Learning Guide Unit 1: Introduction | Home https://my.uopeople.edu/mod/book/view.php?

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Learning Guide Unit 1

Welcome to environmental science, the interdisciplinary and dynamic study of the interaction of the living and nonliving parts of the
environment with special focus on the impact of humans on the environment. The study of environmental science includes circumstances,
objects, or conditions by which an organism or community is surrounded and the aggregate of social, historical, and cultural factors that
in�uence the life of an individual or community.

Whether you �nd the subject of environmental science compelling and helpful depends greatly on your own e�orts and attitudes. Developing
good study habits, setting goals to motivate yourself, �nding an appropriate study space, and taking the initiative to read critically and to
evaluate your sources can both make your study time more e�cient and improve your �nal grade.

The concepts below will help you review this Unit and extend your study.

Sustainability refers to three simple concerns: the need to arrest environmental degradation and ecological imbalance, the need not to
impoverish future generations, and the need for quality of life and equity between current generations.

The concept of ethics involves standards of conduct. These standards help to distinguish between behavior that is considered right and that
which is considered wrong. The ways in which humans interact with the land and its natural resources are determined by ethical attitudes and
behaviors. assumes that the earth has an unlimited supply of resources. includes humans as part of
the natural community rather than managers of it. assumes that the earth’s resources are not unlimited and that humans
must use and conserve resources in a manner that allows their continued use in the future.

Countries are categorized by a variety of methods. During the Cold War period, the United States government categorized countries according
to each government’s ideology and capitalistic development. Current classi�cation models utilize economic (and sometimes other) factors in
their determination.

Environmental justice is achieved when everyone enjoys the same degree of protection from environmental and health hazards and equal
access to the decision-making process to have a healthy environment.

Many problems face , including lack of human rights, exploitation of their traditional lands and themselves, and
degradation of their culture. Despite the lofty U.N. goals, the rights and feelings of indigenous people are often ignored or minimized, even by
supposedly culturally sensitive developed countries.

• Science attempts to describe and understand the nature of the universe in whole or in part.
• Science has many �elds; those �elds related to the physical world and its phenomena are considered natural sciences. A is a
tentative explanation for an observation. A is a well-tested and consistently veri�ed explanation for a set of
observations or phenomena. A is a description, often in the form of a mathematical formula, of the behavior of an aspect
of nature under certain circumstances.
• Two types of logical reasoning are used in science. reasoning uses results to produce general scienti�c principles.
reasoning is a form of logical thinking that predicts results by applying general principles.
• The common thread throughout scienti�c research is the use of the scienti�c method.
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Learning Guide Unit 1: Introduction | Home https://my.uopeople.edu/mod/book/view.php?id=405260&chapterid=487384

• is anything that occupies space and has mass. It is made up of atoms of di�erent elements. that occur naturally have
unique qualities that allow them to combine in various ways to create compounds or molecules. , which consist of protons,
neutrons, and electrons, are the smallest units of an element that retain all of the properties of that element. can be donated
or shared between atoms to create bonds, including ionic, covalent, and hydrogen bonds.
• The is a measure of the concentration of hydrogen ions in the solution.
• Living things are because carbon plays such a prominent role in the chemistry of living things.
•A is the smallest unit of life. Most cells are so small that they cannot be viewed with the naked eye.
• The states that all organisms are composed of one or more cells, the cell is the basic unit of life, and new cells arise
from existing cells. Each cell runs on the chemical energy found mainly in carbohydrate molecules (food), and the majority of these
molecules are produced by one process: photosynthesis.

Through , certain organisms convert solar energy (sunlight) into chemical energy, which is then used to build carbohydrate
molecules. Directly or indirectly, the process of photosynthesis provides most of the energy required by living things on earth. Photosynthesis
also results in the release of oxygen into the atmosphere. In short, to eat and breathe, humans depend almost entirely on the organisms that
carry out photosynthesis.

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