Environmental Science For Dummies
Overview
Ace your environmental science class and get smart about the environment
Environmental Science For Dummies is a straightforward guide to the interrelationships of the natural world and the role that humans play in the environment. This book tracks to a typical introductory environmental science curriculum at the college level—and is great as a supplement or study guide for AP Environmental Science, too. Uncover fascinating facts about the earth’s natural resources and the problems that arise when resources like air, water, and soil are contaminated by pollutants. If you’re in need of extra help for a class, considering a career in environmental science, or simply care about our planet and want to learn more about helping the environment, this friendly Dummies resource is a great place to start.
- The key concepts of environmental science, clearly explained
- All about the changing climate, including new understanding of methane release in the arctic
- Earth’s natural resources and the importance of protecting them
- A new chapter on environmental justice, where issues of poverty and sustainability intersect
A solid foundation in environmental science is essential for anyone looking for a career in the field—and is important knowledge for all of us as we work together to build a sustainable future.
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About The Author
Alecia M. Spooner has 17 years’ experience teaching Earth and environmental sciences. She specializes in the interdisciplinary study of paleoecology, paleoclimate, and archaeology. She is the author of Geology For Dummies.
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environmental science for dummies
CHEAT SHEET
Environmental science is a field of study focused on Earth’s environment and the resources it provides to every living organism, including humans. Environmental scientists focus on studying the environment and everything in it and finding sustainable solutions to environmental issues. In particular, this means meeting the needs of human beings (and other organisms) today without damaging the environment, depleting resources, or compromising the earth’s ability to meet the resource needs of the future.
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Environmental science is all about finding ways to live more sustainably, which means using resources today in a way that maintains their supplies for the future. Environmental sustainability doesn’t mean living without luxuries but rather being aware of your resource consumption and reducing unnecessary waste.
Environmental Science
One approach that environmental scientists take to conservation — called ecosystem-based or habitat-centered conservation — looks beyond single species and seeks to protect entire ecosystems. Preserving a whole habitat from destruction protects all the species that live there and maintains ecosystems for species that are recovering from near extinction.
Surface mining techniques don’t work for extracting all valuable geologic resources. Diamonds and most metal ores, including gold, require extensive subsurface mines to access the rocks with these resources in them.
Subsurface mines are probably what you envision when you think of mining: systems of tunnels and vertical shafts with elevators to take miners underground where they can retrieve the valuable resources.
Environmental Science
Environmental science is a field of study focused on Earth’s environment and the resources it provides to every living organism, including humans. Environmental scientists focus on studying the environment and everything in it and finding sustainable solutions to environmental issues. In particular, this means meeting the needs of human beings (and other organisms) today without damaging the environment, depleting resources, or compromising the earth’s ability to meet the resource needs of the future.
Environmental Science
Agriculture, the growing of plants as food, is the largest consumer of fresh water on Earth, accounting for nearly 70 percent of all freshwater withdrawal. One of the biggest challenges of farming in some regions of the world is locating enough fresh water to support crops.
In the drive to meet the food needs of growing human populations, farmers have extended their croplands into drier regions that are farther from natural, seasonal sources of water.
Environmental science informs decisions about fire management in some ecosystmes. In both forested ecosystems and grasslands, land managers face difficult decisions about fire management. Wildfires are difficult to control and potentially destructive to human developments.
With this potential destruction in mind, for most of the 20th century, land managers practiced methods of fire suppression, focused on keeping fires from starting and putting them out quickly when they did.
The fresh water that flows through rocks and open spaces below the Earth’s surface is known in environmental science as groundwater. Most of the fresh water that people access is groundwater, flowing underground.
Although the ground you walk on is solid, spaces between the particles of sediment, or even within certain types of rock, allow water to move from the surface into underground storage spaces called aquifers.
Environmental Science
The world’s forests are one of the most valuable and most endangered resources. Removal of trees, or the destruction of forests, is called deforestation. Throughout much of the developing world, humans clear trees from forests to use them as fuel — firewood — for daily life. In other regions, humans clear forests and replace them with agricultural or grazing land.
Environmental Science
One way to meet the freshwater needs of both people and ecosystems is to practice water conservation. Water conservation is the process of using less water to begin with and recycling or reusing as much water as possible. The goal of water conservation is to maintain a freshwater supply that can meet the needs of as many people as possible for as long as possible.
