EVSC 1080 Study Guide - Midterm Guide: Resource Consumption

• School: University of Virginia
• Department: Environmental Sciences
• Course: EVSC 1080
• Professor: Galloway Jim

Document Summary

Problems: food production is not evenly distributed, food production is inefficient, most nr created is released into the environment interlinked with consequences on humans and ecosystems. Over the last 40 years, management actions in the us have provided more food and energy with less nr being formed. Benefits: necessary for life, synthetic nitrogen fertilizer provides unlimited food supply. Drawbacks: excess reactive nitrogen negatively affects environmental and human health. We want to completely get rid of reactive nitrogen in the atmosphere, and optimize the nitrogen use in food production. Technology- we have gotten better at growing food. Eating food, driving (fossil fuel use), energy and fossil fuel combustion used to make everyday goods and services. Nitrogen footprint is the amount of reactive nitrogen released to the environment as a result of an entity"s resource consumption. Nitrogen footprints focus on two areas of resource consumption: food consumption and production, and energy.