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Ecology | Ecology is the natural science of the relationships among living organisms, including humans, and their physical environment. Ecology considers organisms at the individual, population, community, ecosystem, and biosphere levels. Ecology overlaps with the closely related sciences of biogeography, evolutionary biology, genetics, ethology, and natural history.
Ecology is a branch of biology, and is the study of abundance, biomass, and distribution of organisms in the context of the environment. It encompasses life processes, interactions, and adaptations; movement of materials and energy through living communities; successional development of ecosystems; cooperation, competition, and predation within and between species; and patterns of biodiversity and its effect on ecosystem processes.
Ecology has practical applications in conservation biology, wetland management, natural resource management (agroecology, agriculture, forestry, agroforestry, fisheries, mining, tourism), urban planning (urban ecology), community health, economics, basic and applied science, and human social interaction (human ecology).
The word ecology was coined in 1866 by the German scientist Ernst Haeckel. The science of ecology as we know it today began with a group of American botanists in the 1890s. Evolutionary concepts relating to adaptation and natural selection are cornerstones of modern ecological theory.
Ecosystems are dynamically interacting systems of organisms, the communities they make up, and the non-living (abiotic) components of their environment. Ecosystem processes, such as primary production, nutrient cycling, and niche construction, regulate the flux of energy and matter through an environment. Ecosystems have biophysical feedback mechanisms that moderate processes acting on living (biotic) and abiotic components of the planet. Ecosystems sustain life-supporting functions and provide ecosystem services like biomass production (food, fuel, fiber, and medicine), the regulation of climate, global biogeochemical cycles, water filtration, soil formation, erosion control, flood protection, and many other natural features of scientific, historical, economic, or intrinsic value.
Levels, scope, and scale of organization
The scope of ecology contains a wide array of interacting levels of organization spanning micro-level (e.g., cells) to a planetary scale (e.g., biosphere) phenomena. Ecosystems, for example, contain abiotic resources and interacting life forms (i.e., individual organisms that aggregate into populations which aggregate into distinct ecological communities). Because ecosystems are dynamic and do not necessarily follow a linear successional route, changes might occur quickly or slowly over thousands of years before specific forest successional stages are brought about by biological processes. An ecosystem's area can vary greatly, from tiny to vast. A single tree is of little consequence to the classification of a forest ecosystem, but is critically relevant to organisms living in and on it. Several generations of an aphid population can exist over the lifespan of a single leaf. Each of those aphids, in turn, supports diverse bacterial communities. The nature of connections in ecological communities cannot be explained by knowing the details of each species in isolation, because the emergent pattern is neither revealed nor predicted until the ecosystem is studied as an integrated whole. Some ecological principles, however, do exhibit collective properties where the sum of the components explain the properties of the whole, such as birth rates of a population being equal to the sum of individual births over a designated time frame.
The main subdisciplines of ecology, population (or community) ecology and ecosystem ecology, exhibit a difference not only in scale but also in two contrasting paradigms in the field. The former focuses on organisms' distribution and abundance, while the latter focuses on materials and energy fluxes.
Hierarchy
The scale of ecological dynamics can operate like a closed system, such as aphids migrating on a single tree, while at the same time remaining open about broader scale influences, such as atmosphere or climate. Hence, ecologists classify ecosystems hierarchically by analyzing data collected from finer scale units, such as vegetation associations, climate, and soil types, and integrate this information to identify emergent patterns of uniform organization and processes that operate on local to regional, landscape, and chronological scales.
To structure the study of ecology into a conceptually manageable framework, the biological world is organized into a nested hierarchy, ranging in scale from genes, to cells, to tissues, to organs, to organisms, to species, to populations, to guilds, to communities, to ecosystems, to biomes, and up to the level of the biosphere. This framework forms a panarchy and exhibits non-linear behaviors; this means that "effect and cause are disproportionate, so that small changes to critical variables, such as the number of nitrogen fixers, can lead to disproportionate, perhaps irreversible, changes in the system properties."
Biodiversity
Biodiversity (an abbreviation of "biological diversity") describes the diversity of life from genes to ecosystems and spans every level of biological organization. The term has several interpretations, and there are many ways to index, measure, characterize, and represent its complex organization. Biodiversity includes species diversity, ecosystem diversity, and genetic diversity and scientists are interested in the way that this diversity affects the complex ecological processes operating at and among these respective levels. Biodiversity plays an important role in ecosystem services which by definition maintain and improve human quality of life. Conservation priorities and management techniques require different approaches and considerations to address the full ecological scope of biodiversity. Natural capital that supports populations is critical for maintaining ecosystem services and species migration (e.g., riverine fish runs and avian insect control) has been implicated as one mechanism by which those service losses are experienced. An understanding of biodiversity has practical applications for species and ecosystem-level conservation planners as they make management recommendations to consulting firms, governments, and industry.
Habitat
The habitat of a species describes the environment over which a species is known to occur and the type of community that is formed as a result. More specifically, "habitats can be defined as regions in environmental space that are composed of multiple dimensions, each representing a biotic or abiotic environmental variable; that is, any component or characteristic of the environment related directly (e.g. forage biomass and quality) or indirectly (e.g. elevation) to the use of a location by the animal." For example, a habitat might be an aquatic or terrestrial environment that can be further categorized as a montane or alpine ecosystem. Habitat shifts provide important evidence of competition in nature where one population changes relative to the habitats that most other individuals of the species occupy. For example, one population of a species of tropical lizard (Tropidurus hispidus) has a flattened body relative to the main populations that live in open savanna. The population that lives in an isolated rock outcrop hides in crevasses where its flattened body offers a selective advantage. Habitat shifts also occur in the developmental life history of amphibians, and in insects that transition from aquatic to terrestrial habitats. Biotope and habitat are sometimes used interchangeably, but the former applies to a community's environment, whereas the latter applies to a species' environment.
Niche
Definitions of the niche date back to 1917, but G. Evelyn Hutchinson made conceptual advances in 1957 by introducing a widely adopted definition: "the set of biotic and abiotic conditions in which a species is able to persist and maintain stable population sizes." The ecological niche is a central concept in the ecology of organisms and is sub-divided into the fundamental and the realized niche. The fundamental niche is the set of environmental conditions under which a species is able to persist. The realized niche is the set of environmental plus ecological conditions under which a species persists. The Hutchinsonian niche is defined more technically as a "Euclidean hyperspace whose dimensions are defined as environmental variables and whose size is a function of the number of values that the environmental values may assume for which an organism has positive fitness."
Biogeographical patterns and range distributions are explained or predicted through knowledge of a species' traits and niche requirements. Species have functional traits that are uniquely adapted to the ecological niche. A trait is a measurable property, phenotype, or characteristic of an organism that may influence its survival. Genes play an important role in the interplay of development and environmental expression of traits. Resident species evolve traits that are fitted to the selection pressures of their local environment. This tends to afford them a competitive advantage and discourages similarly adapted species from having an overlapping geographic range. The competitive exclusion principle states that two species cannot coexist indefinitely by living off the same limiting resource; one will always out-compete the other. When similarly adapted species overlap geographically, closer inspection reveals subtle ecological differences in their habitat or dietary requirements. Some models and empirical studies, however, suggest that disturbances can stabilize the co-evolution and shared niche occupancy of similar species inhabiting species-rich communities. The habitat plus the niche is called the ecotope, which is defined as the full range of environmental and biological variables affecting an entire species.
Niche construction
Organisms are subject to environmental pressures, but they also modify their habitats. The regulatory feedback between organisms and their environment can affect conditions from local (e.g., a beaver pond) to global scales, over time and even after death, such as decaying logs or silica skeleton deposits from marine organisms. The process and concept of ecosystem engineering are related to niche construction, but the former relates only to the physical modifications of the habitat whereas the latter also considers the evolutionary implications of physical changes to the environment and the feedback this causes on the process of natural selection. Ecosystem engineers are defined as: "organisms that directly or indirectly modulate the availability of resources to other species, by causing physical state changes in biotic or abiotic materials. In so doing they modify, maintain and create habitats."
The ecosystem engineering concept has stimulated a new appreciation for the influence that organisms have on the ecosystem and evolutionary process. The term "niche construction" is more often used in reference to the under-appreciated feedback mechanisms of natural selection imparting forces on the abiotic niche. An example of natural selection through ecosystem engineering occurs in the nests of social insects, including ants, bees, wasps, and termites. There is an emergent homeostasis or homeorhesis in the structure of the nest that regulates, maintains and defends the physiology of the entire colony. Termite mounds, for example, maintain a constant internal temperature through the design of air-conditioning chimneys. The structure of the nests themselves is subject to the forces of natural selection. Moreover, a nest can survive over successive generations, so that progeny inherit both genetic material and a legacy niche that was constructed before their time.
Biome
Biomes are larger units of organization that categorize regions of the Earth's ecosystems, mainly according to the structure and composition of vegetation. There are different methods to define the continental boundaries of biomes dominated by different functional types of vegetative communities that are limited in distribution by climate, precipitation, weather, and other environmental variables. Biomes include tropical rainforest, temperate broadleaf and mixed forest, temperate deciduous forest, taiga, tundra, hot desert, and polar desert. Other researchers have recently categorized other biomes, such as the human and oceanic microbiomes. To a microbe, the human body is a habitat and a landscape. Microbiomes were discovered largely through advances in molecular genetics, which have revealed a hidden richness of microbial diversity on the planet. The oceanic microbiome plays a significant role in the ecological biogeochemistry of the planet's oceans.
Biosphere
The largest scale of ecological organization is the biosphere: the total sum of ecosystems on the planet. Ecological relationships regulate the flux of energy, nutrients, and climate all the way up to the planetary scale. For example, the dynamic history of the planetary atmosphere's CO2 and O2 composition has been affected by the biogenic flux of gases coming from respiration and photosynthesis, with levels fluctuating over time in relation to the ecology and evolution of plants and animals. Ecological theory has also been used to explain self-emergent regulatory phenomena at the planetary scale: for example, the Gaia hypothesis is an example of holism applied in ecological theory. The Gaia hypothesis states that there is an emergent feedback loop generated by the metabolism of living organisms that maintains the core temperature of the Earth and atmospheric conditions within a narrow self-regulating range of tolerance.
Population ecology
Population ecology studies the dynamics of species populations and how these populations interact with the wider environment. A population consists of individuals of the same species that live, interact, and migrate through the same niche and habitat.
A primary law of population ecology is the Malthusian growth model which states, "a population will grow (or decline) exponentially as long as the environment experienced by all individuals in the population remains constant." Simplified population models usually starts with four variables: death, birth, immigration, and emigration.
An example of an introductory population model describes a closed population, such as on an island, where immigration and emigration does not take place. Hypotheses are evaluated with reference to a null hypothesis which states that random processes create the observed data. In these island models, the rate of population change is described by:
where N is the total number of individuals in the population, b and d are the per capita rates of birth and death respectively, and r is the per capita rate of population change.
Using these modeling techniques, Malthus' population principle of growth was later transformed into a model known as the logistic equation by Pierre Verhulst:
where N(t) is the number of individuals measured as biomass density as a function of time, t, r is the maximum per-capita rate of change commonly known as the intrinsic rate of growth, and is the crowding coefficient, which represents the reduction in population growth rate per individual added. The formula states that the rate of change in population size will grow to approach equilibrium, where, when the rates of increase and crowding are balanced, . A common, analogous model fixes the equilibrium, as K, which is known as the "carrying capacity."
Population ecology builds upon these introductory models to further understand demographic processes in real study populations. Commonly used types of data include life history, fecundity, and survivorship, and these are analyzed using mathematical techniques such as matrix algebra. The information is used for managing wildlife stocks and setting harvest quotas. In cases where basic models are insufficient, ecologists may adopt different kinds of statistical methods, such as the Akaike information criterion, or use models that can become mathematically complex as "several competing hypotheses are simultaneously confronted with the data."
Metapopulations and migration
The concept of metapopulations was defined in 1969 as "a population of populations which go extinct locally and recolonize". Metapopulation ecology is another statistical approach that is often used in conservation research. Metapopulation models simplify the landscape into patches of varying levels of quality, and metapopulations are linked by the migratory behaviours of organisms. Animal migration is set apart from other kinds of movement because it involves the seasonal departure and return of individuals from a habitat. Migration is also a population-level phenomenon, as with the migration routes followed by plants as they occupied northern post-glacial environments. Plant ecologists use pollen records that accumulate and stratify in wetlands to reconstruct the timing of plant migration and dispersal relative to historic and contemporary climates. These migration routes involved an expansion of the range as plant populations expanded from one area to another. There is a larger taxonomy of movement, such as commuting, foraging, territorial behavior, stasis, and ranging. Dispersal is usually distinguished from migration because it involves the one-way permanent movement of individuals from their birth population into another population.
In metapopulation terminology, migrating individuals are classed as emigrants (when they leave a region) or immigrants (when they enter a region), and sites are classed either as sources or sinks. A site is a generic term that refers to places where ecologists sample populations, such as ponds or defined sampling areas in a forest. Source patches are productive sites that generate a seasonal supply of juveniles that migrate to other patch locations. Sink patches are unproductive sites that only receive migrants; the population at the site will disappear unless rescued by an adjacent source patch or environmental conditions become more favorable. Metapopulation models examine patch dynamics over time to answer potential questions about spatial and demographic ecology. The ecology of metapopulations is a dynamic process of extinction and colonization. Small patches of lower quality (i.e., sinks) are maintained or rescued by a seasonal influx of new immigrants. A dynamic metapopulation structure evolves from year to year, where some patches are sinks in dry years and are sources when conditions are more favorable. Ecologists use a mixture of computer models and field studies to explain metapopulation structure.
Community ecology
Community ecology is the study of the interactions among a collection of species that inhabit the same geographic area. Community ecologists study the determinants of patterns and processes for two or more interacting species. Research in community ecology might measure species diversity in grasslands in relation to soil fertility. It might also include the analysis of predator-prey dynamics, competition among similar plant species, or mutualistic interactions between crabs and corals.
Ecosystem ecology
Ecosystems may be habitats within biomes that form an integrated whole and a dynamically responsive system having both physical and biological complexes. Ecosystem ecology is the science of determining the fluxes of materials (e.g. carbon, phosphorus) between different pools (e.g., tree biomass, soil organic material). Ecosystem ecologists attempt to determine the underlying causes of these fluxes. Research in ecosystem ecology might measure primary production (g C/m^2) in a wetland in relation to decomposition and consumption rates (g C/m^2/y). This requires an understanding of the community connections between plants (i.e., primary producers) and the decomposers (e.g., fungi and bacteria).
The underlying concept of an ecosystem can be traced back to 1864 in the published work of George Perkins Marsh ("Man and Nature"). Within an ecosystem, organisms are linked to the physical and biological components of their environment to which they are adapted. Ecosystems are complex adaptive systems where the interaction of life processes form self-organizing patterns across different scales of time and space. Ecosystems are broadly categorized as terrestrial, freshwater, atmospheric, or marine. Differences stem from the nature of the unique physical environments that shapes the biodiversity within each. A more recent addition to ecosystem ecology are technoecosystems, which are affected by or primarily the result of human activity.
Food webs
A food web is the archetypal ecological network. Plants capture solar energy and use it to synthesize simple sugars during photosynthesis. As plants grow, they accumulate nutrients and are eaten by grazing herbivores, and the energy is transferred through a chain of organisms by consumption. The simplified linear feeding pathways that move from a basal trophic species to a top consumer is called the food chain. Food chains in an ecological community create a complex food web. Food webs are a type of concept map that is used to illustrate and study pathways of energy and material flows.
Empirical measurements are generally restricted to a specific habitat, such as a cave or a pond, and principles gleaned from small-scale studies are extrapolated to larger systems. Feeding relations require extensive investigations, e.g. into the gut contents of organisms, which can be difficult to decipher, or stable isotopes can be used to trace the flow of nutrient diets and energy through a food web. Despite these limitations, food webs remain a valuable tool in understanding community ecosystems.
Food webs illustrate important principles of ecology: some species have many weak feeding links (e.g., omnivores) while some are more specialized with fewer stronger feeding links (e.g., primary predators). Such linkages explain how ecological communities remain stable over time and eventually can illustrate a "complete" web of life.
