Sustainability

Sustainability:
Is the capacity of to maintain a certain process or state indefinitely. The concept has been applied more specifically to living organisms and systems.
Sustainable development:
Is a pattern of resource use that aim to meet human needs while preserving the environment so that needs can be not only in the present, but in the indefinite future.
Renewable energy: sources can bereplenished in a short period of time.
Energy generated from natural resources such as sunlight, wind rain, tides, geothermal heat, which are natural replenished.
* Solar : refers to the utilization of the radiant energy form the sun. solar power is used interchangeably with solar energy, but refers more specifically to the conversion of the sunlight into electricity.
* Wind: is theconversion of wind energy into a useful form, such as electricity, using wind turbines.
* Biomass: Is solar energy stored in organic matter. Carbohydrates make up biomass. When plants die, the process decay releases the energy stored in carbohydrates and discharges carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere.
* Geothermal: Is energy generated by heat stored in the earth, or the collection ofabsorbed heat derived from underground, in the atmosphere and the oceans.
* Water
Non-renewable energy: source that we are using up, cannot recreate in a short period of time.
Energy taken form finite resources that will eventually finish. It become too expensive or too environmentally damaging to retrieve.
* Oil
* Nuclear: is the energy released by the splitting or merging togetherof fussion nuclei of atom, in other words is the energy released by a nuclear reaction.
* Natural gas
* coal
In nuclear fission, atoms are split apart to form smaller atoms, releasing energy. Nuclear power plants use nuclear fission to produce electricity. The fuel most widely used by nuclear plants for nuclear fission is uranium.
FORMATION OF FOSSIL FUELS
Formed from sea plants andanimals that lived up to 300 million years ago, fossil fuels are found in deposits beneath the earth.
ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE
The study of how humans interact with the environment.
Environment is all that surround us; natural world and man made world.
Environmental science ≠ ecology
Ecology is the study of how living things interact with each other and with their non-living environment.Environmental science:
* highly interdisciplinary: natural science, social science, humanities (biology, earth science, physics, chemistry, social studies)
* seeks knowledge about our natural world and our impacts on in.
* in environmental issues the problem is not to identify remedies but to make them socially, economically, and politically acceptable.
Goal of environmental science: tounderstand and solve environmental problems caused by human activity.
Our environment through the time
Environmental change is nothing new, ever since man has hunted, used plants, made a home, the environment has been altered:
* at the beginning of time, humans satisfied their basic necessities.
* As hunters-gatherers: people to collect plants and hunt wild animals for food.
*They migrated as resources were finished
First civilizations affected the environment by:
1. Prevent the growth of trees: set fires to burn and clear forests for planting crops.
2. Introduced foreign plants: spread plants to areas where plants did not originally grow.
3. Overhunt: which led to the disappearance of some large mammal species. (giant sloths, giant bison, mastodons, cavebears, saber-toothed cats
Agricultural revolution:
Agriculture: practice of growing, breeding, and caring for plants and animals that are used for food, clothing, housing, transportation and other purposes.
Agricultural revolution:
1 hunter-gathered began to collect the seeds of the plants they gathered and to domesticate some animals.
2 people started to stay in one place, they formed...