Welcome to

Foundations of Environmental Sustainability

Instructor: Dr. Susan Melzer-Drinnen

 Instructional Methodology

• This is a 3-credit hour course that will only meet online.

– Three hours per week are to be spent online learning course content
through instructor presentations, threaded discussions, and viewing
directive links.
– Course assignments, projects and navigating RamCT/blackboard are
homework and require time spent outside of the 3 hours/week.

• Lectures will be in the form of power point presentations.

– Additionally, videos will be available from guest lecture presentations
and web links to pertinent and elective learning material. Access
lectures online using the learning modules tool.
 Grade Breakdown

Assessment Graded Points Percent of Final Grade

Assignments (3)
300 30
Discussions (7) 210 21
Leadership week (2)
140 14
Written critiques (3)
150 15
Final project (1)
150 15
Quizzes (5) 50 05
TOTAL 1000 100%
 Key Questions
• What keeps us alive? What is an environmentally sustainable society?

• How fast is the human population growing?

• What is the difference between economic growth, economic

development, and environmentally sustainable economic
development?

• What are the earth’s main type of resources? How can they be
depleted or degraded?

• What are the principal types of pollution, and what can we do about
pollution?
 More Questions
• What are the basic causes of today’s environmental problems,
and how are these causes connected?

• What are the harmful effects of poverty and affluence?

• What three major cultural changes have take place since

humans arrived?

• What are the scientific principles of sustainability and how can

they help us build more environmentally sustainable and just
societies?
 Core Case Study –
Living in a Sustainable Age: Life in the Fast Lane

• Exponential growth –
a quantity increases at a fixed
percentage per unit of time.

Starts slow but…….

• 10,000 Years Ago – 5 million people

• Present – 7 billion people

• Projection to 2100 – 8-10 billion people

 The Human Influence
• Human activities cause major changes to Earth’s
systems.
– Mass extinctions (0.1-1% per year) – forests, grasslands,
wetlands, coral reefs, and topsoil vanish or degrade.
• Human ecological footprint spreads exponentially across the globe.

– Climate change is also due to exponential growth of human

activities
• Can negatively effect:
– Water supply
– Agriculture
– Biodiversity
– Economies
 Living More Sustainably

• What is environmental science (ES)?

– The study of how earth works, how we interact with the
earth, and how we deal with environmental problems.
 Living More Sustainably
• Environment – sum of all living and nonliving
things that affect organisms.

– Living things can also influence the environment.

• Exponential increase in human population is accompanied by

an exponential increase in consumption 
degradation/depletion of air, water, soil, and biodiversity.

• Continuation of this trend can threaten long-term sustainability

of our societies.
 Goal of ES is to:
ES is interdisciplinary study – Learn how natural systems work
integrating – Learn how environment affects
– Natural Sciences us
(Bio, Chem, Geol) – Learn how we affect the
environment
– Social Science
– Learn how we can live
(Economics, Politics, Ethics) sustainably w/o degrading our
life-support system.
 Living More Sustainably
• Basic tool of ES, ecology – study of the relationships
between organisms and their environment.

• Environmentalism (not the same as ES or Ecology)

– Social movement for protecting earth’s life-support system for
us and other species.
– Political in nature
• Pass and enforce laws
• Promote solutions to environmental problems
• Protest harmful environmental actions
 Sustainability Theme

• Sustainability – ability of earth’s systems (including human

cultural systems and economies) to survive and adapt to
changing environmental conditions indefinitely.
• Sustainability includes:
– Natural capital
– Natural capital degradation
• Use of normally renewable resources faster than nature can renew them.
– Solutions
– Individuals matter

• Sound science – concepts and ideas that are widely

accepted by experts in fields of natural and social sciences.
 Environmentally Sustainable Societies: Protecting
Natural Capital and Living off its Income.

• Meets current and future needs of its people for basic

resources in a just and equitable manner w/o compromising
the ability of future generations to meet their needs.

• Living sustainably – living off natural income replenished by

soils, plants, air and water and not depleting or degrading
the earth’s natural capital that supplies this income.
• Economic Capital
– 10 % annual interest and one million dollars
– Spend $100 000 a year – sustainable
– Spend $200 000 a year – gone in 7th year
– Spend $110 000 a year – gone in 18th year
– Lesson, protect capital and live on income

• Same lesson should be applied to Earth’s

natural capital.
 Resources
What is a resource?

– Anything obtained from the environment to meet our

needs (and wants).
• Food, water, shelter, and metals

– Some directly available, others indirectly

• Directly – sun, fresh air, wind, fresh surface water, fertile soil,
and wild edible plants.
• Indirectly – petroleum, ground water, iron, and modern crops.
– Such resources require human capital (and ingenuity) and
natural capital.
 Perpetual and Renewable Resources

– Perpetual resources – continuously renewable on a human

timescale

– Renewable resource – can be replenished fairly rapidly as long

as it is not used faster than it can be replaced.
• Forests, grasslands, wildlife, fresh air and water, and fertile
soil

– Sustainable yield – highest rate a renewable resource can be

used without degrading or depleting.

