ENV 1101 Chapter 1: Chapter 1.docx

• School: University of Ottawa
• Department: Environmental Studies
• Course: ENV 1101
• Professor: Sonia Wesche

Document Summary

Environment: our environment consists of everything around us, including living and nonliving things. Humans are a part of the environment and are not separate from it. Resources from nature are essential to human life and civilization. Some resources are inexhaustible or perpetually renewable, others are nonrenewable, and still others are renewable if we are careful no to exploit them at too fast a rate. Hardin articulated the concept of carrying capacity, the number of individuals that can be sustained by a given area of productive land. Wackernagel and rees pioneered the idea of the ecological footprint, a measure of the amount of productive land it would take to support an individual at a certain level of consumption. Environmental science used the approaches and insights of numerous disciplines from the natural sciences and the social sciences. Science is a process of using observations to test ideas,