Learning Guide Unit 1

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ENVS 1301 UNIT 1 February 1-7 Unit 1: Understanding Our Environment Topics  Learning Skills  Environmental concerns, dimensions, and worldviews  Principals of science  Matter, energy, and life Learning Objectives  Discuss environmental concerns in your local area or country of residence based on research.  Compare sustainability services available at the EPA website to services offered in your area of residency. Tasks  Read the Learning Guide and the Reading Assignment  Participate in the Discussion Assignment (post, comment, and rate in the Discussion Forum)  Make entries to the Learning Journal  Take the Self-Quiz Introduction 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 influence the life of an individual or community. Whether you find the subject of environmental science compelling and helpful depends greatly on your own efforts and attitudes. Developing good study habits, setting goals to motivate yourself, finding an appropriate study space, and taking the initiative to read critically and to evaluate your sources can both make your study time more efficient and improve your final grade. The concepts below will help you review this Unit and extend your study. 1. Environment and Sustainability  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 2. Environmental Ethics  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. Frontier ethics assumes that  the earth has an unlimited supply of resources. Environmental ethics includes humans as part of the natural community rather than managers of it. Sustainable ethics assumes that the earth9s resources are not unlimited and that humans must use and conserve resources in a manner that allows their continued use in the future. 3. Categorizing Countries  Countries are categorized by a variety of methods. During the Cold War period, the United States government categorized countries according to each government9s ideology and capitalistic development. Current classification models utilize economic (and sometimes other) factors in their determination. 4. Environmental Justice and Indigenous Struggles

 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 indigenous people, 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. 5. Scientific Process  Science attempts to describe and understand the nature of the universe in whole or in part.  Science has many fields; those fields related to the physical world and its phenomena are considered natural sciences. A hypothesis is a tentative explanation for an observation. A scientific theory is a well-tested and consistently verified explanation for a set of observations or phenomena. A scientific law 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. Inductive reasoning uses results to produce general scientific principles. Deductive reasoning is a form of logical thinking that predicts results by applying general principles.  The common thread throughout scientific research is the use of the scientific method. 6. Matter, Energy, and Life  Matter is anything that occupies space and has mass. It is made up of atoms of different elements. Elements that occur naturally have unique qualities that allow them to combine in various ways to create compounds or molecules. Atoms, which consist of protons, neutrons, and electrons, are the smallest units of an element that retain all of the properties of that element. Electrons can be donated or shared between atoms to create bonds, including ionic, covalent, and hydrogen bonds.

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 The pH of a solution is a measure of the concentration of hydrogen ions in the solution. Living things are carbon-based because carbon plays such a prominent role in the chemistry of living things.  A cell is the smallest unit of life. Most cells are so small that they cannot be viewed with the naked eye.  The unified cell theory 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 photosynthesis, 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 Reading Assignment Doršner, K. (2020). Essentials of environmental science (2nd edition) . Read Chapters 1, 2, 3, and 4 and answer the 'End of Chapter Review Questions' in each chapter. Discussion Assignment Your posts should cover the questions below in full, and be at least 300 words long. Then reply to and peer-review at least three other posts by next Wednesday 11:59PM UoPeople Time, and rate the posts and replies. One: If you live in the USA, then go to the EPA website at this following link, and at the bottom you will see a box titled Your Community=... put in your zip code, and learn about land and environmental impacts in your local neighborhood. Then answer the questions below. Environmental Protection Agency Questions to Answer:

1. What environmental concerns in your local area did you learn about? 2. Did they surprise you? Why or why not? 3. What do you think can be done to improve this (these) situation(s), hazard(s), problem(s), or concern(s)? 4. Give two interesting facts that you learned about your country from the Environmental Snapshots page at the UN Statistics Division link. 5. What other thoughts would you contribute to the topic? Any materials cited should be referenced using the style guidelines established by the American Psychological Association (APA). Learning Journal 1. Write a brief introduction of yourself in the Learning Journal. 2. Explain why you took this course and what you hope to learn from it. 3. Please describe, in detail, some of the major environmental issues in your local village/community/town/region/nation. What are they? Why are they an issue? Do you know of any current actions to deal with it? 4. If you were to implement one, small, simple project in your local area or family in support of the environment, what would it be? Why? 5. One or two sentences of your own personal reflection on something you learned this week. The Learning Journal entry should be a minimum of 400 words and not more than 750 words. Use APA citations and references if you use ideas from the readings or other sources. Self-Quiz The Self-Quiz gives you an opportunity to self-assess your knowledge of what you have learned so far.

The results of the Self-Quiz do not count towards your final grade, but the quiz is an important part of the University’s learning process, and it is expected that you will take it to ensure understanding of the materials presented. Reviewing and analyzing your results will help you perform better on future Graded Quizzes and the Final Exam. Please access the Self-Quiz on the main course homepage; it will be listed inside the Unit. Checklist  Read the Learning Guide and Reading Assignments  Participate in the Discussion Assignment (post, comment, and rate in the  Discussion Forum)  Make entries to the Learning Journal  Take the self quiz

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