The disruption of food webs may have a dramatic impact on the ecology of individual species or whole ecosystems. For instance, the replacement of an ant species by another (invasive) ant species has been shown to affect how elephants reduce tree cover and thus the predation of lions on zebras.
Trophic levels
A trophic level (from Greek troph, τροφή, trophē, meaning "food" or "feeding") is "a group of organisms acquiring a considerable majority of its energy from the lower adjacent level (according to ecological pyramids) nearer the abiotic source." Links in food webs primarily connect feeding relations or trophism among species. Biodiversity within ecosystems can be organized into trophic pyramids, in which the vertical dimension represents feeding relations that become further removed from the base of the food chain up toward top predators, and the horizontal dimension represents the abundance or biomass at each level. When the relative abundance or biomass of each species is sorted into its respective trophic level, they naturally sort into a 'pyramid of numbers'.
Species are broadly categorized as autotrophs (or primary producers), heterotrophs (or consumers), and Detritivores (or decomposers). Autotrophs are organisms that produce their own food (production is greater than respiration) by photosynthesis or chemosynthesis. Heterotrophs are organisms that must feed on others for nourishment and energy (respiration exceeds production). Heterotrophs can be further sub-divided into different functional groups, including primary consumers (strict herbivores), secondary consumers (carnivorous predators that feed exclusively on herbivores), and tertiary consumers (predators that feed on a mix of herbivores and predators). Omnivores do not fit neatly into a functional category because they eat both plant and animal tissues. It has been suggested that omnivores have a greater functional influence as predators because compared to herbivores, they are relatively inefficient at grazing.
Trophic levels are part of the holistic or complex systems view of ecosystems. Each trophic level contains unrelated species that are grouped together because they share common ecological functions, giving a macroscopic view of the system. While the notion of trophic levels provides insight into energy flow and top-down control within food webs, it is troubled by the prevalence of omnivory in real ecosystems. This has led some ecologists to "reiterate that the notion that species clearly aggregate into discrete, homogeneous trophic levels is fiction." Nonetheless, recent studies have shown that real trophic levels do exist, but "above the herbivore trophic level, food webs are better characterized as a tangled web of omnivores."
Keystone species
A keystone species is a species that is connected to a disproportionately large number of other species in the food-web. Keystone species have lower levels of biomass in the trophic pyramid relative to the importance of their role. The many connections that a keystone species holds means that it maintains the organization and structure of entire communities. The loss of a keystone species results in a range of dramatic cascading effects (termed trophic cascades) that alters trophic dynamics, other food web connections, and can cause the extinction of other species. The term keystone species was coined by Robert Paine in 1969 and is a reference to the keystone architectural feature as the removal of a keystone species can result in a community collapse just as the removal of the keystone in an arch can result in the arch's loss of stability.
Sea otters (Enhydra lutris) are commonly cited as an example of a keystone species because they limit the density of sea urchins that feed on kelp. If sea otters are removed from the system, the urchins graze until the kelp beds disappear, and this has a dramatic effect on community structure. Hunting of sea otters, for example, is thought to have led indirectly to the extinction of the Steller's sea cow (Hydrodamalis gigas). While the keystone species concept has been used extensively as a conservation tool, it has been criticized for being poorly defined from an operational stance. It is difficult to experimentally determine what species may hold a keystone role in each ecosystem. Furthermore, food web theory suggests that keystone species may not be common, so it is unclear how generally the keystone species model can be applied.
Complexity
Complexity is understood as a large computational effort needed to piece together numerous interacting parts exceeding the iterative memory capacity of the human mind. Global patterns of biological diversity are complex. This biocomplexity stems from the interplay among ecological processes that operate and influence patterns at different scales that grade into each other, such as transitional areas or ecotones spanning landscapes. Complexity stems from the interplay among levels of biological organization as energy, and matter is integrated into larger units that superimpose onto the smaller parts. "What were wholes on one level become parts on a higher one." Small scale patterns do not necessarily explain large scale phenomena, otherwise captured in the expression (coined by Aristotle) 'the sum is greater than the parts'.
"Complexity in ecology is of at least six distinct types: spatial, temporal, structural, process, behavioral, and geometric." From these principles, ecologists have identified emergent and self-organizing phenomena that operate at different environmental scales of influence, ranging from molecular to planetary, and these require different explanations at each integrative level. Ecological complexity relates to the dynamic resilience of ecosystems that transition to multiple shifting steady-states directed by random fluctuations of history. Long-term ecological studies provide important track records to better understand the complexity and resilience of ecosystems over longer temporal and broader spatial scales. These studies are managed by the International Long Term Ecological Network (LTER). The longest experiment in existence is the Park Grass Experiment, which was initiated in 1856. Another example is the Hubbard Brook study, which has been in operation since 1960.
Holism
Holism remains a critical part of the theoretical foundation in contemporary ecological studies. Holism addresses the biological organization of life that self-organizes into layers of emergent whole systems that function according to non-reducible properties. This means that higher-order patterns of a whole functional system, such as an ecosystem, cannot be predicted or understood by a simple summation of the parts. "New properties emerge because the components interact, not because the basic nature of the components is changed."
Ecological studies are necessarily holistic as opposed to reductionistic. Holism has three scientific meanings or uses that identify with ecology: 1) the mechanistic complexity of ecosystems, 2) the practical description of patterns in quantitative reductionist terms where correlations may be identified but nothing is understood about the causal relations without reference to the whole system, which leads to 3) a metaphysical hierarchy whereby the causal relations of larger systems are understood without reference to the smaller parts. Scientific holism differs from mysticism that has appropriated the same term. An example of metaphysical holism is identified in the trend of increased exterior thickness in shells of different species. The reason for a thickness increase can be understood through reference to principles of natural selection via predation without the need to reference or understand the biomolecular properties of the exterior shells.
Relation to evolution
Ecology and evolutionary biology are considered sister disciplines of the life sciences. Natural selection, life history, development, adaptation, populations, and inheritance are examples of concepts that thread equally into ecological and evolutionary theory. Morphological, behavioural, and genetic traits, for example, can be mapped onto evolutionary trees to study the historical development of a species in relation to their functions and roles in different ecological circumstances. In this framework, the analytical tools of ecologists and evolutionists overlap as they organize, classify, and investigate life through common systematic principles, such as phylogenetics or the Linnaean system of taxonomy. The two disciplines often appear together, such as in the title of the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution. There is no sharp boundary separating ecology from evolution, and they differ more in their areas of applied focus. Both disciplines discover and explain emergent and unique properties and processes operating across different spatial or temporal scales of organization. While the boundary between ecology and evolution is not always clear, ecologists study the abiotic and biotic factors that influence evolutionary processes, and evolution can be rapid, occurring on ecological timescales as short as one generation.
Behavioural ecology
All organisms can exhibit behaviours. Even plants express complex behaviour, including memory and communication. Behavioural ecology is the study of an organism's behaviour in its environment and its ecological and evolutionary implications. Ethology is the study of observable movement or behaviour in animals. This could include investigations of motile sperm of plants, mobile phytoplankton, zooplankton swimming toward the female egg, the cultivation of fungi by weevils, the mating dance of a salamander, or social gatherings of amoeba.
Adaptation is the central unifying concept in behavioural ecology. Behaviours can be recorded as traits and inherited in much the same way that eye and hair colour can. Behaviours can evolve by means of natural selection as adaptive traits conferring functional utilities that increases reproductive fitness.
Predator-prey interactions are an introductory concept into food-web studies as well as behavioural ecology. Prey species can exhibit different kinds of behavioural adaptations to predators, such as avoid, flee, or defend. Many prey species are faced with multiple predators that differ in the degree of danger posed. To be adapted to their environment and face predatory threats, organisms must balance their energy budgets as they invest in different aspects of their life history, such as growth, feeding, mating, socializing, or modifying their habitat. Hypotheses posited in behavioural ecology are generally based on adaptive principles of conservation, optimization, or efficiency. For example, "[t]he threat-sensitive predator avoidance hypothesis predicts that prey should assess the degree of threat posed by different predators and match their behaviour according to current levels of risk" or "[t]he optimal flight initiation distance occurs where expected postencounter fitness is maximized, which depends on the prey's initial fitness, benefits obtainable by not fleeing, energetic escape costs, and expected fitness loss due to predation risk."
Elaborate sexual displays and posturing are encountered in the behavioural ecology of animals. The birds-of-paradise, for example, sing and display elaborate ornaments during courtship. These displays serve a dual purpose of signalling healthy or well-adapted individuals and desirable genes. The displays are driven by sexual selection as an advertisement of quality of traits among suitors.
Cognitive ecology
Cognitive ecology integrates theory and observations from evolutionary ecology and neurobiology, primarily cognitive science, in order to understand the effect that animal interaction with their habitat has on their cognitive systems and how those systems restrict behavior within an ecological and evolutionary framework. "Until recently, however, cognitive scientists have not paid sufficient attention to the fundamental fact that cognitive traits evolved under particular natural settings. With consideration of the selection pressure on cognition, cognitive ecology can contribute intellectual coherence to the multidisciplinary study of cognition." As a study involving the 'coupling' or interactions between organism and environment, cognitive ecology is closely related to enactivism, a field based upon the view that "...we must see the organism and environment as bound together in reciprocal specification and selection...".
Social ecology
Social-ecological behaviours are notable in the social insects, slime moulds, social spiders, human society, and naked mole-rats where eusocialism has evolved. Social behaviours include reciprocally beneficial behaviours among kin and nest mates and evolve from kin and group selection. Kin selection explains altruism through genetic relationships, whereby an altruistic behaviour leading to death is rewarded by the survival of genetic copies distributed among surviving relatives. The social insects, including ants, bees, and wasps are most famously studied for this type of relationship because the male drones are clones that share the same genetic make-up as every other male in the colony. In contrast, group selectionists find examples of altruism among non-genetic relatives and explain this through selection acting on the group; whereby, it becomes selectively advantageous for groups if their members express altruistic behaviours to one another. Groups with predominantly altruistic members survive better than groups with predominantly selfish members.
Coevolution
Ecological interactions can be classified broadly into a host and an associate relationship. A host is any entity that harbours another that is called the associate. Relationships between species that are mutually or reciprocally beneficial are called mutualisms. Examples of mutualism include fungus-growing ants employing agricultural symbiosis, bacteria living in the guts of insects and other organisms, the fig wasp and yucca moth pollination complex, lichens with fungi and photosynthetic algae, and corals with photosynthetic algae. If there is a physical connection between host and associate, the relationship is called symbiosis. Approximately 60% of all plants, for example, have a symbiotic relationship with arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi living in their roots forming an exchange network of carbohydrates for mineral nutrients.
Indirect mutualisms occur where the organisms live apart. For example, trees living in the equatorial regions of the planet supply oxygen into the atmosphere that sustains species living in distant polar regions of the planet. This relationship is called commensalism because many others receive the benefits of clean air at no cost or harm to trees supplying the oxygen. If the associate benefits while the host suffers, the relationship is called parasitism. Although parasites impose a cost to their host (e.g., via damage to their reproductive organs or propagules, denying the services of a beneficial partner), their net effect on host fitness is not necessarily negative and, thus, becomes difficult to forecast. Co-evolution is also driven by competition among species or among members of the same species under the banner of reciprocal antagonism, such as grasses competing for growth space. The Red Queen Hypothesis, for example, posits that parasites track down and specialize on the locally common genetic defense systems of its host that drives the evolution of sexual reproduction to diversify the genetic constituency of populations responding to the antagonistic pressure.
Biogeography
Biogeography (an amalgamation of biology and geography) is the comparative study of the geographic distribution of organisms and the corresponding evolution of their traits in space and time. The Journal of Biogeography was established in 1974. Biogeography and ecology share many of their disciplinary roots. For example, the theory of island biogeography, published by the Robert MacArthur and Edward O. Wilson in 1967 is considered one of the fundamentals of ecological theory.
Biogeography has a long history in the natural sciences concerning the spatial distribution of plants and animals. Ecology and evolution provide the explanatory context for biogeographical studies. Biogeographical patterns result from ecological processes that influence range distributions, such as migration and dispersal. and from historical processes that split populations or species into different areas. The biogeographic processes that result in the natural splitting of species explain much of the modern distribution of the Earth's biota. The splitting of lineages in a species is called vicariance biogeography and it is a sub-discipline of biogeography. There are also practical applications in the field of biogeography concerning ecological systems and processes. For example, the range and distribution of biodiversity and invasive species responding to climate change is a serious concern and active area of research in the context of global warming.
r/K selection theory
A population ecology concept is r/K selection theory, one of the first predictive models in ecology used to explain life-history evolution. The premise behind the r/K selection model is that natural selection pressures change according to population density. For example, when an island is first colonized, density of individuals is low. The initial increase in population size is not limited by competition, leaving an abundance of available resources for rapid population growth. These early phases of population growth experience density-independent forces of natural selection, which is called r-selection. As the population becomes more crowded, it approaches the island's carrying capacity, thus forcing individuals to compete more heavily for fewer available resources. Under crowded conditions, the population experiences density-dependent forces of natural selection, called K-selection.
In the r/K-selection model, the first variable r is the intrinsic rate of natural increase in population size and the second variable K is the carrying capacity of a population. Different species evolve different life-history strategies spanning a continuum between these two selective forces. An r-selected species is one that has high birth rates, low levels of parental investment, and high rates of mortality before individuals reach maturity. Evolution favours high rates of fecundity in r-selected species. Many kinds of insects and invasive species exhibit r-selected characteristics. In contrast, a K-selected species has low rates of fecundity, high levels of parental investment in the young, and low rates of mortality as individuals mature. Humans and elephants are examples of species exhibiting K-selected characteristics, including longevity and efficiency in the conversion of more resources into fewer offspring.
Molecular ecology
The important relationship between ecology and genetic inheritance predates modern techniques for molecular analysis. Molecular ecological research became more feasible with the development of rapid and accessible genetic technologies, such as the polymerase chain reaction (PCR). The rise of molecular technologies and the influx of research questions into this new ecological field resulted in the publication Molecular Ecology in 1992. Molecular ecology uses various analytical techniques to study genes in an evolutionary and ecological context. In 1994, John Avise also played a leading role in this area of science with the publication of his book, Molecular Markers, Natural History and Evolution. Newer technologies opened a wave of genetic analysis into organisms once difficult to study from an ecological or evolutionary standpoint, such as bacteria, fungi, and nematodes. Molecular ecology engendered a new research paradigm for investigating ecological questions considered otherwise intractable. Molecular investigations revealed previously obscured details in the tiny intricacies of nature and improved resolution into probing questions about behavioural and biogeographical ecology. For example, molecular ecology revealed promiscuous sexual behaviour and multiple male partners in tree swallows previously thought to be socially monogamous. In a biogeographical context, the marriage between genetics, ecology, and evolution resulted in a new sub-discipline called phylogeography.
Human ecology
Ecology is as much a biological science as it is a human science. Human ecology is an interdisciplinary investigation into the ecology of our species. "Human ecology may be defined: (1) from a bioecological standpoint as the study of man as the ecological dominant in plant and animal communities and systems; (2) from a bioecological standpoint as simply another animal affecting and being affected by his physical environment; and (3) as a human being, somehow different from animal life in general, interacting with physical and modified environments in a distinctive and creative way. A truly interdisciplinary human ecology will most likely address itself to all three." The term was formally introduced in 1921, but many sociologists, geographers, psychologists, and other disciplines were interested in human relations to natural systems centuries prior, especially in the late 19th century.
The ecological complexities human beings are facing through the technological transformation of the planetary biome has brought on the Anthropocene. The unique set of circumstances has generated the need for a new unifying science called coupled human and natural systems that builds upon, but moves beyond the field of human ecology. Ecosystems tie into human societies through the critical and all-encompassing life-supporting functions they sustain. In recognition of these functions and the incapability of traditional economic valuation methods to see the value in ecosystems, there has been a surge of interest in social-natural capital, which provides the means to put a value on the stock and use of information and materials stemming from ecosystem goods and services. Ecosystems produce, regulate, maintain, and supply services of critical necessity and beneficial to human health (cognitive and physiological), economies, and they even provide an information or reference function as a living library giving opportunities for science and cognitive development in children engaged in the complexity of the natural world. Ecosystems relate importantly to human ecology as they are the ultimate base foundation of global economics as every commodity, and the capacity for exchange ultimately stems from the ecosystems on Earth.