– Environmental degradation – when natural replacement rate is

exceeded.
• Urban sprawl, topsoil erosion, pollution, clearing forests,
depleting groundwater, reduction of biodiversity because of
habitat loss.
• Nonrenewable Resources

– Includes energy resources, metallic mineral resources, and

nonmetallic mineral resources.

– Fossil fuels would be exhausted as there is exponential growth in

their use.

– Recycling and reusing metals and non-metallic minerals

• Tragedy of the Commons

– Overuse of common-property (or free access resources).

• Clean air, open ocean, migratory birds, freshwater

– Degradation of renewable free access resources, called

tragedy of the commons by biologist Garrett Hardin.
• Example: collapse of fisheries.

– Solutions to preventing such degradation.

• Use free access renewable resources at rates below
sustainable yields.
• Convert free-access resources to private ownership.
• Ecological Footprint – the amount of biologically productive land and
water needed to supply an area with resources and to absorb the
wastes and pollution produced from such resource use.

– per capita ecological footprint

– Humanity’s ecological footprint is estimated to be 39% above earth’s

ecological capacity.
• US, EU, China, India and Japan together use 74% of earth’s ecological
capacity.
• The US outdoes every other country by at least two-fold.
• If China and India were to catch up to present US consumption, they
would need two require two planet earths.

– Three factors that have the greatest ecological footprint: agriculture,

transportation, and heating and cooling buildings.
 Environmental Problems:
Causes and Connections

• Key Environmental Problems and Their Basic Causes

– Problems are mostly the result of exponential population growth

and resource use

– Underlying causes
• Three other likely causes:
– Global trade policies that undermine environmental
protection.
– Influence of money and politics.
– Failure to provide inspiring and positive visions of a more
sustainable and durable economic future.
• Resource Consumption and Environmental Problems

– Prosperous over-consume

– Affluenza – term coined to describe the unsustainable addiction to

over-consumption and materialism exhibited in the lifestyles of
many affluent consumers in the US and other developed countries
and the rising middle class in China and India.
• Has enormous environmental impact
• Large amounts of pollution, environmental degradation, and wastes.

– Expert on the growth and decline of civilizations Arnold Toynbee

• True measure of growth – law of progressive simplification – shift from
material to nonmaterial developing culture, compassion, sense of
community, and strength of democracy.
• Connections between Environmental Problems
and Their Causes

– Three factor model

• Impact = Population x Affluence x Technologies
• In US, per capita resource use is up to 100 times greater
than the world’s poorest countries.
• Some technologies are environmentally harmful, others
beneficial.
Cultural Changes and the Environment

• Human Cultural Changes

– Homo sapiens sapiens – 90 to 195 thousand y.a.
• Agricultural revolution – 12 000 y.a.
• Industrial-medical revolution – 275 y.a.
• Information-globalization revolution – 50 y.a.
– Living conditions are better, but progress has put a strain
on earth’s natural capital.
• Eras of Environmental History in the US

– Tribal era, at least 10 000 years before European settelers

– Frontier era, 1607-1890
– Early conservation era, 1832-1870
– Modern environmental era, 1870 to present – government
and private citizens in resource conservation, public health,
and environmental protection.
Sustainability and Environmental Worldview

• Are Things Getting Better or Worse? A Millennium

Assessment
– Two schools of thought:
• Technological advances will allow us to keep growing.
• Global economy is outgrowing the capacity for earth to
support it.
– The 2005 UN’s Millennium Ecosystem Assessment

• 1360 experts from 95 countries

• Human activity degrading or using unsustainably about 60 % of

world’s free natural services.

• Report also says we have the tools to preserve earth’s natural

capital.

• Challenge: not to get trapped into confusion and inaction by

listening primarily to either two:
– Technological optimists
– Environmental pessimists
– Sustaining our current global civilization depends on:
• Shifting to a renewable energy-base;
• a reuse/recycle economy;
• and a diversified transport system.
• Making the transition requires:
– restructuring a global economy to sustain civilization;
– an all-out effort to eradicate poverty, stabilize population, and
restore hope; and
– a systematic effort to restore natural systems.
• Four Scientific Principles
– Four basic components of the earth: natural sustainability
• Reliance on solar energy
• Biodiversity – genes, species, ecosystems, and ecological
processes
• Population control
• Nutrient recycling

– The four scientific principles of sustainability as a guide could

lead to an environmental revolution
• Building Social Capital: Talking and Listening to One
Another

– Social capital – positive force created when people w/ different

views and values find common ground and work together to build
understanding, trust and informed shared visions of what their
communities, states, nations, and world could and should be.

– Stakeholders of all sides have some legitimate and useful

insights.
• Social capital can be built by finding trade-off solutions.
• Individuals matter – 5 to 10% of population can bring major social
change.
 SOLAR
EARTH
CAPITAL
Goods and services

Heat
Human Capital Human
Economic Depletion of
and nonrenewable resources
Cultural
Systems Degradation of
Natural Capital renewable resources

Pollution and waste