Taking Care of the Environment

By Diane Collins

Increased attention to how human activity affects our external world, particularly in a negative way, has meant that the protection of environmental values has become a political issue. Human activity affects nature in many different ways and therefore environmental protection encompasses many different aspects.

Examples of environmental protection issues are the conservation of natural areas, protection of endangered species, reduction of emissions of environmental toxins, countermeasures against littering, and reduction of air emissions that contribute to changes in climate. the atmosphere, including the protection of the ozone layer.

This book is a manual to understand the problems surrounding the Environment, and how they can be faced with practical measures from homes, through local governments to international agreements.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ediciones Afrodita
• Release date: Apr 11, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215176245

Book preview

Chapter 1

Environment

-definition and explanations-

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The environment is everything that surrounds us. It is the set of natural and artificial elements within which human life develops.

With the current ecological problems, the term environment now tends to acquire an increasingly global dimension.

When we talk about our perception of the environment (social, ecological, political, etc.), we must therefore integrate the dimension of globalization and think on a global scale.

In our time, the environment is perceived as a material to be sculpted, a territory to be structured, to be managed. This conception derives from a Promethean approach aimed at affirming the domain of man over nature. Faced with the discourse of radical ecology that is often naive and anti-humanistic, the instrumental and Cartesian approach to the environment seems natural, based on reason and totally adapted to the economic, industrial, commercial, and financial needs of our time.

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Etymology

Etymologically speaking, the term environment has its origin in Greek, Latin, and Gaulish. The term environment is polysemic, that is to say, that today it encompasses many meanings.

The French term environment has been translated into Latin five centuries by Robert Estienne in his French-Latin dictionary in 1539 (p.183). He literally says environment: circumdatio, circumscriptio terrae, stipatio. Therefore, the history of the word and its meanings can go back quite a long way.

The first Anglo-Saxon technical definition of environment appeared in the 1920s: natural (physical, chemical, biological) and cultural (sociological) conditions that can act on all living organisms and human activities. Then, the use of the term environment was developed in the 1960s to encompass and currently mean the biotic (fauna, flora) and abiotic (air, water, soil) natural resources and their reciprocal interactions, the characteristic aspects of landscape and assets that make up the cultural heritage.

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Environment:

• Environment would be, therefore —at a given moment— the environment in which the individual and/or the group develops, including the air, the water, the soil, their interfaces, the natural resources, the fauna, the flora, the fungi, microbes and humans, ecosystems, and the biosphere.

• From you from a more societal point of view, the Environment is the physical, built, the natural and human environment in which an individual or a group works (a family, a neighborhood, a society, a community, a company, the Administration, etc. ); including air, water, soil, subsoil, fauna, flora, other living organisms, the human being, and their interrelationships.

• In its broadest and most shared sense, derived from its etymology, the word Environment evokes everything that, at a given moment, is around us.

But in reality (except in the case of inactive viruses), the physical boundary between the individual and what surrounds him does not really exist. Two examples can illustrate this fuzzy limit:

Our skin seems to be a material barrier that can be the limit between our internal environment and the external environment. However, with each inspiration, the air from our surroundings enters us, loses oxygen, and emerges enriched in water vapor and carbon dioxide that come from inside us. Some of the absorbed oxygen molecules will be included in our body. Others will be released as CO. The same goes for food and excretion, and more subtly for hormones absorbed or emitted by plants or animals. Even our hearing and vision input environmental information (waves and vibrations) into us. Many electromagnetic waves pass through us from one side to the other without impact, others do it with more impact. We understand here that the environment influences individuals.

The fact that there is the soil in which they grow does not mean that there are trees in a forest. Trees have also greatly contributed to producing and fixing the soil in which they live. This soil essentially results from the decomposition of its dead leaves or branches, dead wood, and symbiotic bacteria and fungi or the species they harbor. The land and the forest landscape are not only the environment of the trees, they are also their production.

However, the concept is effective, allowing, in particular, to designate what must be protected around us and the living systems that surround us, so that life can optimally perpetuate itself, so that natural resources can be renewed.

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Evolution of the perception of the environment

• For 100 years, the individual and collective perception of the environment, like that of the landscape, has evolved a lot. We have gone from a fairly local to a planetary environment. Television, images of the conquest of space, and the concrete photographic vision of the planet seen from the moon or from satellites have greatly expanded our perception of our environment.

• We can think that for a growing number of people:

1. the environment experienced daily is less and less natural or rural and more and more urban, built, and controlled.

2. The environment is controlled by the community, even privatized, but it acts less and less for the individual who suffers more and more.

3. The environment is less a known natural object that can be exploited at will as the hunter-gatherer did than the farmer, fisherman, forester, or miner... It was directly exploited by more than 90% of the people. it is no longer directly exploited by more than a small percentage of the population (farmers, fishermen, foresters, miners and quarrymen, etc.). It is subject to indirect and often offshore exploitation, which is less easy to perceive.

4. The environment is increasingly perceived as a finite resource, no longer seen as inexhaustible or infinitely renewable.

5. The environment is a common good, which we have a duty to pass on to future generations.

• The concept is mainly spatial, but everyone intuitively understands that the environment also results from the long history of the coevolution of species on the planet. To speak of the prehistoric environment, we speak of the paleoenvironment. Its understanding is useful to