Environmental Science
Environmental science looks at how to conserve grasslands. Grasslands are an important ecosystem that people use (and sometimes abuse) for the resources they provide. Generally speaking, grasslands, or rangelands, as they’re sometimes called, are open areas without trees.
Farmers and ranchers use grasslands to graze animals such as cattle and sheep.
Environmental Science
Environmental scientists know that in some regions of the world, even practicing water conservation can’t meet all the freshwater needs of people and ecosystems. The Middle East, in particular, faces extreme water scarcity and water stress.
One approach to dealing with these issues is desalinization, the process of removing salt from salt water to create fresh water.
Environmental Science
To effectively use freshwater resources, people must find ways to control the water flowing on the Earth’s surface or access the groundwater below. There are various ways to access the Earth’s fresh water.
Through the hydrologic cycle, water constantly moves among the oceans, the atmosphere, the Earth’s surface, and underground.
Environmental Science
Environmental scientists discovered that the second largest consumer of fresh water is you (and every other person in the U.S.). Every day you drink water, brush your teeth, wash your clothes, flush the toilet, and bathe. These types of household or domestic water use account for more than 10 percent of the freshwater use in the U.
Environmental Science
Many of the interactions that environmental scientists study are the result of acid and base reactions. So what are acids and bases, anyway? Empirically speaking, acids and bases have the following characteristics:
Acids usually have a sour taste (like lemon juice) and will burn your skin.
Bases usually have a bitter taste and feel slippery (like detergent).
Environmental Science
Understanding the basics of covalent bonding is important in environmental science. When two atoms join together in a covalent bond, they form a molecule that shares electrons. Unlike in the ionic bond, neither of the atoms in a covalent bond loses or gains an electron; instead, both atoms use a pair of shared electrons.
Environmental Science
When studying environmental science, one type of atomic bond you need to be familiar with is the hydrogen bond. A hydrogen bond results when some of the atoms in a covalently bonded molecule pull the shared electrons to one side of the molecule, creating an electrical imbalance in the molecule. (Remember that electrons have a negative electric charge.
Environmental Science
Understanding the basics of ionic bonding is important in environmental science because, although ionic bonds are strong, they’re easily broken in water. For atoms to construct matter large enough for you to see or feel, they have to combine with other atoms to form molecules. To form molecules, atoms must exchange or share electrons from their outer electron shell to create atomic bonds.
Environmental Science
In environmental science, the tragedy of the commons scenario describes how all the people who have access to common areas or shared public space will use it to meet their current needs, thus allowing the land to be damaged and the resource depleted.
The assumption in this scenario is that every person who uses a shared resource acts primarily in self-interest, seeking short-term gain without planning and managing the resource to sustain it for the future.
Environmental Science
Environmental scientists who study biological communities look at the number of organisms, the number of species, and the distribution of the plants and animals across the environments that they inhabit. Two measures that help scientists study communities and observe how they change over time or across their environment are abundance and richness:
Abundance: The total number of organisms in a community
Richness: The number of different species that make up a community
Although these two concepts may seem similar, they measure two different things.
Environmental Science
One of the greatest dangers to human health is water pollution. After all, people can’t survive without drinking water, and if their freshwater resources are polluted, they can become ill from drinking them. Different types of pollutants affect human health in different ways.
Organisms that cause disease are called pathogens.
Environmental Science
Scientists who study living organisms examine them from different perspectives of complexity. The simplest level is the individual. Each individual is a member of a population. Each population is made up of a group of individuals of the same species that occupy the same environment and interact with each other.
Environmental Science
In today’s culture of fast-paced media, blog posts, blurbs, sound bites, and talking heads, knowing how to spot good environmental science when you see it is more important than ever. The ability to distinguish between reliable information and unreliable information in the media is called information literacy.
Environmental Science
An important source of alternative energy is hydropower: converting the flow of rivers and ocean waves and tides into electricity through dams and turbines. The best part about both of these water sources is that they’re 100 percent renewable.
Generate energy with hydropower dams
All rivers and streams flow downhill across the land surface.
Environmental Science
The most common question that people ask when confronted with all the scientific data about global climate warming is how scientists can be certain that humans are responsible for the increase in greenhouse gases, specifically carbon dioxide. The answer to this question is isotopes.
What are isotopes and carbon ratios?
Environmental Science
The peak of environmental legislation in the U.S. occurred in the 1960s and 1970s. In the 1970s in particular, the U.S. Congress passed a number of important laws to repair environmental damage and protect the environment from further pollution. In fact, the relatively clean and healthy environment you enjoy today is a result of the laws passed during this period (some of which have been updated multiple times since their initial passing).