Restoration Ecology
Ecology is an employed science of restoration, repairing disturbed sites through human intervention, in natural resource management, and in environmental impact assessments. Edward O. Wilson predicted in 1992 that the 21st century "will be the era of restoration in ecology". Ecological science has boomed in the industrial investment of restoring ecosystems and their processes in abandoned sites after disturbance. Natural resource managers, in forestry, for example, employ ecologists to develop, adapt, and implement ecosystem based methods into the planning, operation, and restoration phases of land-use. Another example of conservation is seen on the east coast of the United States in Boston, MA. The city of Boston implemented the Wetland Ordinance, improving the stability of their wetland environments by implementing soil amendments that will improve groundwater storage and flow, and trimming or removal of vegetation that could cause harm to water quality. Ecological science is used in the methods of sustainable harvesting, disease, and fire outbreak management, in fisheries stock management, for integrating land-use with protected areas and communities, and conservation in complex geo-political landscapes.
Relation to the environment
The environment of ecosystems includes both physical parameters and biotic attributes. It is dynamically interlinked and contains resources for organisms at any time throughout their life cycle. Like ecology, the term environment has different conceptual meanings and overlaps with the concept of nature. Environment "includes the physical world, the social world of human relations and the built world of human creation." The physical environment is external to the level of biological organization under investigation, including abiotic factors such as temperature, radiation, light, chemistry, climate and geology. The biotic environment includes genes, cells, organisms, members of the same species (conspecifics) and other species that share a habitat.
The distinction between external and internal environments, however, is an abstraction parsing life and environment into units or facts that are inseparable in reality. There is an interpenetration of cause and effect between the environment and life. The laws of thermodynamics, for example, apply to ecology by means of its physical state. With an understanding of metabolic and thermodynamic principles, a complete accounting of energy and material flow can be traced through an ecosystem. In this way, the environmental and ecological relations are studied through reference to conceptually manageable and isolated material parts. After the effective environmental components are understood through reference to their causes; however, they conceptually link back together as an integrated whole, or holocoenotic system as it was once called. This is known as the dialectical approach to ecology. The dialectical approach examines the parts but integrates the organism and the environment into a dynamic whole (or umwelt). Change in one ecological or environmental factor can concurrently affect the dynamic state of an entire ecosystem.
Disturbance and resilience
A disturbance is any process that changes or removes biomass from a community, such as a fire, flood, drought, or predation. Disturbances are both the cause and product of natural fluctuations within an ecological community. Biodiversity can protect ecosystems from disturbances.
The effect of a disturbance is often hard to predict, but there are numerous examples in which a single species can massively disturb an ecosystem. For example, a single-celled protozoan has been able to kill up to 100% of sea urchins in some coral reefs in the Red Sea and Western Indian Ocean. Sea urchins enable complex reef ecosystems to thrive by eating algae that would otherwise inhibit coral growth. Similarly, invasive species can wreak havoc on ecosystems. For instance, invasive Burmese pythons have caused a 98% decline of small mammals in the Everglades.
Metabolism and the early atmosphere
The Earth was formed approximately 4.5 billion years ago. As it cooled and a crust and oceans formed, its atmosphere transformed from being dominated by hydrogen to one composed mostly of methane and ammonia. Over the next billion years, the metabolic activity of life transformed the atmosphere into a mixture of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and water vapor. These gases changed the way that light from the sun hit the Earth's surface and greenhouse effects trapped heat. There were untapped sources of free energy within the mixture of reducing and oxidizing gasses that set the stage for primitive ecosystems to evolve and, in turn, the atmosphere also evolved.
Throughout history, the Earth's atmosphere and biogeochemical cycles have been in a dynamic equilibrium with planetary ecosystems. The history is characterized by periods of significant transformation followed by millions of years of stability. The evolution of the earliest organisms, likely anaerobic methanogen microbes, started the process by converting atmospheric hydrogen into methane (4H2 + CO2 → CH4 + 2H2O). Anoxygenic photosynthesis reduced hydrogen concentrations and increased atmospheric methane, by converting hydrogen sulfide into water or other sulfur compounds (for example, 2H2S + CO2 + hv → CH2O + H2O + 2S). Early forms of fermentation also increased levels of atmospheric methane. The transition to an oxygen-dominant atmosphere (the Great Oxidation) did not begin until approximately 2.4–2.3 billion years ago, but photosynthetic processes started 0.3 to 1 billion years prior.
Radiation: heat, temperature and light
The biology of life operates within a certain range of temperatures. Heat is a form of energy that regulates temperature. Heat affects growth rates, activity, behaviour, and primary production. Temperature is largely dependent on the incidence of solar radiation. The latitudinal and longitudinal spatial variation of temperature greatly affects climates and consequently the distribution of biodiversity and levels of primary production in different ecosystems or biomes across the planet. Heat and temperature relate importantly to metabolic activity. Poikilotherms, for example, have a body temperature that is largely regulated and dependent on the temperature of the external environment. In contrast, homeotherms regulate their internal body temperature by expending metabolic energy.
There is a relationship between light, primary production, and ecological energy budgets. Sunlight is the primary input of energy into the planet's ecosystems. Light is composed of electromagnetic energy of different wavelengths. Radiant energy from the sun generates heat, provides photons of light measured as active energy in the chemical reactions of life, and also acts as a catalyst for genetic mutation. Plants, algae, and some bacteria absorb light and assimilate the energy through photosynthesis. Organisms capable of assimilating energy by photosynthesis or through inorganic fixation of H2S are autotrophs. Autotrophs—responsible for primary production—assimilate light energy which becomes metabolically stored as potential energy in the form of biochemical enthalpic bonds.
Physical environments
Water
Diffusion of carbon dioxide and oxygen is approximately 10,000 times slower in water than in air. When soils are flooded, they quickly lose oxygen, becoming hypoxic (an environment with O2 concentration below 2 mg/liter) and eventually completely anoxic where anaerobic bacteria thrive among the roots. Water also influences the intensity and spectral composition of light as it reflects off the water surface and submerged particles. Aquatic plants exhibit a wide variety of morphological and physiological adaptations that allow them to survive, compete, and diversify in these environments. For example, their roots and stems contain large air spaces (aerenchyma) that regulate the efficient transportation of gases (for example, CO2 and O2) used in respiration and photosynthesis. Salt water plants (halophytes) have additional specialized adaptations, such as the development of special organs for shedding salt and osmoregulating their internal salt (NaCl) concentrations, to live in estuarine, brackish, or oceanic environments. Anaerobic soil microorganisms in aquatic environments use nitrate, manganese ions, ferric ions, sulfate, carbon dioxide, and some organic compounds; other microorganisms are facultative anaerobes and use oxygen during respiration when the soil becomes drier. The activity of soil microorganisms and the chemistry of the water reduces the oxidation-reduction potentials of the water. Carbon dioxide, for example, is reduced to methane (CH4) by methanogenic bacteria. The physiology of fish is also specially adapted to compensate for environmental salt levels through osmoregulation. Their gills form electrochemical gradients that mediate salt excretion in salt water and uptake in fresh water.
Gravity
The shape and energy of the land are significantly affected by gravitational forces. On a large scale, the distribution of gravitational forces on the earth is uneven and influences the shape and movement of tectonic plates as well as influencing geomorphic processes such as orogeny and erosion. These forces govern many of the geophysical properties and distributions of ecological biomes across the Earth. On the organismal scale, gravitational forces provide directional cues for plant and fungal growth (gravitropism), orientation cues for animal migrations, and influence the biomechanics and size of animals. Ecological traits, such as allocation of biomass in trees during growth are subject to mechanical failure as gravitational forces influence the position and structure of branches and leaves. The cardiovascular systems of animals are functionally adapted to overcome the pressure and gravitational forces that change according to the features of organisms (e.g., height, size, shape), their behaviour (e.g., diving, running, flying), and the habitat occupied (e.g., water, hot deserts, cold tundra).
Pressure
Climatic and osmotic pressure places physiological constraints on organisms, especially those that fly and respire at high altitudes, or dive to deep ocean depths. These constraints influence vertical limits of ecosystems in the biosphere, as organisms are physiologically sensitive and adapted to atmospheric and osmotic water pressure differences. For example, oxygen levels decrease with decreasing pressure and are a limiting factor for life at higher altitudes. Water transportation by plants is another important ecophysiological process affected by osmotic pressure gradients. Water pressure in the depths of oceans requires that organisms adapt to these conditions. For example, diving animals such as whales, dolphins, and seals are specially adapted to deal with changes in sound due to water pressure differences. Differences between hagfish species provide another example of adaptation to deep-sea pressure through specialized protein adaptations.
Wind and turbulence
Turbulent forces in air and water affect the environment and ecosystem distribution, form, and dynamics. On a planetary scale, ecosystems are affected by circulation patterns in the global trade winds. Wind power and the turbulent forces it creates can influence heat, nutrient, and biochemical profiles of ecosystems. For example, wind running over the surface of a lake creates turbulence, mixing the water column and influencing the environmental profile to create thermally layered zones, affecting how fish, algae, and other parts of the aquatic ecosystem are structured. Wind speed and turbulence also influence evapotranspiration rates and energy budgets in plants and animals. Wind speed, temperature and moisture content can vary as winds travel across different land features and elevations. For example, the westerlies come into contact with the coastal and interior mountains of western North America to produce a rain shadow on the leeward side of the mountain. The air expands and moisture condenses as the winds increase in elevation; this is called orographic lift and can cause precipitation. This environmental process produces spatial divisions in biodiversity, as species adapted to wetter conditions are range-restricted to the coastal mountain valleys and unable to migrate across the xeric ecosystems (e.g., of the Columbia Basin in western North America) to intermix with sister lineages that are segregated to the interior mountain systems.
Fire
Plants convert carbon dioxide into biomass and emit oxygen into the atmosphere. By approximately 350 million years ago (the end of the Devonian period), photosynthesis had brought the concentration of atmospheric oxygen above 17%, which allowed combustion to occur. Fire releases CO2 and converts fuel into ash and tar. Fire is a significant ecological parameter that raises many issues pertaining to its control and suppression. While the issue of fire in relation to ecology and plants has been recognized for a long time, Charles Cooper brought attention to the issue of forest fires in relation to the ecology of forest fire suppression and management in the 1960s.
Native North Americans were among the first to influence fire regimes by controlling their spread near their homes or by lighting fires to stimulate the production of herbaceous foods and basketry materials. Fire creates a heterogeneous ecosystem age and canopy structure, and the altered soil nutrient supply and cleared canopy structure opens new ecological niches for seedling establishment. Most ecosystems are adapted to natural fire cycles. Plants, for example, are equipped with a variety of adaptations to deal with forest fires. Some species (e.g., Pinus halepensis) cannot germinate until after their seeds have lived through a fire or been exposed to certain compounds from smoke. Environmentally triggered germination of seeds is called serotiny. Fire plays a major role in the persistence and resilience of ecosystems.
Soils
Soil is the living top layer of mineral and organic dirt that covers the surface of the planet. It is the chief organizing centre of most ecosystem functions, and it is of critical importance in agricultural science and ecology. The decomposition of dead organic matter (for example, leaves on the forest floor), results in soils containing minerals and nutrients that feed into plant production. The whole of the planet's soil ecosystems is called the pedosphere where a large biomass of the Earth's biodiversity organizes into trophic levels. Invertebrates that feed and shred larger leaves, for example, create smaller bits for smaller organisms in the feeding chain. Collectively, these organisms are the detritivores that regulate soil formation. Tree roots, fungi, bacteria, worms, ants, beetles, centipedes, spiders, mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and other less familiar creatures all work to create the trophic web of life in soil ecosystems. Soils form composite phenotypes where inorganic matter is enveloped into the physiology of a whole community. As organisms feed and migrate through soils they physically displace materials, an ecological process called bioturbation. This aerates soils and stimulates heterotrophic growth and production. Soil microorganisms are influenced by and are fed back into the trophic dynamics of the ecosystem. No single axis of causality can be discerned to segregate the biological from geomorphological systems in soils. Paleoecological studies of soils places the origin for bioturbation to a time before the Cambrian period. Other events, such as the evolution of trees and the colonization of land in the Devonian period played a significant role in the early development of ecological trophism in soils.
Biogeochemistry and climate
Ecologists study and measure nutrient budgets to understand how these materials are regulated, flow, and recycled through the environment. This research has led to an understanding that there is global feedback between ecosystems and the physical parameters of this planet, including minerals, soil, pH, ions, water, and atmospheric gases. Six major elements (hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, sulfur, and phosphorus; H, C, N, O, S, and P) form the constitution of all biological macromolecules and feed into the Earth's geochemical processes. From the smallest scale of biology, the combined effect of billions upon billions of ecological processes amplify and ultimately regulate the biogeochemical cycles of the Earth. Understanding the relations and cycles mediated between these elements and their ecological pathways has significant bearing toward understanding global biogeochemistry.
The ecology of global carbon budgets gives one example of the linkage between biodiversity and biogeochemistry. It is estimated that the Earth's oceans hold 40,000 gigatonnes (Gt) of carbon, that vegetation and soil hold 2070 Gt, and that fossil fuel emissions are 6.3 Gt carbon per year. There have been major restructurings in these global carbon budgets during the Earth's history, regulated to a large extent by the ecology of the land. For example, through the early-mid Eocene volcanic outgassing, the oxidation of methane stored in wetlands, and seafloor gases increased atmospheric CO2 (carbon dioxide) concentrations to levels as high as 3500 ppm.
In the Oligocene, from twenty-five to thirty-two million years ago, there was another significant restructuring of the global carbon cycle as grasses evolved a new mechanism of photosynthesis, C4 photosynthesis, and expanded their ranges. This new pathway evolved in response to the drop in atmospheric CO2 concentrations below 550 ppm. The relative abundance and distribution of biodiversity alters the dynamics between organisms and their environment such that ecosystems can be both cause and effect in relation to climate change. Human-driven modifications to the planet's ecosystems (e.g., disturbance, biodiversity loss, agriculture) contributes to rising atmospheric greenhouse gas levels. Transformation of the global carbon cycle in the next century is projected to raise planetary temperatures, lead to more extreme fluctuations in weather, alter species distributions, and increase extinction rates. The effect of global warming is already being registered in melting glaciers, melting mountain ice caps, and rising sea levels. Consequently, species distributions are changing along waterfronts and in continental areas where migration patterns and breeding grounds are tracking the prevailing shifts in climate. Large sections of permafrost are also melting to create a new mosaic of flooded areas having increased rates of soil decomposition activity that raises methane (CH4) emissions. There is concern over increases in atmospheric methane in the context of the global carbon cycle, because methane is a greenhouse gas that is 23 times more effective at absorbing long-wave radiation than CO2 on a 100-year time scale. Hence, there is a relationship between global warming, decomposition and respiration in soils and wetlands producing significant climate feedbacks and globally altered biogeochemical cycles.
History
Early beginnings
Ecology has a complex origin, due in large part to its interdisciplinary nature. Ancient Greek philosophers such as Hippocrates and Aristotle were among the first to record observations on natural history. However, they viewed life in terms of essentialism, where species were conceptualized as static unchanging things while varieties were seen as aberrations of an idealized type. This contrasts against the modern understanding of ecological theory where varieties are viewed as the real phenomena of interest and having a role in the origins of adaptations by means of natural selection. Early conceptions of ecology, such as a balance and regulation in nature can be traced to Herodotus (died c. 425 BC), who described one of the earliest accounts of mutualism in his observation of "natural dentistry". Basking Nile crocodiles, he noted, would open their mouths to give sandpipers safe access to pluck leeches out, giving nutrition to the sandpiper and oral hygiene for the crocodile. Aristotle was an early influence on the philosophical development of ecology. He and his student Theophrastus made extensive observations on plant and animal migrations, biogeography, physiology, and their behavior, giving an early analogue to the modern concept of an ecological niche.
