What Is an Environmentally Sustainable Society?
CConcept 1 Our lives and economies depend on energy from the sun (solar capital) and natural resources and natural services (natural capital) provided by the earth.
CConcept 2 Living sustainably means living off the earth’s natural income without depleting or degrading the natural capital that supplies it.
Environmental Science is a study of connections in nature
The environment is everything around us. It includes all of the living and the nonliving things (air, water, and energy) with which we interact.
Despite our manyscientific and technological advances, we are utterly dependent on the environment for air, water, food, shelter, energy, and everything else we need to stay alive and healthy. As a result, we are part of and not apart from the rest of nature.
Environmental science is an interdisciplinary study of humanity’s relationships with the earth’s living and nonliving things. It integrates information and ideas from the natural sciences, such as biology, chemistry, and geology; the social sciences, such as economics, demography (the study of populations), and political science; and the humanities, including law, philosophy and ethics The goals of environmental science are to learn how nature works, how the environment affects us, how we affect the environment, and how to deal with environmental problems and live more sustainably.
Ecology, a biological science that studies the relationships between organisms, or living things, and their environment, plays an important role in environmental science. A major focus of ecology is the study of ecosystems. An ecosystem is a set of organisms interacting with one another and with their environment of nonliving matter and energy within a defined area.
We should not confuse environmental science and ecology with environmentalism, a social movement dedicated to protecting the earth’s air, water, soil, natural cleansing and recycling systems, and other components of its life-support systems for us and other species. Environmentalism is practiced more in the political arena than in the realm of science.