Environmental scientists study ocean circulation because, along with patterns of air movement in the atmosphere, the movement of water through the oceans helps determine weather and climate conditions for different regions of the world. The three main patterns of ocean circulation are gyres, upwelling, and thermohaline circulation.
Here is the lowdown on these fuels and a couple of lesser-known petroleum-related resources, and what the possible ecological effects and advantages of extracting them are.
What you know as oil is actually called petroleum or crude oil and may exist as a combination of liquid, gas, and sticky, tar-like substances.
One of the best outcomes of studying environmental science is realizing that you can play a role in creating a cleaner, more sustainable world to live in. Many students find that whatever their career choice, they can incorporate consideration of the ecosystem, energy use, pollution, or human health into their daily work.
Environmental Science
The phrase tragedy of the commons, first described by biologist Garrett Hardin in 1968, describes how shared environmental resources are overused and eventually depleted. He compared shared resources to a common grazing pasture; in this scenario, everyone with rights to the pasture grazes as many animals as possible, acting in self-interest for the greatest short-term personal gain.
Environmental Science
The use of pesticides in farming is an important issue to environmental scientists. Farmers encounter many different pests that can damage their crops, and each kind of pest requires different chemical compounds to kill it.
The use of pesticides isn’t new, but these days most of the pesticides farmers use are synthetic rather than organic, or natural.
As environmental scientists and the industrial world look for ways to reduce the dependence on fossil fuels, nuclear energy seems to provide a potential solution. As with any fuel source, though, using nuclear energy has pros and cons.
One of the biggest advantages in using nuclear power (especially compared to some of the other alternative energy sources) is the ability to steadily produce large amounts of energy.
Environmental Science
Environmental scientists use two models to describe how populations grow over time: the exponential growth model and the logistic growth model. Two important concepts underlie both models of population growth:
Carrying capacity: Carrying capacity is the number of individuals that the available resources of an environment can successfully support.
Environmental Science
The environmental damage caused by surface mining is related to the large amount of surface material that humans remove during mining operations. The environmental effects of surface mining include
Habitat destruction
Soil erosion
Air pollution from dust particulates
Pollution (especially from sediments)
All surface mining techniques negatively affect the environment, though some methods are more damaging than others.
Environmental Science
Sustainable agriculture uses methods to produce food that don’t damage the environment or rely on toxic chemicals. Farmers and scientists have developed these methods because they produce food in ways that keep ecosystems and farmland healthy enough to continue to produce food into the future.
Conserving soil with sustainable agriculture
Fertile soil is literally the foundation of farming.
Alternative or renewable energy sources aren’t based on resources that are in limited supply on Earth; instead, they’re captured from processes (such as wind, waves, and sunshine) that are continually being driven by energy from the sun or created using materials (such as water) that are naturally renewed through Earth’s processes.
Environmental Science
In environmental science, experimental design is an extremely important part of the scientific method. When a scientist seeks to prove or disprove a hypothesis, he or she must carefully design the experiment so that it tests only one thing, or variable. If the scientist doesn’t design the experiment carefully around that one variable, the results may be confusing.
Environmental Science
Air pollution, which can lead to smog and acid rain, is the result of adding compounds or particles to the air that are harmful to human health or the environment. The most obvious danger of air pollution is that humans and other animals inhale pollutants and can become ill. In particular, air pollution leads to lung and respiratory illnesses — including asthma, bronchitis, and emphysema — and various cancers.
Environmental Science
Humans can capture solar energy directly from the sun through passive and active solar energy systems. Ancient people used passive solar energy systems by building their houses out of stone or clay, which absorbed the sun’s heat during the day and stayed warm after dark, providing heat throughout the night. Builders today use similar methods for passively capturing solar energy.
Persistent organic pollutants (POPs) are nonbiodegradable compounds, so called because they stick around for a long time, polluting the environment and causing illnesses. While many modern pesticides are made to degrade into their original elements and molecules so that they aren’t toxic as they move through the ecosystem, other substances such as plastics and other manmade chemicals don’t biodegrade.
Environmental Science
Environmental scientists recognize that the fundamental source of energy for most life on earth is the sun. Through photosynthesis, plants capture the light and convert it into chemical potential energy. Plants then store the potential energy in the form of biomass (biological matter that fuels nearly every animal on earth).
