you can’t sterilize a living body that’s packed with microbes. Moreover, astronauts on Mars may need to land close to Special Regions in order to generate their own water, and other survival materials.

Alberto Fairén, an astrobiologist at Cornell University, has advocated for updating planetary protection protocols in advance of any human missions to avoid forward contamination “before it is too late,” in the words of a 2017 Astrobiology paper that he led.

“I think the community is considering seriously the problem that, once you have humans on Mars, everything is compromised from a biological point of view, and determining whether any traces of life are Martians or Earthlings would be extremely difficult,” said Fairén in an email. “I'm very happy to see that these concerns about exploring Mars astrobiologically, before sending astronauts, are very seriously addressed by several colleagues.”

The new directive acknowledges that some degree of forward contamination from human missions is inevitable on Mars, noting that “it will not be possible for all human-associated processes and mission operations to be conducted within entirely closed systems.” As a result, NASA intends to close numerous “knowledge gaps” that will limit the risk of forward contamination, rather than eliminate it entirely. It’s harder to prepare for the avoidance of backward contamination, because the very notion of extant Martian life is one gigantic knowledge gap.

Protecting Earth

The threat that speculative Martian microbes pose to us may depend on how closely they are related to Earth life. Fairén is skeptical that Mars life would be communicable to Earthlings because it would simply be too alien to interact with our living world.

“It is true that we are basically speculating, but from a purely academic point of view about evolution, applying the basic principles we know that guide the way nature functions on Earth, I simply don't see how microorganisms evolving separately during billions of years could have the molecular mechanisms to interact with each other,” he said.

”We are seeing this basic concept at play right now with the coronavirus: it can infect us because it has the molecular ‘keys’ to enter our cells, inherited from very, very similar ‘keys’ developed during long periods of time in other mammals (whether bats or pangolins),” he added. “Conversely, I don't see how a Martian microbe living today, evolved totally separately from the Earth's biosphere, could have developed the ‘keys’ to enter terrestrial forms of life. Or vice versa. For me, this just doesn't make sense.”

On the other hand, Earth and Mars have been exchanging meteorites for billions of years, so it’s possible that similar lifeforms may have emerged on both worlds as a result of these interactions. The upshot is that we just don’t know, which means planetary protection protocols will likely continue to advise a careful approach, including extensive surveys of any region of Mars selected to serve as a base for astronauts.

“NASA will determine if it is necessary to conduct a precursor in situ experiment at a location close to the human mission landing or operating sites to characterize any organic constituents that are present,” the new NID notes. “The measurement should be on airborne materials and on materials from the surface and down to a depth to which astronauts may be exposed, and to establish a baseline scientific understanding.”

While the directive focuses on human missions to Mars, it also reiterates NASA’s commitment to “preclude backward contamination of Earth by extraterrestrial life and bioactive molecules” in samples that are robotically returned from other worlds to Earth. This is especially relevant given that NASA’s Perseverance rover, which is due for launch to Mars in a few weeks, is tasked with drilling out Martian samples to be collected by a future robotic probe, which will send them back to Earth.

Even before the advent of the interplanetary spaceflight, people wrestled with the threat of biological cross-contamination between Earth and other bodies. Take the famous twist at the end of H.G. Wells’ novel The War of the Worlds, in which the bloodthirsty Martians that invade Earth are ultimately wiped out by our planet’s own microscopic pathogens.

If humans aim to make the opposite journey, from Earth to Mars, we should be prepared for the possibility, however unlikely, that Martian microbes could similarly infect or harm astronauts, as well as any Earth ecosystems they reach.

“You don’t want these sorts of things to be discovered when your tourist flight wants to come home and some of the passengers start to die off,” Rummel said. “You don’t want to keep everybody from coming home because a couple of people die in a way that’s considered mysterious. You want to have that covered.”

“It’s great that NASA’s doing this,” he added, referring to the new NID. “I think in terms of setting the path for the future, they’ve done the right thing for Mars.”

NASA: Alien Life is ‘Highest Planetary Protection Priority’ for Mars Missions syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

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