The second half of the book: How humans interact with the environment

The first half of this textbook was a very brief overview of how science thinks that nature works.  Very brief.  Every chapter covered material that you could reasonably spend a whole class on, or in fact the rest of your career as a student or a scientist.  These are huge, intricate systems.

So if your interest is piqued, I encourage you to keep learning and exploring.

Now we’re going to spend the rest of the book looking at how human systems interact with those environmental systems.  Again, there is so much more than we can possibly cover in just the few weeks that we have, so we’ll just choose a few to focus on.  Fair warning, though, the rest of this might be quite a bit darker than the first half was.

Within that overall category, “how humans interact with natural systems,” you can think about two subcategories: how we affect nature, and how it affects us.  And within each of those, we broadly divide those into positive and negative impacts.  So very broadly, you have:

• ecosystem services: all the ways that we depend on nature, all the different goods and services that natural systems provide of humanity.  This includes not only specific products, like wood from forests or metals that we mine.  It also includes services like producing soil, or even producing the oxygen that we breathe.  And there are also more intangible services, like the fact that most people just enjoy seeing views of nature. We’ll look a bit at this category, and how those services are quantified, in this chapter.
• conservation and restoration: human efforts at good stewardship of natural resources, ecosystems, or nature.  This was covered in Chapter 5
• environmental degradation: all the ways that we harm natural systems, from the local to the global.  And because we depend so heavily on those natural systems (all those ecosystem services), and simply because we live in the environment, this environmental damage usually ends up harming human health as well.  So these are often intricately interrelated with
• environmental hazards: dangers and disasters of the natural world, which are harmful to humans.  These include natural disasters like drought, earthquakes, or hurricanes.  But for the most part, the hazards that we humans face from our environment are, in fact, things that humans put there ourselves.  Pollutants, toxins, and contaminants that can now be found almost everywhere on the planet. This chapter will also discuss this topic in some detail.

Learning Outcomes