Ernst Haeckel (left) and Eugenius Warming (right), two founders of ecology
Ecological concepts such as food chains, population regulation, and productivity were first developed in the 1700s, through the published works of microscopist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723) and botanist Richard Bradley (1688?–1732). Biogeographer Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) was an early pioneer in ecological thinking and was among the first to recognize ecological gradients, where species are replaced or altered in form along environmental gradients, such as a cline forming along a rise in elevation. Humboldt drew inspiration from Isaac Newton, as he developed a form of "terrestrial physics". In Newtonian fashion, he brought a scientific exactitude for measurement into natural history and even alluded to concepts that are the foundation of a modern ecological law on species-to-area relationships. Natural historians, such as Humboldt, James Hutton, and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (among others) laid the foundations of the modern ecological sciences. The term "ecology" was coined by Ernst Haeckel in his book Generelle Morphologie der Organismen (1866). Haeckel was a zoologist, artist, writer, and later in life a professor of comparative anatomy.
Opinions differ on who was the founder of modern ecological theory. Some mark Haeckel's definition as the beginning; others say it was Eugenius Warming with the writing of Oecology of Plants: An Introduction to the Study of Plant Communities (1895), or Carl Linnaeus' principles on the economy of nature that matured in the early 18th century. Linnaeus founded an early branch of ecology that he called the economy of nature. His works influenced Charles Darwin, who adopted Linnaeus' phrase on the economy or polity of nature in The Origin of Species. Linnaeus was the first to frame the balance of nature as a testable hypothesis. Haeckel, who admired Darwin's work, defined ecology in reference to the economy of nature, which has led some to question whether ecology and the economy of nature are synonymous.
From Aristotle until Darwin, the natural world was predominantly considered static and unchanging. Prior to The Origin of Species, there was little appreciation or understanding of the dynamic and reciprocal relations between organisms, their adaptations, and the environment. An exception is the 1789 publication Natural History of Selborne by Gilbert White (1720–1793), considered by some to be one of the earliest texts on ecology. While Charles Darwin is mainly noted for his treatise on evolution, he was one of the founders of soil ecology, and he made note of the first ecological experiment in The Origin of Species. Evolutionary theory changed the way that researchers approached the ecological sciences.
Since 1900
Modern ecology is a young science that first attracted substantial scientific attention toward the end of the 19th century (around the same time that evolutionary studies were gaining scientific interest). The scientist Ellen Swallow Richards adopted the term "oekology" (which eventually morphed into home economics) in the U.S. as early as 1892.
In the early 20th century, ecology transitioned from a more descriptive form of natural history to a more analytical form of scientific natural history. Frederic Clements published the first American ecology book in 1905, presenting the idea of plant communities as a superorganism. This publication launched a debate between ecological holism and individualism that lasted until the 1970s. Clements' superorganism concept proposed that ecosystems progress through regular and determined stages of seral development that are analogous to the developmental stages of an organism. The Clementsian paradigm was challenged by Henry Gleason, who stated that ecological communities develop from the unique and coincidental association of individual organisms. This perceptual shift placed the focus back onto the life histories of individual organisms and how this relates to the development of community associations.
The Clementsian superorganism theory was an overextended application of an idealistic form of holism. The term "holism" was coined in 1926 by Jan Christiaan Smuts, a South African general and polarizing historical figure who was inspired by Clements' superorganism concept. Around the same time, Charles Elton pioneered the concept of food chains in his classical book Animal Ecology. Elton defined ecological relations using concepts of food chains, food cycles, and food size, and described numerical relations among different functional groups and their relative abundance. Elton's 'food cycle' was replaced by 'food web' in a subsequent ecological text. Alfred J. Lotka brought in many theoretical concepts applying thermodynamic principles to ecology.
In 1942, Raymond Lindeman wrote a landmark paper on the trophic dynamics of ecology, which was published posthumously after initially being rejected for its theoretical emphasis. Trophic dynamics became the foundation for much of the work to follow on energy and material flow through ecosystems. Robert MacArthur advanced mathematical theory, predictions, and tests in ecology in the 1950s, which inspired a resurgent school of theoretical mathematical ecologists. Ecology also has developed through contributions from other nations, including Russia's Vladimir Vernadsky and his founding of the biosphere concept in the 1920s and Japan's Kinji Imanishi and his concepts of harmony in nature and habitat segregation in the 1950s. Scientific recognition of contributions to ecology from non-English-speaking cultures is hampered by language and translation barriers.
Ecology surged in popular and scientific interest during the 1960–1970s environmental movement. There are strong historical and scientific ties between ecology, environmental management, and protection. The historical emphasis and poetic naturalistic writings advocating the protection of wild places by notable ecologists in the history of conservation biology, such as Aldo Leopold and Arthur Tansley, have been seen as far removed from urban centres where, it is claimed, the concentration of pollution and environmental degradation is located. Palamar (2008) notes an overshadowing by mainstream environmentalism of pioneering women in the early 1900s who fought for urban health ecology (then called euthenics) and brought about changes in environmental legislation. Women such as Ellen Swallow Richards and Julia Lathrop, among others, were precursors to the more popularized environmental movements after the 1950s.
In 1962, marine biologist and ecologist Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring helped to mobilize the environmental movement by alerting the public to toxic pesticides, such as DDT, bioaccumulating in the environment. Carson used ecological science to link the release of environmental toxins to human and ecosystem health. Since then, ecologists have worked to bridge their understanding of the degradation of the planet's ecosystems with environmental politics, law, restoration, and natural resources management.
See also
Carrying capacity
Chemical ecology
Climate justice
Circles of Sustainability
Cultural ecology
Dialectical naturalism
Ecological death
Ecological empathy
Ecological overshoot
Ecological psychology
Ecology movement
Ecosophy
Ecopsychology
Human ecology
Industrial ecology
Information ecology
Landscape ecology
Natural resource
Normative science
Philosophy of ecology
Political ecology
Theoretical ecology
Sensory ecology
Sexecology
Spiritual ecology
Sustainable development
Lists
Glossary of ecology
Index of biology articles
List of ecologists
Outline of biology
Terminology of ecology
Notes
References
External links
The Nature Education Knowledge Project: Ecology
Biogeochemistry
Emergence | 0.827401 | 0.999069 | 0.826631 |
Degrowth | Degrowth is an academic and social movement critical of the concept of growth in gross domestic product as a measure of human and economic development. The idea of degrowth is based on ideas and research from economic anthropology, ecological economics, environmental sciences, and development studies. It argues that modern capitalism's unitary focus on growth causes widespread ecological damage and is unnecessary for the further increase of human living standards. Degrowth theory has been met with both academic acclaim and considerable criticism.
Degrowth's main argument is that an infinite expansion of the economy is fundamentally contradictory to the finiteness of material resources on Earth. It argues that economic growth measured by GDP should be abandoned as a policy objective. Policy should instead focus on economic and social metrics such as life expectancy, health, education, housing, and ecologically sustainable work as indicators of both ecosystems and human well-being. Degrowth theorists posit that this would increase human living standards and ecological preservation even as GDP growth slows.
Degrowth theory is highly critical of free market capitalism, and it highlights the importance of extensive public services, care work, self-organization, commons, relational goods, community, and work sharing.
Degrowth theory partly orients itself as a critique of green capitalism or as a radical alternative to the market-based, sustainable development goal (SDG) model of addressing ecological overshoot and environmental collapse.
A 2024 review of degrowth studies over the past 10 years showed that most were of poor quality: almost 90% were opinions rather than analysis, few used quantitative or qualitative data, and even fewer ones used formal modelling; the latter used small samples or a focus on non-representative cases. Also most studies offered subjective policy advice, but lacked policy evaluation and integration with insights from the literature on environmental/climate policies.
Background
The "degrowth" movement arose from concerns over the consequences of the productivism and consumerism associated with industrial societies (whether capitalist or socialist) including:
The reduced availability of energy sources (see peak oil);
The destabilization of Earth's ecosystems upon which all life on Earth depends (see Holocene Extinction, Anthropocene, global warming, pollution, current biodiversity loss);
The rise of negative societal side-effects (unsustainable development, poorer health, poverty); and
The ever-expanding use of resources by Global North countries to satisfy lifestyles that consume more food and energy, and produce greater waste, at the expense of the Global South (see neocolonialism).
A 2017 review of the research literature on degrowth, found that it focused on three main goals: (1) reduction of environmental degradation; (2) redistribution of income and wealth locally and globally; (3) promotion of a social transition from economic materialism to participatory culture.
Decoupling
The concept of decoupling denotes decoupling economic growth, usually measured in GDP growth, GDP per capita growth or GNI per capita growth from the use of natural resources and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Absolute decoupling refers to GDP growth coinciding with a reduction in natural resource use and GHG emissions, while relative decoupling describes an increase in resource use and GHG emissions lower than the increase in GDP growth. The degrowth movement heavily critiques this idea and argues that absolute decoupling is only possible for short periods, specific locations, or with small mitigation rates. In 2021 NGO European Environmental Bureau called stated that "not only is there no empirical evidence supporting the existence of a decoupling of economic growth from environmental pressures on anywhere near the scale needed to deal with environmental breakdown", and that reported cases of existing eco-economic decouplings either depict relative decoupling and/or are observed only temporarily and/or only on a local scale, arguing that alternatives to eco-economic decoupling are needed. This is supported by several other studies which state that absolute decoupling is highly unlikely to be achieved fast enough to prevent global warming over 1.5 °C or 2 °C, even under optimistic policy conditions.
Major criticism of this view points out that Degrowth is politically unpalatable, defaulting towards the more free market green growth orthodoxy as a set of solutions that is more politically tenable. The problems with the SDG process are political rather than technical, Ezra Klein of the New York Times claims in summary of these criticisms, and degrowth has less plausibility than green growth as a democratic political platform. However, in a recent review of efforts toward Sustain Development Goals by the Council of Foreign Relations in 2023 it was found that progress toward 50% of the minimum viable SDG's have stalled and 30% of these verticals have reversed (or are getting worse, rather than better). Thus, while it may be true that Degrowth will be 'a difficult sell' (per Ezra Klein) to introduce via democratic voluntarism, the critique of SDG's and decoupling against green capitalism leveled by Degrowth theorists appear to have predictive power.
Resource depletion
Degrowth proponents argue that economic expansion must be met with a corresponding increase in resource consumption. Non-renewable resources, like petroleum, have a limited supply and can eventually be exhausted. Similarly, renewable resources can also be depleted if they are harvested at unsustainable rates for prolonged periods. An example of this depletion is evident in the case of caviar production in the Caspian Sea.
Supporters of degrowth contend that reducing demand is the sole permanent solution to bridging the demand gap. To sustain renewable resources, both demand and production must be regulated to levels that avert depletion and ensure environmental sustainability. Transitioning to a society less reliant on oil is crucial for averting societal collapse as non-renewable resources dwindle. Degrowth can also be interpreted as a plea for resource reallocation, aiming to halt unsustainable practices of transforming certain entities into resources, such as non-renewable natural resources. Instead, the focus shifts towards identifying and utilizing alternative resources, such as renewable human capabilities.
Ecological footprint
The ecological footprint measures human demand on the Earth's ecosystems by comparing human demand with the Earth's ecological capacity to regenerate. It represents the amount of biologically productive land and sea area required to regenerate the resources a human population consumes and to absorb and render harmless the corresponding waste.
According to a 2005 Global Footprint Network report, inhabitants of high-income countries live off of 6.4 global hectares (gHa), while those from low-income countries live off of a single gHa. For example, while each inhabitant of Bangladesh lives off of what they produce from 0.56 gHa, a North American requires 12.5 gHa. Each inhabitant of North America uses 22.3 times as much land as a Bangladeshi. According to the same report, the average number of global hectares per person was 2.1, while current consumption levels have reached 2.7 hectares per person. For the world's population to attain the living standards typical of European countries, the resources of between three and eight planet Earths would be required with current levels of efficiency and means of production. For world economic equality to be achieved with the currently available resources, proponents say rich countries would have to reduce their standard of living through degrowth. The constraints on resources would eventually lead to a forced reduction in consumption. A controlled reduction of consumption would reduce the trauma of this change, assuming no technological changes increase the planet's carrying capacity. Multiple studies now demonstrate that in many affluent countries per-capita energy consumption could be decreased substantially and quality living standards still be maintained.
Sustainable development
Degrowth ideology opposes all manifestations of productivism, which advocates that economic productivity and growth should be the primary objectives of human organization. Consequently, it stands in opposition to the prevailing model of sustainable development. While the concept of sustainability aligns with some aspects of degrowth philosophy, sustainable development, as conventionally understood, is based on mainstream development principles focused on augmenting economic growth and consumption. Degrowth views sustainable development as contradictory because any development reliant on growth within a finite and ecologically strained context is deemed intrinsically unsustainable. Development based on growth in a finite, environmentally stressed world is viewed as inherently unsustainable.
Critics of degrowth argue that a slowing of economic growth would result in increased unemployment, increased poverty, and decreased income per capita. Many who believe in negative environmental consequences of growth still advocate for economic growth in the South, even if not in the North. Slowing economic growth would fail to deliver the benefits of degrowth — self-sufficiency and material responsibility — and would indeed lead to decreased employment. Rather, degrowth proponents advocate the complete abandonment of the current (growth) economic model, suggesting that relocalizing and abandoning the global economy in the Global South would allow people of the South to become more self-sufficient and would end the overconsumption and exploitation of Southern resources by the North. Supporters of degrowth view it as a potential method to shield ecosystems from human exploitation. Within this concept, there is an emphasis on communal stewardship of the environment, fostering a symbiotic relationship between humans and nature. Degrowth recognizes ecosystems as valuable entities beyond their utility as mere sources of resources. During the Second International Conference on degrowth, discussions encompassed concepts like implementing a maximum wage and promoting open borders. Degrowth advocates an ethical shift that challenges the notion that high-resource consumption lifestyles are desirable. Additionally, alternative perspectives on degrowth include addressing perceived historical injustices perpetrated by the global North through centuries of colonization and exploitation, advocating for wealth redistribution. Determining the appropriate scale of action remains a focal point of debate within degrowth movements.
Some researchers believe that the world is poised to experience a Great Transformation, either by disastrous events or intentional design. They maintain that ecological economics must incorporate Postdevelopment theories, Buen vivir, and degrowth to affect the change necessary to avoid these potentially catastrophic events.
A 2022 paper by Mark Diesendorf found that limiting global warming to 1,5 degrees with no overshoot would require a reduction of energy consumption. It describes (chapters 4–5) degrowth toward a steady state economy as possible and probably positive. The study ends with the words: "The case for a transition to a steady-state economy with low throughput and low emissions, initially in the high-income economies and then in rapidly growing economies, needs more serious attention and international cooperation.
"Rebound effect"
Technologies designed to reduce resource use and improve efficiency are often touted as sustainable or green solutions. Degrowth literature, however, warns about these technological advances due to the "rebound effect", also known as Jevons paradox. This concept is based on observations that when a less resource-exhaustive technology is introduced, behavior surrounding the use of that technology may change, and consumption of that technology could increase or even offset any potential resource savings. In light of the rebound effect, proponents of degrowth hold that the only effective "sustainable" solutions must involve a complete rejection of the growth paradigm and a move to a degrowth paradigm. There are also fundamental limits to technological solutions in the pursuit of degrowth, as all engagements with technology increase the cumulative matter-energy throughput. However, the convergence of digital commons of knowledge and design with distributed manufacturing technologies may arguably hold potential for building degrowth future scenarios.
Mitigation of climate change and determinants of 'growth'
Scientists report that degrowth scenarios, where economic output either "declines" or declines in terms of contemporary economic metrics such as current GDP, have been neglected in considerations of 1.5 °C scenarios reported by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), finding that investigated degrowth scenarios "minimize many key risks for feasibility and sustainability compared to technology-driven pathways" with a core problem of such being feasibility in the context of contemporary decision-making of politics and globalized rebound- and relocation-effects. However, structurally realigning 'economic growth' and socioeconomic activity determination-structures may not be widely debated in both the degrowth community and in degrowth research which may largely focus on reducing economic growth either more generally or without structural alternative but with e.g. nonsystemic political interventions. Similarly, many green growth advocates suggest that contemporary socioeconomic mechanisms and metrics – including for economic growth – can be continued with forms of nonstructural "energy-GDP decoupling". A study concluded that public services are associated with higher human need satisfaction and lower energy requirements while contemporary forms of economic growth are linked with the opposite, with the contemporary economic system being fundamentally misaligned with the twin goals of meeting human needs and ensuring ecological sustainability, suggesting that prioritizing human well-being and ecological sustainability would be preferable to overgrowth in current metrics of economic growth. The word 'degrowth' was mentioned 28 times in the United Nations IPCC Sixth Assessment Report by Working Group III published in April 2022.
