Unit 1: Introduction to Environmental Science & Sustainability
Reading Questions 1A
Opening Story: The Mysterious Neuse River Fish Kill
Environmental science offers important insights into our world and how we influence it.
Humans alter natural systems.
Environmental scientists monitor natural systems for signs of stress.
1. What happened in the Neuse River, and how did it affect the local population & economy?
2. What is the importance of studying systems in environmental science? Why can’t we just study isolated events or isolated individuals?
3. Environmental Science is interdisciplinary, in that it includes life sciences, natural sciences, and social sciences to study the interactions of living, nonliving and
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12. Why are both natural AND controlled experiments necessary to increasing scientific understanding, and how do their roles in the scientific process differ?
13. What factors make research in environmental science particularly difficult?
14. What are the goals of the environmental justice movement, and why are they relevant to sustainability?
Reading Questions 20A
Opening Story: Assembly Plants, Free Trade and Sustainable Systems
Sustainability is the ultimate goal of sound environmental science and policy.
Economics studies how scarce resources are allocated.
Economic health depends on the availability of natural capital and basic human welfare.
Ecosystems provide valuable services (p77-80).
1. Do you think the expansion of maquiladoras has been more of a benefit or a harm to Mexico? Why?
2. Why would environmental scientists be interested in social and economic issues that arise from the maquiladoras, as well as the environmental effects?
3. In a market economy, how are scarce resources distributed to satisfy unlimited wants?
4. What are externalities, and how do they typically affect the price of a good or service?
5. How are the wealth and productivity of a nation usually measured, and what other factors must be considered when evaluating the well-being of a nation’s people?
6. In reference to the Kuznets Curve, why does the
Synopsis: About a decade ago, a fatal virus which was called ALZ-113 but best known as Simian Flu, human civilization is mostly disintegrated resulting economic collapse of every country in the world.
The environmental movement main purpose is to seek change in the abuse of decisions made by people in power to the disproportional exposure of color people and other racial minorities to polluted air, soil and water causing long term health effects by allowing the construction of waste or nuclear facilities in the same segregated area were poor people are located.
2. Environmental science is an interdisciplinary area of study that deals with all of the following except
Our unit plan focuses on Unit:D Interactions and ecosystems in grade 7 science. Our essential question for this unit was; how do humans impact their environment? After completing this unit students will understand that ecosystems vary in sizes, all organisms within the ecosystem play an important role and local impacts are connected to global issues. There are many different activities throughout the unit that emphasizes these key understandings. The unit spans over an approximate 25 day period. After completing this unit students will be able to identify components of an ecosystem, create and interpret food webs, recognize human impacts on ecosystems, explain the purpose of different habitats and explain why changes within them occur, analyze environmental issues, and identify different management practices.
Describe a human-induced environmental impact and how knowledge of ecosystem ecology could be used to mitigate this impact. In your answer, pay particular attention to the spatial and temporal nature of the impact and how this has affected ecosystem structure and function.
Anthropologists should also study the sociocultural context of the environment that is being affected by the environmental damage.
Ecology is the study of living organisms and their relationship with their natural habitat. It considers the living organisms from according to various dimensions of composition, age, and amount among other things. The ecosystem is considered in a hierarchical form, going from the simplest most basic ecosystems to more complex structures called communities.
sustainability, as well as air, land, and water pollution are now some of the most pressing issues at the forefront of activism, research , agreements, and social movements that aim to save, improve, and curtail our environmental behaviors
(d)Taking a holistic (big picture) view, please list (with a brief rationale for each) the environmental impacts of the Mayor 's lantern initiative. (6 marks)
Externalities exist when a third party bears costs or receives benefits arising from an economic transaction in which he or she is not a direct participant. This occurs when producers or consumers provide benefits to third parties or impose costs on third parties for which the market system does not enable them to receive full payment in return.
Describe how Gross Domestic product (GDP) is calculated; discuss how good a measure GDP is of a country’s economic wellbeing.
Ecology is the study of the distribution and abundance of organisms, their interactions between each other and their environment, and the structure and function of ecosystems. To this end, the scale (spatial, functional, temporal, organizational, etc.) at which we observe nature and the multitude of environments that comprise it is an extremely important factor in the study of ecology. Dumping sewage effluent in the middle of a small pond is not going to register even a slight disturbance on a global or even regional scale , but there is a still massive disturbance to the organisms at the small scale of that pond ecosystem. Similarly,
Environmental studies is a very broad academic field which examines the interactions between humans and their natural environment. As one might imagine, environmental studies is an interdisciplinary field, incorporating concepts as varied as geology and philosophy.