The natural environment or natural world encompasses all biotic and abiotic things occurring naturally, meaning in this case not artificial. The term is most often applied to Earth or some parts of Earth. This environment encompasses the interaction of all living species, climate, weather and natural resources that affect human survival and economic activity.
The concept of the natural environment can be distinguished as components:
Complete ecological units that function as natural systems without massive civilized human intervention, including all vegetation, microorganisms, soil, rocks, plateaus, mountains, the atmosphere and natural phenomena that occur within their boundaries and their nature.
In contrast to the natural environment is the built environment. Built environments are where humans have fundamentally transformed landscapes such as urban settings and agricultural land conversion, the natural environment is greatly changed into a simplified human environment. Even acts which seem less extreme, such as building a mud hut or a photovoltaic system in the desert, the modified environment becomes an artificial one. Though many animals build things to provide a better environment for themselves, they are not human, hence beaver dams and the works of mound-building termites are thought of as natural. (Full article...)
The natural environment or natural world encompasses all biotic and abiotic things occurring naturally, meaning in this case not artificial. The term is most often applied to Earth or some parts of Earth. This environment encompasses the interaction of all living species, climate, weather and natural resources that affect human survival and economic activity.
The concept of the natural environment can be distinguished as components:
Complete ecological units that function as natural systems without massive civilized human intervention, including all vegetation, microorganisms, soil, rocks, plateaus, mountains, the atmosphere and natural phenomena that occur within their boundaries and their nature.
In contrast to the natural environment is the built environment. Built environments are where humans have fundamentally transformed landscapes such as urban settings and agricultural land conversion, the natural environment is greatly changed into a simplified human environment. Even acts which seem less extreme, such as building a mud hut or a photovoltaic system in the desert, the modified environment becomes an artificial one. Though many animals build things to provide a better environment for themselves, they are not human, hence beaver dams and the works of mound-building termites are thought of as natural.
People cannot find absolutely natural environments on Earth,naturalness usually varies in a continuum, from 100% natural in one extreme to 0% natural in the other. The massive environmental changes of humanity in the Anthropocene have fundamentally effected all natural environments including: climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution from plastic and other chemicals in the air and water. More precisely, we can consider the different aspects or components of an environment, and see that their degree of naturalness is not uniform. If, for instance, in an agricultural field, the mineralogic composition and the structure of its soil are similar to those of an undisturbed forest soil, but the structure is quite different. (Full article...)
Overfishing is the removal of a species of fish (i.e. fishing) from a body of water at a rate greater than that the species can replenish its population naturally (i.e. the overexploitation of the fishery's existing fish stock), resulting in the species becoming increasingly underpopulated in that area. Overfishing can occur in water bodies of any sizes, such as ponds, wetlands, rivers, lakes or oceans, and can result in resource depletion, reduced biological growth rates and low biomass levels. Sustained overfishing can lead to critical depensation, where the fish population is no longer able to sustain itself. Some forms of overfishing, such as the overfishing of sharks, has led to the upset of entire marine ecosystems. Types of overfishing include growth overfishing, recruitment overfishing, and ecosystem overfishing. Overfishing not only causes negative impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem functioning, but also reduces fish production, which subsequently leads to negative social and economic consequences.
The ability of a fishery to recover from overfishing depends on whether its overall carrying capacity and the variety of ecological conditions are suitable for the recovery. Dramatic changes in species composition can result in an ecosystem shift, where other equilibrium energy flows involve species compositions different from those that had been present before the depletion of the original fish stock. For example, once trout have been overfished, carp might exploit the change in competitive equilibria and take over in a way that makes it impossible for the trout to re-establish a breeding population. (Full article...)
... that "Look at the world" is a 1996 choral harvest anthem with text and music by John Rutter, written for CPRE "on the theme of the environment and our responsibility towards it"?
Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel (German:[ɛʁnstˈhɛkl̩]; 16 February 1834 – 9 August 1919) was a German zoologist, naturalist, eugenicist, philosopher, physician, professor, marine biologist and artist. He discovered, described and named thousands of new species, mapped a genealogical tree relating all life forms and coined many terms in biology, including ecology, phylum, phylogeny, and Protista. Haeckel promoted and popularised Charles Darwin's work in Germany and developed the debunked but influential recapitulation theory ("ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny"), falsely claiming that an individual organism's biological development, or ontogeny, parallels and summarizes its species' evolutionary development, or phylogeny, using incorrectly redrawn images of human embryonic development, images which heavily influenced the public to believe in the theory of evolution. Whether he intentionally falsified the images or drew them poorly by accident is a matter of debate.