Open Localism
Open localism is a concept that has been promoted by the degrowth community when envisioning an alternative set of social relations and economic organization. It builds upon the political philosophies of localism and is based on values such as diversity, ecologies of knowledge, and openness. Open localism does not look to create an enclosed community but rather to circulate production locally in an open and integrative manner.
Open localism is a direct challenge to the acts of closure regarding identitarian politics. By producing and consuming as much as possible locally, community members enhance their relationships with one another and the surrounding environment.
Degrowth's ideas around open localism share similarities with ideas around the commons while also having clear differences. On the one hand, open localism promotes localized, common production in cooperative-like styles similar to some versions of how commons are organized. On the other hand, open localism does not impose any set of rules or regulations creating a defined boundary, rather it favours a cosmopolitan approach.
Feminism
The degrowth movement builds on feminist economics that has criticized measures of economic growth like the GDP as it excludes work mainly done by women such as unpaid care work (the work performed to fulfill people's needs) and reproductive work (the work sustaining life), first argued by Marilyn Waring. Further, degrowth draws on the critique of socialist feminists like Silvia Federici and Nancy Fraser claiming that capitalist growth builds on the exploitation of women's work. Instead of devaluing it, degrowth centers the economy around care, proposing that care work should be organized as a commons.
Centering care goes hand in hand with changing society's time regimes. Degrowth scholars propose a working time reduction. As this does not necessarily lead to gender justice, the redistribution of care work has to be equally pushed. A concrete proposal by Frigga Haug is the 4-in-1 perspective that proposes 4 hours of wage work per day, freeing time for 4 hours of care work, 4 hours of political activities in a direct democracy, and 4 hours of personal development through learning.
Furthermore, degrowth draws on materialist ecofeminisms that state the parallel of the exploitation of women and nature in growth-based societies and proposes a subsistence perspective conceptualized by Maria Mies and Ariel Salleh. Synergies and opportunities for cross-fertilization between degrowth and feminism were proposed in 2022, through networks including the Feminisms and Degrowth Alliance (FaDA). FaDA argued that the 2023 launch of Degrowth Journal created "a convivial space for generating and exploring knowledge and practice from diverse perspectives".
Decolonialism
A relevant concept within the theory of degrowth is decolonialism, which refers to putting an end to the perpetuation of political, social, economic, religious, racial, gender, and epistemological relations of power, domination, and hierarchy of the global north over the global south.
The foundation of this relationship lies in the claim that the imminent socio-ecological collapse is caused by capitalism, which is sustained by economic growth. This economic growth in turn can only be maintained under the eaves of colonialism and extractivism, perpetuating asymmetric power relationships between territories. Colonialism is understood as the appropriation of common goods, resources, and labor, which is antagonistic to degrowth principles.
Through colonial domination, capital depresses the prices of inputs and colonial cheapening occurs to the detriment of the oppressed countries. Degrowth criticizes these appropriation mechanisms and enclosure of one territory over another and proposes a provision of human needs through disaccumulation, de-enclosure, and decommodification. It also reconciles with social movements and seeks to recognize the ecological debt to achieve the catch-up, which is postulated as impossible without decolonization.
In practice, decolonial practices close to degrowth are observed, such as the movement of Buen vivir or sumak kawsay by various indigenous peoples.
Policies
There is a wide range of policy proposals associated with degrowth. In 2022, Nick Fitzpatrick, Timothée Parrique and Inês Cosme conducted a comprehensive survey of degrowth literature from 2005 to 2020 and found 530 specific policy proposals with "50 goals, 100 objectives, 380 instruments". The survey found that the ten most frequently cited proposals were: universal basic incomes, work-time reductions, job guarantees with a living wage, maximum income caps, declining caps on resource use and emissions, not-for-profit cooperatives, holding deliberative forums, reclaiming the commons, establishing ecovillages, and housing cooperatives.
To address the common criticism that such policies are not realistically financeable, economic anthropologist Jason Hickel sees an opportunity to learn from modern monetary theory, which argues that monetary sovereign states can issue the money needed to pay for anything available in the national economy without the need to first tax their citizens for the requisite funds. Taxation, credit regulations and price controls could be used to mitigate the inflation this may generate, while also reducing consumption.
Origins of the movement
The contemporary degrowth movement can trace its roots back to the anti-industrialist trends of the 19th century, developed in Great Britain by John Ruskin, William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement (1819–1900), in the United States by Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), and in Russia by Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910).
Degrowth movements draw on the values of humanism, enlightenment, anthropology and human rights.
Club of Rome reports
In 1968, the Club of Rome, a think tank headquartered in Winterthur, Switzerland, asked researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a report on the limits of our world system and the constraints it puts on human numbers and activity. The report, called The Limits to Growth, published in 1972, became the first significant study to model the consequences of economic growth.
The reports (also known as the Meadows Reports) are not strictly the founding texts of the degrowth movement, as these reports only advise zero growth, and have also been used to support the sustainable development movement. Still, they are considered the first studies explicitly presenting economic growth as a key reason for the increase in global environmental problems such as pollution, shortage of raw materials, and the destruction of ecosystems. The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update was published in 2004, and in 2012, a 40-year forecast from Jørgen Randers, one of the book's original authors, was published as 2052: A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years. In 2021, Club of Rome committee member Gaya Herrington published an article comparing the proposed models' predictions against empirical data trends. The BAU2 ("Business as Usual 2") scenario, predicting "collapse through pollution", as well as the CT ("Comprehensive Technology") scenario, predicting exceptional technological development and gradual decline, were found to align most closely with data observed as of 2019. In September 2022, the Club of Rome released updated predictive models and policy recommendations in a general-audiences book titled Earth for all – A survival guide to humanity.
Lasting influence of Georgescu-Roegen
The degrowth movement recognises Romanian American mathematician, statistician and economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen as the main intellectual figure inspiring the movement. In his 1971 work, The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, Georgescu-Roegen argues that economic scarcity is rooted in physical reality; that all natural resources are irreversibly degraded when put to use in economic activity; that the carrying capacity of Earth—that is, Earth's capacity to sustain human populations and consumption levels—is bound to decrease sometime in the future as Earth's finite stock of mineral resources is presently being extracted and put to use; and consequently, that the world economy as a whole is heading towards an inevitable future collapse.
Georgescu-Roegen's intellectual inspiration to degrowth dates back to the 1970s. When Georgescu-Roegen delivered a lecture at the University of Geneva in 1974, he made a lasting impression on the young, newly graduated French historian and philosopher, Jacques Grinevald, who had earlier been introduced to Georgescu-Roegen's works by an academic advisor. Georgescu-Roegen and Grinevald became friends, and Grinevald devoted his research to a closer study of Georgescu-Roegen's work. As a result, in 1979, Grinevald published a French translation of a selection of Georgescu-Roegen's articles entitled Demain la décroissance: Entropie – Écologie – Économie ('Tomorrow, the Decline: Entropy – Ecology – Economy'). Georgescu-Roegen, who spoke French fluently, approved the use of the term décroissance in the title of the French translation. The book gained influence in French intellectual and academic circles from the outset. Later, the book was expanded and republished in 1995 and once again in 2006; however, the word Demain ('tomorrow') was removed from the book's title in the second and third editions.
By the time Grinevald suggested the term décroissance to form part of the title of the French translation of Georgescu-Roegen's work, the term had already permeated French intellectual circles since the early 1970s to signify a deliberate political action to downscale the economy on a permanent and voluntary basis. Simultaneously, but independently, Georgescu-Roegen criticised the ideas of The Limits to Growth and Herman Daly's steady-state economy in his article, "Energy and Economic Myths", delivered as a series of lectures from 1972, but not published before 1975. In the article, Georgescu-Roegen stated the following:
When reading this particular passage of the text, Grinevald realised that no professional economist of any orientation had ever reasoned like this before. Grinevald also realised the congruence of Georgescu-Roegen's viewpoint and the French debates occurring at the time; this resemblance was captured in the title of the French edition. The translation of Georgescu-Roegen's work into French both fed on and gave further impetus to the concept of décroissance in France—and everywhere else in the francophone world—thereby creating something of an intellectual feedback loop.
By the 2000s, when décroissance was to be translated from French back into English as the catchy banner for the new social movement, the original term "decline" was deemed inappropriate and misdirected for the purpose: "Decline" usually refers to an unexpected, unwelcome, and temporary economic recession, something to be avoided or quickly overcome. Instead, the neologism "degrowth" was coined to signify a deliberate political action to downscale the economy on a permanent, conscious basis—as in the prevailing French usage of the term—something good to be welcomed and maintained, or so followers believe.
When the first international degrowth conference was held in Paris in 2008, the participants honoured Georgescu-Roegen and his work. In his manifesto on Petit traité de la décroissance sereine ("Farewell to Growth"), the leading French champion of the degrowth movement, Serge Latouche, credited Georgescu-Roegen as the "main theoretical source of degrowth". Likewise, Italian degrowth theorist Mauro Bonaiuti considered Georgescu-Roegen's work to be "one of the analytical cornerstones of the degrowth perspective".
Schumacher and Buddhist economics
E. F. Schumacher's 1973 book Small Is Beautiful predates a unified degrowth movement but nonetheless serves as an important basis for degrowth ideas. In this book he critiques the neo-liberal model of economic development, arguing that an increasing "standard of living", based on consumption is absurd as a goal of economic activity and development. Instead, under what he refers to as Buddhist economics, we should aim to maximize well-being while minimizing consumption.
Ecological and social issues
In January 1972, Edward Goldsmith and Robert Prescott-Allen—editors of The Ecologist—published A Blueprint for Survival, which called for a radical programme of decentralisation and deindustrialization to prevent what the authors referred to as "the breakdown of society and the irreversible disruption of the life-support systems on this planet".
In 2019, a summary for policymakers of the largest, most comprehensive study to date of biodiversity and ecosystem services was published by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. The report was finalised in Paris. The main conclusions:
Over the last 50 years, the state of nature has deteriorated at an unprecedented and accelerating rate.
The main drivers of this deterioration have been changes in land and sea use, exploitation of living beings, climate change, pollution and invasive species. These five drivers, in turn, are caused by societal behaviors, from consumption to governance.
Damage to ecosystems undermines 35 of 44 selected UN targets, including the UN General Assembly's Sustainable Development Goals for poverty, hunger, health, water, cities' climate, oceans and land. It can cause problems with food, water and humanity's air supply.
To fix the problem, humanity needs transformative change, including sustainable agriculture, reductions in consumption and waste, fishing quotas and collaborative water management. Page 8 of the report proposes "enabling visions of a good quality of life that do not entail ever-increasing material consumption" as one of the main measures. The report states that "Some pathways chosen to achieve the goals related to energy, economic growth, industry and infrastructure and sustainable consumption and production (Sustainable Development Goals 7, 8, 9 and 12), as well as targets related to poverty, food security and cities (Sustainable Development Goals 1, 2 and 11), could have substantial positive or negative impacts on nature and therefore on the achievement of other Sustainable Development Goals".
In a June 2020 paper published in Nature Communications, a group of scientists argue that "green growth" or "sustainable growth" is a myth: "we have to get away from our obsession with economic growth—we really need to start managing our economies in a way that protects our climate and natural resources, even if this means less, no or even negative growth." They conclude that a change in economic paradigms is imperative to prevent environmental destruction, and suggest a range of ideas from the reformist to the radical, with the latter consisting of degrowth, eco-socialism and eco-anarchism.
In June 2020, the official site of one of the organizations promoting degrowth published an article by Vijay Kolinjivadi, an expert in political ecology, arguing that the emergence of COVID-19 is linked to the ecological crisis.
The 2019 World Scientists' Warning of a Climate Emergency and its 2021 update have asserted that economic growth is a primary driver of the overexploitation of ecosystems, and to preserve the biosphere and mitigate climate change civilization must, in addition to other fundamental changes including stabilizing population growth and adopting largely plant-based diets, "shift from GDP growth and the pursuit of affluence toward sustaining ecosystems and improving human well-being by prioritizing basic needs and reducing inequality." In an opinion piece published in Al Jazeera, Jason Hickel states that this paper, which has more than 11,000 scientist cosigners, demonstrates that there is a "strong scientific consensus" towards abandoning "GDP as a measure of progress."
In a 2022 comment published in Nature, Hickel, Giorgos Kallis, Juliet Schor, Julia Steinberger and others say that both the IPCC and the IPBES "suggest that degrowth policies should be considered in the fight against climate breakdown and biodiversity loss, respectively".
Movement
Conferences
The movement has included international conferences promoted by the network Research & Degrowth (R&D). The First International Conference on Economic Degrowth for Ecological Sustainability and Social Equity in Paris (2008) was a discussion about the financial, social, cultural, demographic, and environmental crisis caused by the deficiencies of capitalism and an explanation of the main principles of degrowth. Further conferences were in Barcelona (2010), Montreal (2012), Venice (2012), Leipzig (2014), Budapest (2016), Malmö (2018), and Zagreb (2023). The 10th International Degrowth Conference will be held in Pontevedra in June 2024. Separately, two conferences have been organised as cross-party initiatives of Members of the European Parliament: the Post-Growth 2018 Conference and the Beyond Growth 2023 Conference, both held in the European Parliament in Brussels.
International Degrowth Network
The conferences have also been accompanied by informal degrowth assemblies since 2018, to build community between degrowth groups across countries. The 4th Assembly in Zagreb in 2023 discussed a proposal to create a more intentional organisational structure and led to the creation of the International Degrowth Network, which organised the 5th assembly in June 2024.
Relation to other social movements
The degrowth movement has a variety of relations to other social movements and alternative economic visions, which range from collaboration to partial overlap. The Konzeptwerk Neue Ökonomie (Laboratory for New Economic Ideas), which hosted the 2014 international Degrowth conference in Leipzig, has published a project entitled "Degrowth in movement(s)" in 2017, which maps relationships with 32 other social movements and initiatives. The relation to the environmental justice movement is especially visible.
Although not explicitly called degrowth, movements inspired by similar concepts and terminologies can be found around the world, including Buen Vivir in Latin America, the Zapatistas in Mexico, the Kurdish Rojava or Eco-Swaraj in India, and the sufficiency economy in Thailand. The Cuban economic situation has also been of interest to degrowth advocates because its limits on growth were socially imposed (although as a result of geopolitics), and has resulted in positive health changes.
Another set of movements the degrowth movement finds synergy with is the wave of initiatives and networks inspired by the commons, where resources are sustainably shared in a decentralised and self-managed manner, instead of through capitalist organization. For example, initiatives inspired by commons could be food cooperatives, open-source platforms, and group management of resources such as energy or water. Commons-based peer production also guides the role of technology in degrowth, where conviviality and socially useful production are prioritised over capital gain. This could happen in the form of cosmolocalism, which offers a framework for localising collaborative forms of production while sharing resources globally as digital commons, to reduce dependence on global value chains.
Criticisms, challenges and dilemmas
Critiques of degrowth concern the poor study quality of degrowth studies, negative connotation that the term "degrowth" imparts, the misapprehension that growth is seen as unambiguously bad, the challenges and feasibility of a degrowth transition, as well as the entanglement of desirable aspects of modernity with the growth paradigm.
Criticisms
According to a highly cited scientific paper of environmental economist Jeroen C. J. M. van den Bergh, degrowth is often seen as an ambiguous concept due to its various interpretations, which can lead to confusion rather than a clear and constructive debate on environmental policy. Many interpretations of degrowth do not offer effective strategies for reducing environmental impact or transitioning to a sustainable economy. Additionally, degrowth is unlikely to gain significant social or political support, making it an ineffective strategy for achieving environmental sustainability.
