Environmental Sciences
Lecture 1
Learning Objectives
What is Environmental Sciences
The State of the Planet:
i. Explain the main reasons for concern about the health of our planet today.
ii. What are the achievements in recent years, and
iii. Explain how environmental science has greatly contributed to the environmental movement.
Sustainability:
i. Define sustainability and explain ways in which our relationship with the environment needs to be
more sustainable.
Stewardship:
i. Define the principle of stewardship and give examples.
Moving Toward a Sustainable Future:
i. Identify trends that must be overcome in order to pursue a sustainable future and trends that promote
sustainability.
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What is Environmental Sciences
Environmental Sciences are TWO words. In order to understand what Environmental Sciences is we first
have to understand the meaning of these TWO words individually.
Environment: the physical, non-living and living, surrounding of a society with which it has a reciprocal
(mutual, common, shared) relationship.
Sciences: systematic knowledge of the physical or material world gained through observation and
experimentation.
Thus Environmental Sciences can be defined as the study of man-made environmental problems.
Environmental Problems and Solutions in Context
Environmental problems, the main subject of the environmental sciences, are currently important for
society. If you ask anyone to characterize environmental problems in greater detail, it makes a world of
difference whether people are questioned about matters confronting them in their own everyday
environment or about environmental problems in general.
Such a difference is to be expected, because not every general environmental problem is experienced as
a problem in one’s own living environment. Being aware of problems is not the same as experiencing them.
From time immemorial, humans have made use of the natural environment to satisfy their basic needs for
food, clothing, shelter, warmth, security and transport. In this respect, human beings are in principle no
different from other creatures.
Even in their early stages of development, human societies were confronted with the consequences of their
actions, in the form of soil salinisation and exhaustion, erosion and desertification. The fact that we can
nevertheless speak of environmental degradation as a modern problem, despite its ultimately long history, is
partly due to the global scale that humanity’s environmental impacts have assumed in our era and also to
our vastly expanded knowledge of the nature of that impact.
But that is not all. Just as important, if not more so, is that it is now also increasingly seen as a structural
problem of societies. This somewhat remarkable reversal of attitude cannot be explained by the fact that
people were previously blind to the negative impacts of human action.
The change in thinking is due mainly to the fact that today, far more so than in former times, we have
become aware of the inter-relatedness, scale and scope of environmental problems, no longer
categorizing them as being nasty but unavoidable side-effects of our social evolution.
With the environment now a fully-fl edged ‘issue’, understood in far greater detail and depth, a realisation
begins to dawn of the fundamentally unsustainable nature of much of modern humanity’s interaction with
the natural environment. Climate change, land degradation through erosion, declining fish catches through
over-harvesting and biological extinction on a massive scale through habitat destruction are the most
convincing and best documented examples of man’s unsustainable use of the natural environment.
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Environmental Sciences
Acceptance of sustainable development as an overall guiding framework (a solution in context) led to an
explosion of studies and publications in which the concept was critically analysed and fleshed out
increasing detail. Once the aforementioned tension between sustainability and development is taken
seriously, the key question becomes how prosperity can be increased while at the same time reducing
environmental pressure.
A Paradox: What Is the Real State of the Planet?
Paradox (n.): A statement exhibiting contradictory or inexplicable aspects or qualities.1
A group of scientists from McGill University published a paper in which they identified a so-called
environmentalist’s paradox.2 The paradox, they said, is this: over the past 40 years, human well-being has
been steadily improving, while natural ecosystems (from which we derive many goods and services) have
been declining.
To explain this paradox, the authors advanced four hypotheses:
1. The measurements of human well-being are flawed; it is actually declining.
2. Food production, a crucial ecosystem service that has been enhanced, outweighs the effects of
declines in other ecosystem services.
3. Human technology, such as irrigation and synthetic fertilizers, makes us less dependent on ecosystem
services.
4. There is a time lag between ecosystem decline and human well-being; the worst is yet to come.
1 Webster’s II New College Dictionary (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1995), s.v. “paradox.”
2Ciara Raudsepp-Hearne et al., “Untangling the Environmentalist’s Paradox: Why Is Human Well-Being Increasing as Ecosystem
Services Degrade?” Bioscience 60 (September 2010): 576–589.
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