Intro to Environmental Science

Concepts:

In this class we will go from approaching environmentalism from the global perspective, to the local level, to internalizing it all and forming a personal activism.

Water is the new oil.

Nature creates energy, people create power.

Consider the future of electronics waste.

Gardening is a great way to teach about science:
growing--biology
cooking--chemistry
soils-water--earth science
rain water--environmental science

What is "environmental science"?
Environmental science is the study and practice of the interaction between humans and the environment and how to make it mutually beneficial. It is human ecology.

Science is the active process of making models and testing them. It is the search for creative approach and solutions and the search for repeating patterns.

A scientific theory is an explanation, based on models, of how things work.

Examples of models are:
physical model: Biosphere II
mathematical model: String Theory
computer model: weather report (7 supercomputers in US)

Science is about:
what- empirical measurement, observation
why- philosophy, theory, models

A common model of the earth is a globe.
It is:
accurate- useful, sphere, tilted 23 degrees, land mass/water, topographical
inaccurate- political lines arbitrary, not flat at top and bottom, not wet, no atmosphere, much smaller than real earth.

On any common globe, the moon is approximately the same size as the United States.

The corresponding scale is:

earth- 25,000 miles circumference:: globe- approximately 3 feet circumference
moon- 250,000 miles away:: ball about 30 feet away
sun- approximately 100,000,000 miles away:: a ball about 12,000 feet away (more than 2 miles away from globe!)

The earth's ecosphere:
geosphere: 17,000 miles beneath the crust- land, rocks, minerals, core
atmosphere: 60 miles above the crust- air, gas
hydrosphere: water and ice on surface of earth
biosphere: surface of earth to 5 miles beneath crust- living things

The geosphere is by far the largest sphere, followed by the atmosphere, then the hydrosphere with the biosphere the smallest in scale.

The context of the earth is its connection to its parts, to us, and to the universe.