Our Island, Earth
The Nature of Environmental Science
The Nature of Science
Sustainability and the Future of Our World
Potpori
100
This includes all the living and nonliving things around us with which we interact.
What is environment?
100
This term refers to the idea that environmental science borrows techniques from numerous disciplines and brings research results from these disciplines together into a broad synthesis.
What is interdisciplinary?
100
The systematic process for learning about the world and testing our understanding of it.
What is science?
100
A society achieves this when people can maintain a high standard of living without depleting available resources.
What is sustainability?
100
Process in which several other scientists will examine the work of another and provide comments and criticism.
What is peer review?
200
This is the study of how the natural world works, how our environment affects us, and how we affect our environment.
What is environmental science?
200
Environmental science incorporates these 2 broad fields of science, the study of our surroundings and how humans interact with those surroundings.
What are natural sciences and social sciences?
200
The technique for testing ideas in science that follows a general form and relies on the same basic assumptions.
What is the scientific method?
200
These are the 2 main factors that drive environmental impact
What are population and consumption?
200
A widely accepted, well tested explanation of one or more cause-and-effect relationships that has been extensively validated by a great amount of research.
What is a theory?
300
Resources such as sunlight, wind and wave energy which are perpetually available are referred to as this.
What are renewable resources?
300
These factors may all play a role in whether someone deems an environmental condition to be a "problem."
What are age, gender, class, race, nationality, employment, or educational background ?
300
An experiment in which the researcher actively chooses and manipulates the independent variable and provides the strongest type of evidence a scientist can obtain by revealing causal relationships.
What is manipulative experiment?
300
These are the negative aspects of expanding and intensifying food production
What are use of chemical fertilizers, dangerous pesticides, alteration of natural systems, erosion, climate change, or poorly managed irrigation?
300
The concept that sustainable solutions meet environmental, economic and social goals simultaneously.
What is the triple bottom line?
400
These 2 events in human history helped increase life span, improve quality of life and ultimately led to human population growth.
What are the agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution?
400
The social movement dedicated to protecting the natural world.
What is environmentalism?
400
One of the disciplines most central to environmental science that deals with the distribution and abundance of organisms, their interactions among them and the interactions between organisms and their nonliving environments.
What is ecology?
400
The cumulative number and diversity of living things is referred to as this.
What is biodiversity?
400
This example provides a lesson to us on resource consumption and conservation.
What is Easter Island?
500
This man claimed that unless population growth were controlled by laws or other social strictures the number of people would outgrow available food supply until starvation, war or disease arose and reduced the population.
Who is Thomas Malthus?
500
One way environmental science has addressed an issue and led to an effective or lasting solution
What is improvement in air quality in the US by removing lead from gasoline, banning of DDT use, creation of energy efficient automobiles, use of prescribed burning in forests, the search for alternative fuels, organic agriculture, high-efficiency irrigation, recycling, habitat preservation.
500
when the dominant view is abandoned for another
What is a paradigm shift?
500
These are the people who suffer the most from environmental degradation.
Who are society's poorer people?
500
These are the 6 steps involved in the scientific method.
What is observe, question, hypothesize, predict, test and analyze?
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