Ineffectiveness and better alternatives
In his scientific paper, Jeroen C. J. M. van den Bergh concludes that a degrowth strategy, which focuses on reducing the overall scale of the economy or consumption, tends to overlook the significance of changes in production composition and technological innovation.
Van den Bergh also highlights that a focus solely on reducing consumption (or consumption degrowth) may lead to rebound effects. For instance, reducing consumption of certain goods and services might result in an increase in spending on other items, as disposable income remains unchanged. Alternatively, it could lead to savings, which would provide additional funds for others to borrow and spend.
He emphasizes the importance of (global) environmental policies, such as pricing externalities through taxes or permits, which incentivize behavior changes that reduce environmental impact and which provide essential information for consumers and help manage rebound effects. Effective environmental regulation through pricing is crucial for transitioning from polluting to cleaner consumption patterns.
Study quality
A 2024 review of degrowth studies over the past 10 years showed that most were of poor quality: almost 90% were opinions rather than analysis, few used quantitative or qualitative data, and even fewer ones used formal modelling; the latter used small samples or a focus on non-representative cases. Also most studies offered subjective policy advice, but lacked policy evaluation and integration with insights from the literature on environmental/climate policies.
Negative connotation
The use of the term "degrowth" is criticized for being detrimental to the degrowth movement because it could carry a negative connotation, in opposition to the positively perceived "growth". "Growth" is associated with the "up" direction and positive experiences, while "down" generates the opposite associations. Research in political psychology has shown that the initial negative association of a concept, such as of "degrowth" with the negatively perceived "down", can bias how the subsequent information on that concept is integrated at the unconscious level. At the conscious level, degrowth can be interpreted negatively as the contraction of the economy, although this is not the goal of a degrowth transition, but rather one of its expected consequences. In the current economic system, a contraction of the economy is associated with a recession and its ensuing austerity measures, job cuts, or lower salaries. Noam Chomsky commented on the use of the term: "When you say 'degrowth' it frightens people. It's like saying you're going to have to be poorer tomorrow than you are today, and it doesn't mean that."
Since "degrowth" contains the term "growth", there is also a risk of the term having a backfire effect, which would reinforce the initial positive attitude toward growth. "Degrowth" is also criticized for being a confusing term, since its aim is not to halt economic growth as the word implies. Instead, "a-growth" is proposed as an alternative concept that emphasizes that growth ceases to be an important policy objective, but that it can still be achieved as a side-effect of environmental and social policies.
Systems theoretical critique
In stressing the negative rather than the positive side(s) of growth, the majority of degrowth proponents remain focused on (de-)growth, thus giving continued attention to the issue of growth, leading to continued attention to the arguments that sustainable growth is possible. One way to avoid giving attention to growth might be extending from the economic concept of growth, which proponents of both growth and degrowth commonly adopt, to a broader concept of growth that allows for the observation of growth in other sociological characteristics of society. A corresponding "recoding" of "growth-obsessed", capitalist organizations was proposed by Steffen Roth.
Marxist critique
Traditional Marxists distinguish between two types of value creation: that which is useful to mankind, and that which only serves the purpose of accumulating capital. Traditional Marxists consider that it is the exploitative nature and control of the capitalist production relations that is the determinant and not the quantity. According to Jean Zin, while the justification for degrowth is valid, it is not a solution to the problem. Other Marxist writers have adopted positions close to the de-growth perspective. For example, John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff, in common with David Harvey, Immanuel Wallerstein, Paul Sweezy and others focus on endless capital accumulation as the basic principle and goal of capitalism. This is the source of economic growth and, in the view of these writers, results in an unsustainable growth imperative. Foster and Magdoff develop Marx's own concept of the metabolic rift, something he noted in the exhaustion of soils by capitalist systems of food production, though this is not unique to capitalist systems of food production as seen in the Aral Sea. Many degrowth theories and ideas are based on neo-Marxist theory. Foster emphasizes that degrowth "is not aimed at austerity, but at finding a 'prosperous way down' from our current extractivist, wasteful, ecologically unsustainable, maldeveloped, exploitative, and unequal, class-hierarchical world."
Challenges
Lack of macroeconomics for sustainability
It is reasonable for society to worry about recession as economic growth has been the unanimous goal around the globe in the past decades. However, in some advanced countries, there are attempts to develop a model for a regrowth economy. For instance, the Cool Japan strategy has proven to be instructive for Japan, which has been a static economy for almost decades.
Political and social spheres
According to some scholars in Sociology, the growth imperative is deeply entrenched in market capitalist societies such that it is necessary for their stability. Moreover, the institutions of modern societies, such as the nation state, welfare, labor market, education, academia, law and finance, have co-evolved with growth to sustain them. A degrowth transition thus requires not only a change of the economic system but of all the systems on which it relies. As most people in modern societies are dependent on those growth-oriented institutions, the challenge of a degrowth transition also lies in individual resistance to move away from growth.
Land privatisation
Baumann, Alexander and Burdon suggest that "the Degrowth movement needs to give more attention to land and housing costs, which are significant barriers hindering true political and economic agency and any grassroots driven degrowth transition."
They claim that land – a necessity like land and air – privatisation creates an absolute economic growth determinant. They point out that even one who is fully committed to degrowth nevertheless has no option but decades of market growth participation to pay rent or mortgage. Because of this, land privatisation is a structural impediment to moving forward that makes degrowth economically and politically unviable. They conclude that without addressing land privatisation (the market's inaugural privatisation – primitive accumulation) the degrowth movement's strategies cannot succeed. Just as land enclosure (privatisation) initiated capitalism (economic growth), degrowth must start with reclaiming land commons.
Agriculture
When it comes to agriculture, a degrowth society would require a shift from industrial agriculture to less intensive and more sustainable agricultural practices such as permaculture or organic agriculture. Still, it is not clear if any of those alternatives could feed the current and projected global population. In the case of organic agriculture, Germany, for example, would not be able to feed its population under ideal organic yields over all of its arable land without meaningful changes to patterns of consumption, such as reducing meat consumption and food waste. Moreover, labour productivity of non-industrial agriculture is significantly lower due to the reduced use or absence of fossil fuels, which leaves much less labour for other sectors. Potential solutions to this challenge include scaling up approaches such as community-supported agriculture (CSA).
Dilemmas
Given that modernity has emerged with high levels of energy and material throughput, there is an apparent compromise between desirable aspects of modernity (e.g., social justice, gender equality, long life expectancy, low infant mortality) and unsustainable levels of energy and material use. Some researchers, however, argue that the decline in income inequality and rise in social mobility occurring under capitalism from the late 1940s to the 1960s was a product of the heavy bargaining power of labor unions and increased wealth and income redistribution during that time; while also pointing to the rise in income inequality in the 1970s following the collapse of labor unions and weakening of state welfare measures. Others also argue that modern capitalism maintains gender inequalities by means of advertising, messaging in consumer goods, and social media.
Another way of looking at the argument that the development of desirable aspects of modernity require unsustainable energy and material use is through the lens of the Marxist tradition, which relates the superstructure (culture, ideology, institutions) and the base (material conditions of life, division of labor). A degrowth society, with its drastically different material conditions, could produce equally drastic changes in society's cultural and ideological spheres. The political economy of global capitalism has generated a lot of social and environmental bads, such as socioeconomic inequality and ecological devastation, which in turn have also generated a lot of goods through individualization and increased spatial and social mobility. At the same time, some argue the widespread individualization promulgated by a capitalist political economy is a bad due to its undermining of solidarity, aligned with democracy as well as collective, secondary, and primary forms of caring, and simultaneous encouragement of mistrust of others, highly competitive interpersonal relationships, blame of failure on individual shortcomings, prioritization of one's self-interest, and peripheralization of the conceptualization of human work required to create and sustain people. In this view, the widespread individuation resulting from capitalism may impede degrowth measures, requiring a change in actions to benefit society rather than the individual self.
Some argue the political economy of capitalism has allowed social emancipation at the level of gender equality, disability, sexuality and anti-racism that has no historical precedent. However, others dispute social emancipation as being a direct product of capitalism or question the emancipation that has resulted. The feminist writer Nancy Holmstrom, for example, argues that capitalism's negative impacts on women outweigh the positive impacts, and women tend to be hurt by the system. In her examination of China following the Chinese Communist Revolution, Holmstrom notes that women were granted state-assisted freedoms to equal education, childcare, healthcare, abortion, marriage, and other social supports. Thus, whether the social emancipation achieved in Western society under capitalism may coexist with degrowth is ambiguous.
Doyal and Gough allege that the modern capitalist system is built on the exploitation of female reproductive labor as well as that of the Global South, and sexism and racism are embedded in its structure. Therefore, some theories (such as Eco-Feminism or political ecology) argue that there cannot be equality regarding gender and the hierarchy between the Global North and South within capitalism.
The structural properties of growth present another barrier to degrowth as growth shapes and is enforced by institutions, norms, culture, technology, identities, etc. The social ingraining of growth manifests in peoples' aspirations, thinking, bodies, mindsets, and relationships. Together, growth's role in social practices and in socio-economic institutions present unique challenges to the success of the degrowth movement. Another potential barrier to degrowth is the need for a rapid transition to a degrowth society due to climate change and the potential negative impacts of a rapid social transition including disorientation, conflict, and decreased well-being.
In the United States, a large barrier to the support of the degrowth movement is the modern education system, including both primary and higher learning institutions. Beginning in the second term of the Reagan administration, the education system in the US was restructured to enforce neoliberal ideology by means of privatization schemes such as commercialization and performance contracting, implementation of standards and accountability measures incentivizing schools to adopt a uniform curriculum, and higher education accreditation and curricula designed to affirm market values and current power structures and avoid critical thought concerning the relations between those in power, ethics, authority, history, and knowledge. The degrowth movement, based on the empirical assumption that resources are finite and growth is limited, clashes with the limitless growth ideology associated with neoliberalism and the market values affirmed in schools, and therefore faces a major social barrier in gaining widespread support in the US.
Nevertheless, co-evolving aspects of global capitalism, liberal modernity, and the market society, are closely tied and will be difficult to separate to maintain liberal and cosmopolitan values in a degrowth society. At the same time, the goal of the degrowth movement is progression rather than regression, and researchers point out that neoclassical economic models indicate neither negative nor zero growth would harm economic stability or full employment. Several assert the main barriers to the movement are social and structural factors clashing with implementing degrowth measures.
Healthcare
It has been pointed out that there is an apparent trade-off between the ability of modern healthcare systems to treat individual bodies to their last breath and the broader global ecological risk of such an energy and resource intensive care. If this trade-off exists, a degrowth society must choose between prioritizing the ecological integrity and the ensuing collective health or maximizing the healthcare provided to individuals. However, many degrowth scholars argue that the current system produces both psychological and physical damage to people. They insist that societal prosperity should be measured by well-being, not GDP.
See also
A Blueprint for Survival
Agrowth
Anti-consumerism
Critique of political economy
Degrowth advocates (category)
Political ecology
Postdevelopment theory
Power Down: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World
Paradox of thrift
The Path to Degrowth in Overdeveloped Countries
Post-capitalism
Productivism
Prosperity Without Growth
Slow movement
Steady-state economy
Transition town
Uneconomic growth
References
Reference details
Further reading
External links
List of International Degrowth conferences on degrowth.info
Research and Degrowth
International Degrowth Network
Degrowth Journal
Planned Degrowth: Ecosocialism and Sustainable Human Development. Monthly Reviewissue on "Planned Degrowth". July 1, 2023.
Simple living
Sustainability
Green politics
Ecological economics
Environmental movements
Environmental ethics
Environmental economics
Environmental social science concepts | 0.823665 | 0.996878 | 0.821094 |
Sustainable living | Sustainable living describes a lifestyle that attempts to reduce the use of Earth's natural resources by an individual or society. Its practitioners often attempt to reduce their ecological footprint (including their carbon footprint) by altering their home designs and methods of transportation, energy consumption and diet. Its proponents aim to conduct their lives in ways that are consistent with sustainability, naturally balanced, and respectful of humanity's symbiotic relationship with the Earth's natural ecology. The practice and general philosophy of ecological living closely follows the overall principles of sustainable development.
One approach to sustainable living, exemplified by small-scale urban transition towns and rural ecovillages, seeks to create self-reliant communities based on principles of simple living, which maximize self-sufficiency, particularly in food production. These principles, on a broader scale, underpin the concept of a bioregional economy.
Definition
Sustainable living is fundamentally the application of sustainability to lifestyle choices and decisions. One conception of sustainable living expresses what it means in triple-bottom-line terms as meeting present ecological, societal, and economical needs without compromising these factors for future generations. Another broader conception describes sustainable living in terms of four interconnected social domains: economics, ecology, politics, and culture. In the first conception, sustainable living can be described as living within the innate carrying capacities defined by these factors. In the second or Circles of Sustainability conception, sustainable living can be described as negotiating the relationships of needs within limits across all the interconnected domains of social life, including consequences for future human generations and non-human species.
Sustainable design and sustainable development are critical factors to sustainable living. Sustainable design encompasses the development of appropriate technology, which is a staple of sustainable living practices. Sustainable development in turn is the use of these technologies in infrastructure. Sustainable architecture and agriculture are the most common examples of this practice.
Lester R. Brown, a prominent environmentalist and founder of the Worldwatch Institute and Earth Policy Institute, describes sustainable living in the twenty-first century as "shifting to a renewable energy-based, reuse/recycle economy with a diversified transport system." Anitra Nelson notes that the Degrowth movement has "pointed to ‘growth’ and ‘growth economies’ as the source of inequities and unsustainabilities" with the result that advocates call for "a radical reduction in production and consumption, greater citizen participation in politics, and more diversity, especially within ecological systems and landscapes, along with a flourishing of creativity, care, and commoning — using renewable energy and materials. Derrick Jensen ("the poet-philosopher of the ecological movement"), a celebrated American author, radical environmentalist and prominent critic of mainstream environmentalism argues that "industrial civilization is not and can never be sustainable". From this statement, the natural conclusion is that sustainable living is at odds with industrialization. Thus, practitioners of the philosophy potentially face the challenge of living in an industrial society and adapting alternative norms, technologies, or practices.
History
1954 The publication of Living the Good Life by Helen and Scott Nearing marked the beginning of the modern day sustainable living movement. The publication paved the way for the "back-to-the-land movement" in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
1962 The publication of Silent Spring by Rachel Carson marked another major milestone for the sustainability movement.
1972 Donella Meadows wrote the international bestseller The Limits to Growth, which reported on a study of long-term global trends in population, economics and the environment. It sold millions of copies and was translated into 28 languages.
1973 E. F. Schumacher published a collection of essays on shifting towards sustainable living through the appropriate use of technology in his book Small Is Beautiful.
1992–2002 The United Nations held a series of conferences, which focused on increasing sustainability within societies to conserve the Earth's natural resources. The Earth Summit conferences were held in 1992, 1972 and 2002.
2007 the United Nations published Sustainable Consumption and Production, Promoting Climate-Friendly Household Consumption Patterns, which promoted sustainable lifestyles in communities and homes.
Shelter
On a global scale, shelter is associated with about 25% of the greenhouse gas emissions embodied in household purchases and 26% of households' land use.
Sustainable homes are built using sustainable methods, materials, and facilitate green practices, enabling a more sustainable lifestyle. Their construction and maintenance have neutral impacts on the Earth. Often, if necessary, they are close in proximity to essential services such as grocery stores, schools, daycares, work, or public transit making it possible to commit to sustainable transportation choices. Sometimes, they are off-the-grid homes that do not require any public energy, water, or sewer service.
If not off-the-grid, sustainable homes may be linked to a grid supplied by a power plant that is using sustainable power sources, buying power as is normal convention. Additionally, sustainable homes may be connected to a grid, but generate their own electricity through renewable means and sell any excess to a utility. There are two common methods to approaching this option: net metering and double metering.