Environmental Science
All around the earth, environmental scientists observe fairly steady patterns of wind (or directions of airflow). These prevailing winds, as they’re often called, are the result of the air being moved by convection currents (the Hadley cells at the equator and other convection cells near the poles and mid-latitudes) combined with the Earth’s rotation.
Environmental Science
One way to reduce poverty and encourage social justice is through microlending. Social justice is the idea that the world has enough resources to meet the needs of everyone but that financial inequality and unequal resource distribution result in hunger, poverty, violence, and environmental damage. Many environmental scientists believe in social justice.
Environmental Science
Air pollution has the ability to affect the earth’s entire ecosystem, as environmental scientists realized when they found direct links between ozone layer destruction and manmade pollutants called CFCs. To understand the ozone layer, you need to be familiar with the atmosphere as a whole. Earth is surrounded by layers of gas with different temperatures, pressures, and compositions.
The basic unit of study in environmental science is the ecosystem. An ecosystem consists of a biological community and its physical environment. Here are the most important things you need to know about ecosystems:
An ecosystem can be as small as a drop of water or as large as a forest.
Some ecosystems (such as caves) have clear boundaries, while others (such as forests) do not.
Environmental Science
At the end of the 1960s and throughout the 1970s, the U.S. passed a number of important laws on environmental issues, including pollution, species protection, and natural resource management.
These are some of the most important U.S. Environmental laws.
National Environmental Policy Act of 1969
The National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, also known as NEPA, does three important things:
Describes environmental policies and goals on a national scale
Requires that federal agencies consider environmental outcomes and effects in their decision making
Creates the Council on Environmental Quality to advise the president on environmental matters
NEPA asks federal agencies to complete an environmental impact statement, or EIS, to study in detail how a project will affect the environment and to explore possible alternatives that would be less harmful.
Environmental Science
Different nations have come together on their own accord to create international agreements about how to maintain, protect, and care for the earth’s natural resources. These international agreements and treaties are often drafted during large meetings, or conventions, that representatives from various interested nations attend.
One of the most innovative ways to tackle environmental damage by toxins and pollution is to let nature do the dirty work of cleaning up the mess. Certain microbes, or microscopic organisms that live in soil and water, can help with bioremediation, the natural cleanup of contaminants in the environment, by eating chemical compounds that would otherwise harm the environment.
Environmental Science
Cogeneration is a method of energy conservation that involves the production of two types of energy at a single power plant. The ugly truth is that human beings waste a lot of energy. Although some energy is lost due to the nature of energy transfer and entropy, humans waste an almost equal amount (nearly 40 percent) in the processing, transportation, and overall use of energy.
A common way that humans pollute water is through the addition of nutrients (fertilizers and sewage) to water as nonpoint source pollution. These added materials are full of nitrogen and phosphorus, two nutrients that encourage the growth of aquatic producers, such as algae. The excessive growth of algae dramatically disrupts the entire ecosystem.
Some ecosystems exist in a steady state, or homeostasis. In steady-state systems, the amount of input and the amount of output are equal. In other words, any matter entering the system is equivalent to the matter exiting the system.
An ecosystem includes living organisms and the environment that they inhabit and depend on for resources.
Environmental Science
Mining and burning coal for fuel is harmful to the environment; but, because coal is so abundant and cheap, many people are reluctant to give it up as a fuel source.
Coal starts as peat, or sections of partially decomposed organic matter that accumulate on the earth’s surface. Over millions of years, the peat is buried and heat and pressure transform it into increasingly pure forms of coal called lignite, sub-bituminous, bituminous, and anthracite coal.
Environmental Science
What you know as oil is actually called petroleum or crude oil and may exist as a combination of liquid, gas, and sticky, tar-like substances. Oil and natural gas are cleaner fuels than coal, but they still have many environmental disadvantages.
The secret to fossil fuels’ ability to produce energy is that they contain a large amount of carbon.
The hydrologic cycle involves water moving from the surface (most importantly the oceans) to the atmosphere, across the land, and everywhere in between. Environmental scientists know that the hydrologic cycle includes various processes that change water from solid to liquid to gas form and transport it to every corner of earth’s surface (and below).
Environmental Science
The theory of evolution by natural selection explains how species evolve, or change through time — sometimes changing so much that new species are created. The variety you see in the living things all around you is a result of each organism’s unique genes.
The theory of evolution by natural selection doesn’t attempt to explain how life first began or why living things are on earth.
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