Intro Environmental Science Notes

Environmental Science
|What is ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE, and why should we care?? |
|The goal of the Environmental Science course is to provide students with the scientific principles, concepts, and methodologies required to |
|understand the interrelationships of the natural world, to identify and analyze environmental problems both natural and human-made, to |
|evaluate the relative risks associated with these problems, and to examine alternative solutions for resolving and/or preventing them. |
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|Environmental Science is interdisciplinary; it embraces a wide variety of topics from different areas of study. Yet there are several major|
|unifying constructs, or themes, that cut across the many topics included in the study of environmental science. The following themes |
|provide a foundation for the structure of the Environmental Science course. |
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|1. Science is a process. |
|Science is a method of learning more about the world. |
|Science constantly changes the way we understand the world. |
|2. Energy conversions underlie all ecological processes. |
|Energy cannot be created; it must come from somewhere.