Net metering uses the common meter that is installed in most homes, running forward when power is used from the grid, and running backward when power is put into the grid (which allows them to "net" out their total energy use, putting excess energy into the grid when not needed, and using energy from the grid during peak hours, when you may not be able to produce enough immediately). Power companies can quickly purchase the power that is put back into the grid, as it is being produced. Double metering involves installing two meters: one measuring electricity consumed, the other measuring electricity created. Additionally, or in place of selling their renewable energy, sustainable home owners may choose to bank their excess energy by using it to charge batteries. This gives them the option to use the power later during less favorable power-generating times (i.e.: night-time, when there has been no wind, etc.), and to be completely independent of the electrical grid.
Sustainably designed (see Sustainable Design) houses are generally sited so as to create as little of a negative impact on the surrounding ecosystem as possible, oriented to the sun so that it creates the best possible microclimate (typically, the long axis of the house or building should be oriented east–west), and provide natural shading or wind barriers where and when needed, among many other considerations. The design of a sustainable shelter affords the options it has later (i.e.: using passive solar lighting and heating, creating temperature buffer zones by adding porches, deep overhangs to help create favorable microclimates, etc.) Sustainably constructed houses involve environmentally friendly management of waste building materials such as recycling and composting, use non-toxic and renewable, recycled, reclaimed, or low-impact production materials that have been created and treated in a sustainable fashion (such as using organic or water-based finishes), use as much locally available materials and tools as possible so as to reduce the need for transportation, and use low-impact production methods (methods that minimize effects on the environment).
In April 2019, New York City passed a bill to cut greenhouse gas emissions. The bill's goal was to minimize the climate pollution stemming from the hub that is New York City. It was approved in a 42 to 5 vote, showing a strong favor of the bill. The bill will restrict energy use in larger buildings. The bill imposes greenhouse gas caps on buildings that are over 25,000 square feet. The calculation of the exact cap is done by square feet per building. A similar emission cap had existed already for buildings of 50,000 square feet or more. This bill expands the legislation to cover more large buildings. The bill protects rent-regulated buildings of which there are around 990,000. Due to the implementation of the bill, around 23,000 new green jobs will be created. The bill received support from Mayor Bill de Blasio. New York is taking action based on the recognition that their climate pollution has effects far beyond the city limits of New York. In discussion of a possible new Amazon headquarters in NYC, De Blasio specified that the bill applies to everyone, regardless of prestige. Mayor de Blasio also announced a lawsuit by the city (of New York) to five major oil companies due to their harm on the environment and climate pollution. This also raises the question of the possible closing of the 24 oil and gas burning power plants in New York City, due to the aimed declining use of these sources of energy. With the emission cap, New York will likely see a turn to renewable energy sources. It is possible that these plants will be transitioned to hubs of renewable energy to power the city. This new bill will go into action in three years (2022) and is estimated to cut climate pollution by 40% in eight years (by 2030).
Many materials can be considered a "green" material until its background is revealed. Any material that has used toxic or carcinogenic chemicals in its treatment or manufacturing (such as formaldehyde in glues used in woodworking), has traveled extensively from its source or manufacturer, or has been cultivated or harvested in an unsustainable manner might not be considered green. In order for any material to be considered green, it must be resource efficient, not compromise indoor air quality or water conservation, and be energy efficient (both in processing and when in use in the shelter). Resource efficiency can be achieved by using as much recycled content, reusable or recyclable content, materials that employ recycled or recyclable packaging, locally available material, salvaged or remanufactured material, material that employs resource efficient manufacturing, and long-lasting material as possible.
Sustainable building materials
Some building materials might be considered "sustainable" by some definitions and under certain conditions. For example, wood might be thought of as sustainable if it is grown using sustainable forest management, processed using sustainable energy, delivered by sustainable transport, etc. Under different conditions, however, it might not be considered as sustainable. The following materials might be considered as sustainable under certain conditions, based on a Life-cycle assessment:
Adobe
Bamboo
Cellulose insulation
Clay
Cob
Composite wood (when made from reclaimed hardwood sawdust and reclaimed or recycled plastic)
Compressed earth block
Cordwood
Cork
Hemp
Insulating concrete forms
Lime render
Linoleum
Lumber from Forest Stewardship Council approved sources
Natural Rubber
Natural fiber (coir, wool, jute, etc.)
Organic cotton insulation
Papercrete
Rammed earth
Reclaimed stone
Reclaimed brick
Recycled metal
Recycled concrete
Recycled paper
Soy-based adhesive
Soy insulation
Straw Bale
Structural insulated panel
Wood
Insulation of a sustainable home is important because of the energy it conserves throughout the life of the home. Well insulated walls and lofts using green materials are a must as it reduces or, in combination with a house that is well designed, eliminates the need for heating and cooling altogether. Installation of insulation varies according to the type of insulation being used. Typically, lofts are insulated by strips of insulating material laid between rafters. Walls with cavities are done in much the same manner. For walls that do not have cavities behind them, solid-wall insulation may be necessary which can decrease internal space and can be expensive to install. Energy-efficient windows are another important factor in insulation. Simply assuring that windows (and doors) are well sealed greatly reduces energy loss in a home. Double or Triple glazed windows are the typical method to insulating windows, trapping gas or creating a vacuum between two or three panes of glass allowing heat to be trapped inside or out. Low-emissivity or Low-E glass is another option for window insulation. It is a coating on windowpanes of a thin, transparent layer of metal oxide and works by reflecting heat back to its source, keeping the interior warm during the winter and cool during the summer. Simply hanging heavy-backed curtains in front of windows may also help their insulation. "Superwindows," mentioned in Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution, became available in the 1980s and use a combination of many available technologies, including two to three transparent low-e coatings, multiple panes of glass, and a heavy gas filling. Although more expensive, they are said to be able to insulate four and a half times better than a typical double-glazed windows.
Equipping roofs with highly reflective material (such as aluminum) increases a roof's albedo and will help reduce the amount of heat it absorbs, hence, the amount of energy needed to cool the building it is on. Green roofs or "living roofs" are a popular choice for thermally insulating a building. They are also popular for their ability to catch storm-water runoff and, when in the broader picture of a community, reduce the heat island effect (see urban heat island) thereby reducing energy costs of the entire area. It is arguable that they are able to replace the physical "footprint" that the building creates, helping reduce the adverse environmental impacts of the building's presence.
Energy efficiency and water conservation are also major considerations in sustainable housing. If using appliances, computers, HVAC systems, electronics, or lighting the sustainable-minded often look for an Energy Star label, which is government-backed and holds stricter regulations in energy and water efficiency than is required by law. Ideally, a sustainable shelter should be able to completely run the appliances it uses using renewable energy and should strive to have a neutral impact on the Earth's water sources
Greywater, including water from washing machines, sinks, showers, and baths may be reused in landscape irrigation and toilets as a method of water conservation. Likewise, rainwater harvesting from storm-water runoff is also a sustainable method to conserve water use in a sustainable shelter. Sustainable Urban Drainage Systems replicate the natural systems that clean water in wildlife and implement them in a city's drainage system so as to minimize contaminated water and unnatural rates of runoff into the environment.
See related articles in: LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design)
and also it is one of the most important factor of sustainable lifestyle.
Power
As mentioned under Shelter, some sustainable households may choose to produce their own renewable energy, while others may choose to purchase it through the grid from a power company that harnesses sustainable sources (also mentioned previously are the methods of metering the production and consumption of electricity in a household). Purchasing sustainable energy, however, may simply not be possible in some locations due to its limited availability. 6 out of the 50 states in the US do not offer green energy, for example. For those that do, its consumers typically buy a fixed amount or a percentage of their monthly consumption from a company of their choice and the bought green energy is fed into the entire national grid. Technically, in this case, the green energy is not being fed directly to the household that buys it. In this case, it is possible that the amount of green electricity that the buying household receives is a small fraction of their total incoming electricity. This may or may not depend on the amount being purchased. The purpose of buying green electricity is to support their utility's effort in producing sustainable energy. Producing sustainable energy on an individual household or community basis is much more flexible, but can still be limited in the richness of the sources that the location may afford (some locations may not be rich in renewable energy sources while others may have an abundance of it).
When generating renewable energy and feeding it back into the grid (in participating countries such as the US and Germany), producing households are typically paid at least the full standard electricity rate by their utility and are also given separate renewable energy credits that they can then sell to their utility, additionally (utilities are interested in buying these renewable energy credits because it allows them to claim that they produce renewable energy). In some special cases, producing households may be paid up to four times the standard electricity rate, but this is not common.
Solar power harnesses the energy of the sun to make electricity. Two typical methods for converting solar energy into electricity are photo-voltaic cells that are organized into panels and concentrated solar power, which uses mirrors to concentrate sunlight to either heat a fluid that runs an electrical generator via a steam turbine or heat engine, or to simply cast onto photo-voltaic cells. The energy created by photo-voltaic cells is a direct current and has to be converted to alternating current before it can be used in a household. At this point, users can choose to either store this direct current in batteries for later use, or use an AC/DC inverter for immediate use. To get the best out of a solar panel, the angle of incidence of the sun should be between 20 and 50 degrees. Solar power via photo-voltaic cells are usually the most expensive method to harnessing renewable energy, but is falling in price as technology advances and public interest increases. It has the advantages of being portable, easy to use on an individual basis, readily available for government grants and incentives, and being flexible regarding location (though it is most efficient when used in hot, arid areas since they tend to be the most sunny). For those that are lucky, affordable rental schemes may be found. Concentrated solar power plants are typically used on more of a community scale rather than an individual household scale, because of the amount of energy they are able to harness but can be done on an individual scale with a parabolic reflector.
Solar thermal energy is harnessed by collecting direct heat from the sun. One of the most common ways that this method is used by households is through solar water heating. In a broad perspective, these systems involve well insulated tanks for storage and collectors, are either passive or active systems (active systems have pumps that continuously circulate water through the collectors and storage tank) and, in active systems, involve either directly heating the water that will be used or heating a non-freezing heat-transfer fluid that then heats the water that will be used. Passive systems are cheaper than active systems since they do not require a pumping system (instead, they take advantage of the natural movement of hot water rising above cold water to cycle the water being used through the collector and storage tank).
Other methods of harnessing solar power are solar space heating (for heating internal building spaces), solar drying (for drying wood chips, fruits, grains, etc.), solar cookers, solar distillers, and other passive solar technologies (simply, harnessing sunlight without any mechanical means).
Wind power is harnessed through turbines, set on tall towers (typically 20’ or 6m with 10‘ or 3m diameter blades for an individual household's needs) that power a generator that creates electricity. They typically require an average of wind speed of 9 mi/hr (14 km/h) to be worth their investment (as prescribed by the US Department of Energy), and are capable of paying for themselves within their lifetimes. Wind turbines in urban areas usually need to be mounted at least 30’ (10m) in the air to receive enough wind and to be void of nearby obstructions (such as neighboring buildings). Mounting a wind turbine may also require permission from authorities. Wind turbines have been criticized for the noise they produce, their appearance, and the argument that they can affect the migratory patterns of birds (their blades obstruct passage in the sky). Wind turbines are much more feasible for those living in rural areas and are one of the most cost-effective forms of renewable energy per kilowatt, approaching the cost of fossil fuels, and have quick paybacks.
For those that have a body of water flowing at an adequate speed (or falling from an adequate height) on their property, hydroelectricity may be an option. On a large scale, hydroelectricity, in the form of dams, has adverse environmental and social impacts. When on a small scale, however, in the form of single turbines, hydroelectricity is very sustainable. Single water turbines or even a group of single turbines are not environmentally or socially disruptive. On an individual household basis, single turbines are the probably the only economically feasible route (but can have high paybacks and is one of the most efficient methods of renewable energy production). It is more common for an eco-village to use this method rather than a singular household.
Geothermal energy production involves harnessing the hot water or steam below the earth's surface, in reservoirs, to produce energy. Because the hot water or steam that is used is reinjected back into the reservoir, this source is considered sustainable. However, those that plan on getting their electricity from this source should be aware that there is controversy over the lifespan of each geothermal reservoir as some believe that their lifespans are naturally limited (they cool down over time, making geothermal energy production there eventually impossible). This method is often large scale as the system required to harness geothermal energy can be complex and requires deep drilling equipment. There do exist small individual scale geothermal operations, however, which harness reservoirs very close to the Earth's surface, avoiding the need for extensive drilling and sometimes even taking advantage of lakes or ponds where there is already a depression. In this case, the heat is captured and sent to a geothermal heat pump system located inside the shelter or facility that needs it (often, this heat is used directly to warm a greenhouse during the colder months). Although geothermal energy is available everywhere on Earth, practicality and cost-effectiveness varies, directly related to the depth required to reach reservoirs. Places such as the Philippines, Hawaii, Alaska, Iceland, California, and Nevada have geothermal reservoirs closer to the Earth's surface, making its production cost-effective.
Biomass power is created when any biological matter is burned as fuel. As with the case of using green materials in a household, it is best to use as much locally available material as possible so as to reduce the carbon footprint created by transportation. Although burning biomass for fuel releases carbon dioxide, sulfur compounds, and nitrogen compounds into the atmosphere, a major concern in a sustainable lifestyle, the amount that is released is sustainable (it will not contribute to a rise in carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere). This is because the biological matter that is being burned releases the same amount of carbon dioxide that it consumed during its lifetime. However, burning biodiesel and bioethanol (see biofuel) when created from virgin material, is increasingly controversial and may or may not be considered sustainable because it inadvertently increases global poverty, the clearing of more land for new agriculture fields (the source of the biofuel is also the same source of food), and may use unsustainable growing methods (such as the use of environmentally harmful pesticides and fertilizers).
List of organic matter that can be burned for fuel
Bagasse
Biogas
Manure
Stover
Straw
Used vegetable oil
Wood
Digestion of organic material to produce methane is becoming an increasingly popular method of biomass energy production. Materials such as waste sludge can be digested to release methane gas that can then be burnt to produce electricity. Methane gas is also a natural by-product of landfills, full of decomposing waste, and can be harnessed here to produce electricity as well. The advantage in burning methane gas is that is prevents the methane from being released into the atmosphere, exacerbating the greenhouse effect. Although this method of biomass energy production is typically large scale (done in landfills), it can be done on a smaller individual or community scale as well.
Food
Globally, food accounts for 48% and 90% of household environmental impacts on land and water resources respectively, with consumption of meat, dairy and processed food rising quickly with income.
Environmental impacts of industrial agriculture
Industrial agricultural production is highly resource and energy intensive. Industrial agriculture systems typically require heavy irrigation, extensive pesticide and fertilizer application, intensive tillage, concentrated monoculture production, and other continual inputs. As a result of these industrial farming conditions, today's mounting environmental stresses are further exacerbated. These stresses include: declining water tables, chemical leaching, chemical runoff, soil erosion, land degradation, loss in biodiversity, and other ecological concerns.
Conventional food distribution and long distance transport
Conventional food distribution and long-distance transport are additionally resource and energy exhaustive. Substantial climate-disrupting carbon emissions, boosted by the transport of food over long distances, are of growing concern as the world faces such global crisis as natural resource depletion, peak oil and climate change. "The average American meal currently costs about 1500 miles, and takes about 10 calories of oil and other fossil fuels to produce a single calorie of food."
Local and seasonal foods
A more sustainable means of acquiring food is to purchase locally and seasonally. Buying food from local farmers reduces carbon output, caused by long-distance food transport, and stimulates the local economy. Local, small-scale farming operations also typically utilize more sustainable methods of agriculture than conventional industrial farming systems such as decreased tillage, nutrient cycling, fostered biodiversity and reduced chemical pesticide and fertilizer applications. Adapting a more regional, seasonally based diet is more sustainable as it entails purchasing less energy and resource demanding produce that naturally grow within a local area and require no long-distance transport. These vegetables and fruits are also grown and harvested within their suitable growing season. Thus, seasonal food farming does not require energy intensive greenhouse production, extensive irrigation, plastic packaging and long-distance transport from importing non-regional foods, and other environmental stressors. Local, seasonal produce is typically fresher, unprocessed and argued to be more nutritious. Local produce also contains less to no chemical residues from applications required for long-distance shipping and handling. Farmers' markets, public events where local small-scale farmers gather and sell their produce, are a good source for obtaining local food and knowledge about local farming productions. As well as promoting localization of food, farmers markets are a central gathering place for community interaction. Another way to become involved in regional food distribution is by joining a local community-supported agriculture (CSA). A CSA consists of a community of growers and consumers who pledge to support a farming operation while equally sharing the risks and benefits of food production. CSA's usually involve a system of weekly pick-ups of locally farmed vegetables and fruits, sometimes including dairy products, meat and special food items such as baked goods. Considering the previously noted rising environmental crisis, the United States and much of the world is facing immense vulnerability to famine. Local food production ensures food security if potential transportation disruptions and climatic, economical, and sociopolitical disasters were to occur.