The published artwork of Haeckel includes over 100 detailed, multi-colour illustrations of animals and sea creatures, collected in his Kunstformen der Natur ("Art Forms of Nature"), a book which would go on to influence the Art Nouveau artistic movement. As a philosopher, Ernst Haeckel wrote Die Welträthsel (1895–1899; in English: The Riddles of the Universe, 1900), the genesis for the term "world riddle" (Welträtsel); and Freedom in Science and Teaching to support teaching evolution. (Full article...)
The Brundtland Commission officially dissolved in 1987 after releasing Our Common Future, also known as the Brundtland Report. The document popularized the term "sustainable development" and won the Grawemeyer Award in 1991. In 1988, the Center for Our Common Future replaced the commission. (Full article...)
The following are images from various environment-related articles on Wikipedia.
Image 1Environmental science examines the effects of humans on nature, such as the Glen Canyon Dam in the United States (from Environmental science)
Image 2Global oceanic and terrestrial phototroph abundance, from September 1997 to August 2000. As an estimate of autotroph biomass, it is only a rough indicator of primary production potential and not an actual estimate of it. (from Ecosystem)
Image 3Sequence of a decomposing pig carcass over time (from Ecosystem)
Image 7A map of the Amazon rainforest ecoregions. The yellow line encloses the ecoregions per the World Wide Fund for Nature. (from Ecoregion)
Image 8Aerial view of stormwater treatment areas in the northern Everglades bordered by sugarcane fields on the right (from Restoration of the Everglades)
Image 9The Paris Agreement (formerly the Kyoto Protocol) is adopted in 2016. Nearly every country in the United Nations has signed the treaty, which aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. (from Environmental science)
Image 20Cattails indicate the presence of phosphorus in the water. Cattails are an invasive species; they crowd out sawgrass and grow too thick to allow nesting for birds and alligators. (from Restoration of the Everglades)
Image 21Dense mass of white crabs at a hydrothermal vent, with stalked barnacles on right (from Habitat)
Image 26Rachel Carson published her groundbreaking novel, Silent Spring, in 1962, bringing the study of environmental science to the forefront of society. (from Environmental science)
Image 29Compartments established by C&SF projects that separated the historic Everglades into Water Conservation Areas and the Everglades Agricultural Area. One-fourth of the original Everglades is preserved in Everglades National Park. (from Restoration of the Everglades)
Image 35View of Earth, taken in 1972 by the Apollo 17 crew. Approximately 71% of Earth's surface (an area of some 361 million square kilometers) consists of ocean (from Ecoregion)
Image 36Climbing ferns overtake cypress trees in the Everglades. The ferns act as "fire ladders" that can destroy trees that would otherwise survive fires. (from Restoration of the Everglades)
Image 41A false color composite of the greater Boston area, created using remote sensing technology, reveals otherwise not visible characteristics about the land cover and the health of the surrounding ecosystems. (from Environmental science)
Image 42Few creatures make the ice shelves of Antarctica their habitat, but water beneath the ice can provide habitat for multiple species. Animals such as penguins have adapted to live in very cold conditions. (from Habitat)
Image 45A team of British researchers found a hole in the ozone layer forming over Antarctica, the discovery of which would later influence the Montreal Protocol in 1987. (from Environmental science)
Image 51Proportion of forest area by forest area density class and global ecological zone, 2015, from Food and Agriculture Organization publication The State of the World's Forests 2020. Forests, biodiversity and people – In brief (from Ecoregion)
Image 53Loch Lomond in Scotland forms a relatively isolated ecosystem. The fish community of this lake has remained stable over a long period until a number of introductions in the 1970s restructured its food web. (from Ecosystem)
Image 54Biodiversity of a coral reef. Corals adapt and modify their environment by forming calcium carbonate skeletons. This provides growing conditions for future generations and forms a habitat for many other species. (from Environmental science)
"The Wildlife Enforcement Monitoring System will provide the platform for our enforcement agencies to collect and share information on the trends and patterns of wildlife crime. Moreover, the cross-border nature of wild life crime underscores the need to enhance cooperation among our governments and to pool financial and human resources. I am confident that these measures will go a long way in enhancing our capacity to protect our wildlife resources."
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