Reducing meat consumption
Industrial meat production also involves high environmental costs such as land degradation, soil erosion and depletion of natural resources, especially pertaining to water and food. Mass meat production increase the amount of methane in the atmosphere. For more information on the environmental impact of meat production and consumption, see the ethics of eating meat. Reducing meat consumption, perhaps to a few meals a week, or adopting a vegetarian or vegan diet, alleviates the demand for environmentally damaging industrial meat production. Buying and consuming organically raised, free range or grass fed meat is another alternative towards more sustainable meat consumption.
Organic farming
Purchasing and supporting organic products is another fundamental contribution to sustainable living. Organic farming is a rapidly emerging trend in the food industry and in the web of sustainability. According to the USDA National Organic Standards Board (NOSB), organic agriculture is defined as "an ecological production management system that promotes and enhances biodiversity, biological cycles, and soil biological activity. It is based on minimal use of off-farm inputs and on management practices that restore, maintain, or enhance ecological harmony. The primary goal of organic agriculture is to optimize the health and productivity of interdependent communities of soil life, plants, animals and people." Upon sustaining these goals, organic agriculture uses techniques such as crop rotation, permaculture, compost, green manure and biological pest control. In addition, organic farming prohibits or strictly limits the use of manufactured fertilizers and pesticides, plant growth regulators such as hormones, livestock antibiotics, food additives and genetically modified organisms. Organically farmed products include vegetables, fruit, grains, herbs, meat, dairy, eggs, fibers, and flowers. See organic certification for more information.
Urban gardening
In addition to local, small-scale farms, there has been a recent emergence in urban agriculture expanding from community gardens to private home gardens. With this trend, both farmers and ordinary people are becoming involved in food production. A network of urban farming systems helps to further ensure regional food security and encourages self-sufficiency and cooperative interdependence within communities. With every bite of food raised from urban gardens, negative environmental impacts are reduced in numerous ways. For instance, vegetables and fruits raised within small-scale gardens and farms are not grown with tremendous applications of nitrogen fertilizer required for industrial agricultural operations. The nitrogen fertilizers cause toxic chemical leaching and runoff that enters our water tables. Nitrogen fertilizer also produces nitrous oxide, a more damaging greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Local, community-grown food also requires no imported, long-distance transport which further depletes our fossil fuel reserves. In developing more efficiency per land acre, urban gardens can be started in a wide variety of areas: in vacant lots, public parks, private yards, church and school yards, on roof tops (roof-top gardens), and many other places. Communities can work together in changing zoning limitations in order for public and private gardens to be permissible. Aesthetically pleasing edible landscaping plants can also be incorporated into city landscaping such as blueberry bushes, grapevines trained on an arbor, pecan trees, etc. With as small a scale as home or community farming, sustainable and organic farming methods can easily be utilized. Such sustainable, organic farming techniques include: composting, biological pest control, crop rotation, mulching, drip irrigation, nutrient cycling and permaculture. For more information on sustainable farming systems, see sustainable agriculture.
Food preservation and storage
Preserving and storing foods reduces reliance on long-distance transported food and the market industry. Home-grown foods can be preserved and stored outside of their growing season and continually consumed throughout the year, enhancing self-sufficiency and independence from the supermarket. Food can be preserved and saved by dehydration, freezing, vacuum packing, canning, bottling, pickling and jellying. For more information, see food preservation.
Transportation
With rising concerns over non-renewable energy source usage and climate change caused by carbon emissions, the phase-out of fossil fuel vehicles is becoming more and more important to the conversation of sustainability. Zero-emission urban transport systems that foster mobility, accessible public transportation and healthier urban environments are needed. Such urban transport systems should consist of rail transport, electric buses, bicycle pathways, provision for human-powered transport and pedestrian walkways. Public transport systems such as underground rail systems and bus transit systems shift huge numbers of people away from reliance on car dependency and dramatically reduce the rate of carbon emissions caused by automobile transport.
In comparison to automobiles, bicycles are a paragon of energy efficient personal transportation with the bicycle roughly 50 times more energy efficient than driving. Bicycles increase mobility while alleviating congestion, lowering air and noise pollution, and increasing physical exercise. Most importantly, they do not emit climate-damaging carbon dioxide. Bike-sharing programs are beginning to boom throughout the world and are modeled in leading cities such as Paris, Amsterdam and London. Bike-sharing programs offer kiosks and docking stations that supply hundreds to thousands of bikes for rental throughout a city through small deposits or affordable memberships.
A recent boom has occurred in electric bikes especially in China and other Asian countries. Electric bikes are similar to electric cars in that they are battery-powered and can be plugged into the provincial electric grid for recharging as needed. In contrast to electric cars, electric bikes do not directly use any fossil fuels. Adequate sustainable urban transportation is dependent upon proper city transport infrastructure and planning that incorporates efficient public transit along with bicycle and pedestrian-friendly pathways.
Water
A major factor of sustainable living involves that which no human can live without, water. Unsustainable water use has far reaching implications for humankind. Currently, humans use one-fourth of the Earth's total fresh water in natural circulation, and over half the accessible runoff. Additionally, population growth and water demand is ever increasing. Thus, it is necessary to use available water more efficiently. In sustainable living, one can use water more sustainably through a series of simple, everyday measures. These measures involve considering indoor home appliance efficiency, outdoor water use, and daily water use awareness.
Indoor home appliances
Housing and commercial buildings account for 12 percent of America's freshwater withdrawals. A typical American single family home uses about per person per day indoors. This use can be reduced by simple alterations in behavior and upgrades to appliance quality.
Toilets
Toilets accounted for almost 30% of residential indoor water use in the United States in 1999. One flush of a standard U.S. toilet requires more water than most individuals, and many families, in the world use for all their needs in an entire day.
A home's toilet water sustainability can be improved in one of two ways: improving the current toilet or installing a more efficient toilet. To improve the current toilet, one possible method is to put weighted plastic bottles in the toilet tank. Also, there are inexpensive tank banks or float booster available for purchase. A tank bank is a plastic bag to be filled with water and hung in the toilet tank. A float booster attaches underneath the float ball of pre-1986 three and a half gallon capacity toilets. It allows these toilets to operate at the same valve and float setting but significantly reduces their water level, saving between one and one and a third gallons of water per flush. A major waste of water in existing toilets is leaks. A slow toilet leak is undetectable to the eye, but can waste hundreds of gallons each month. One way to check this is to put food dye in the tank, and to see if the water in the toilet bowl turns the same color. In the event of a leaky flapper, one can replace it with an adjustable toilet flapper, which allows self-adjustment of the amount of water per flush.
In installing a new toilet there are a number of options to obtain the most water efficient model. A low flush toilet uses one to two gallons per flush. Traditionally, toilets use three to five gallons per flush. If an eighteen-liter per flush toilet is removed and a six-liter per flush toilet is put in its place, 70% of the water flushed will be saved while the overall indoor water use by will be reduced by 30%. It is possible to have a toilet that uses no water. A composting toilet treats human waste through composting and dehydration, producing a valuable soil additive. These toilets feature a two-compartment bowl to separate urine from feces. The urine can be collected or sold as fertilizer. The feces can be dried and bagged or composted. These toilets cost scarcely more than regularly installed toilets and do not require a sewer hookup. In addition to providing valuable fertilizer, these toilets are highly sustainable because they save sewage collection and treatment, as well as lessen agricultural costs and improve topsoil.
Additionally, one can reduce toilet water sustainability by limiting total toilet flushing. For instance, instead of flushing small wastes, such as tissues, one can dispose of these items in the trash or compost.
Showers
On average, showers were 18% of U.S. indoor water use in 1999, at per minute traditionally in America. A simple method to reduce this use is to switch to low-flow, high-performance showerheads. These showerheads use only 1.0–1.5 gpm or less. An alternative to replacing the showerhead is to install a converter. This device arrests a running shower upon reaching the desired temperature. Solar water heaters can be used to obtain optimal water temperature, and are more sustainable because they reduce dependence on fossil fuels. To lessen excess water use, water pipes can be insulated with pre-slit foam pipe insulation. This insulation decreases hot water generation time. A simple, straightforward method to conserve water when showering is to take shorter showers. One method to accomplish this is to turn off the water when it is not necessary (such as while lathering) and resuming the shower when water is necessary. This can be facilitated when the plumbing or showerhead allow turning off the water without disrupting the desired temperature setting (common in the UK but not the United States).
Dishwashers and sinks
On average, sinks were 15% of U.S. indoor water use in 1999. There are, however, easy methods to rectify excessive water loss. Available for purchase is a screw-on aerator. This device works by combining water with air thus generating a frothy substance with greater perceived volume, reducing water use by half. Additionally, there is a flip-valve available that allows flow to be turned off and back on at the previously reached temperature. Finally, a laminar flow device creates a 1.5–2.4 gpm stream of water that reduces water use by half, but can be turned to normal water level when optimal.
In addition to buying the above devices, one can live more sustainably by checking sinks for leaks, and fixing these links if they exist. According to the EPA, "A small drip from a worn faucet washer can waste 20 gallons of water per day, while larger leaks can waste hundreds of gallons". When washing dishes by hand, it is not necessary to leave the water running for rinsing, and it is more efficient to rinse dishes simultaneously.
On average, dishwashing consumes 1% of indoor water use. When using a dishwasher, water can be conserved by only running the machine when it is full. Some have a "low flow" setting to use less water per wash cycle. Enzymatic detergents clean dishes more efficiently and more successfully with a smaller amount of water at a lower temperature.
Washing machines
On average, 23% of U.S. indoor water use in 1999 was due to clothes washing. In contrast to other machines, American washing machines have changed little to become more sustainable. A typical washing machine has a vertical-axis design, in which clothes are agitated in a tubful of water. Horizontal-axis machines, in contrast, put less water into the bottom of the rub and rotate clothes through it. These machines are more efficient in terms of soap use and clothing stability.
Outdoor water use
There are a number of ways one can incorporate a personal yard, roof, and garden in more sustainable living. While conserving water is a major element of sustainability, so is sequestering water.
Conserving water
In planning a yard and garden space, it is most sustainable to consider the plants, soil, and available water. Drought resistant shrubs, plants, and grasses require a smaller amount of water in comparison to more traditional species. Additionally, native plants (as opposed to herbaceous perennials) will use a smaller supply of water and have a heightened resistance to plant diseases of the area. Xeriscaping is a technique that selects drought-tolerant plants and accounts for endemic features such as slope, soil type, and native plant range. It can reduce landscape water use by 50 – 70%, while providing habitat space for wildlife. Plants on slopes help reduce runoff by slowing and absorbing accumulated rainfall. Grouping plants by watering needs further reduces water waste.
After planting, placing a circumference of mulch surrounding plants functions to lessen evaporation. To do this, firmly press two to four inches of organic matter along the plant's dripline. This prevents water runoff. When watering, consider the range of sprinklers; watering paved areas is unnecessary. Additionally, to conserve the maximum amount of water, watering should be carried out during early mornings on non-windy days to reduce water loss to evaporation. Drip-irrigation systems and soaker hoses are a more sustainable alternative to the traditional sprinkler system. Drip-irrigation systems employ small gaps at standard distances in a hose, leading to the slow trickle of water droplets which percolate the soil over a protracted period. These systems use 30 – 50% less water than conventional methods. Soaker hoses help to reduce water use by up to 90%. They connect to a garden hose and lay along the row of plants under a layer of mulch. A layer of organic material added to the soil helps to increase its absorption and water retention; previously planted areas can be covered with compost.
In caring for a lawn, there are a number of measures that can increase the sustainability of lawn maintenance techniques. A primary aspect of lawn care is watering. To conserve water, it is important to only water when necessary, and to deep soak when watering. Additionally, a lawn may be left to go dormant, renewing after a dry spell to its original vitality.
Sequestering water
A common method of water sequestrations is rainwater harvesting, which incorporates the collection and storage of rain. Primarily, the rain is obtained from a roof, and stored on the ground in catchment tanks. Water sequestration varies based on extent, cost, and complexity. A simple method involves a single barrel at the bottom of a downspout, while a more complex method involves multiple tanks. It is highly sustainable to use stored water in place of purified water for activities such as irrigation and flushing toilets. Additionally, using stored rainwater reduces the amount of runoff pollution, picked up from roofs and pavements that would normally enter streams through storm drains. The following equation can be used to estimate annual water supply:
Collection area (square feet) × Rainfall (inch/year) / 12 (inch/foot) = Cubic Feet of Water/Year
Cubic Feet/Year × 7.43 (Gallons/Cubic Foot) = Gallons/year
Note, however, this calculation does not account for losses such as evaporation or leakage.
Greywater systems function in sequestering used indoor water, such as laundry, bath and sink water, and filtering it for reuse. Greywater can be reused in irrigation and toilet flushing. There are two types of greywater systems: gravity fed manual systems and package systems. The manual systems do not require electricity but may require a larger yard space. The package systems require electricity but are self-contained and can be installed indoors.
Waste
As populations and resource demands climb, waste production contributes to emissions of carbon dioxide, leaching of hazardous materials into the soil and waterways, and methane emissions. In America alone, over the course of a decade, of American resources will have been transformed into nonproductive wastes and gases. Thus, a crucial component of sustainable living is being waste conscious. One can do this by reducing waste, reusing commodities, and recycling.
There are a number of ways to reduce waste in sustainable living. Two methods to reduce paper waste are canceling junk mail like credit card and insurance offers and direct mail marketing and changing monthly paper statements to paperless emails. Junk mail alone accounted for 1.72 million tons of landfill waste in 2009. Another method to reduce waste is to buy in bulk, reducing packaging materials. Preventing food waste can limit the amount of organic waste sent to landfills producing the powerful greenhouse gas methane. Another example of waste reduction involves being cognizant of purchasing excessive amounts when buying materials with limited use like cans of paint. Non-hazardous or less hazardous alternatives can also limit the toxicity of waste.
By reusing materials, one lives more sustainably by not contributing to the addition of waste to landfills. Reusing saves natural resources by decreasing the necessity of raw material extraction. For example, reusable bags can reduce the amount of waste created by grocery shopping eliminating the need to create and ship plastic bags and the need to manage their disposal and recycling or polluting effects.
Recycling, a process that breaks down used items into raw materials to make new materials, is a particularly useful means of contributing to the renewal of goods. Recycling incorporates three primary processes; collection and processing, manufacturing, and purchasing recycled products. A natural example of recycling involves using food waste as compost to enrich the quality of soil, which can be carried out at home or locally with community composting. An offshoot of recycling, upcycling, strives to convert material into something of similar or greater value in its second life. By integrating measures of reusing, reducing, and recycling one can effectively reduce personal waste and use materials in a more sustainable manner.
Reproductive choices
Though it is not always included in discussions of sustainable living, some consider reproductive choices to be a key part of sustainable living. Reproductive choices refers, in this case, to the number of children that an individual has, whether they are conceived biologically or adopted. Some researchers have claimed that for people living in wealthy, high-consumption countries such as the United States, having fewer children is by far the most effective way to decrease one's carbon footprint, and one's ecological footprint more broadly. However, the scholarship that has led to this claim has been questioned, as has the misleading way that it's often been presented in popular newspaper and web articles. Some ethicists and environmental activists have made similar arguments about the need for a "small family ethic" and research has found that in some countries, these ecological concerns are leading some people to report having fewer children than they would otherwise, or no children at all.
However, there have been multiple critiques of the idea that having fewer children is part of a sustainable lifestyle. Some argue that it is an example of the kind of Malthusian thinking that has led to coercion and violence in the past (including forced sterilizations and forced abortions), and that it might lead to similar policies that deny women reproductive freedom in the future. Additionally, research has found that some environmentalists consider having children, and even having more children than they might otherwise, to be a part of sustainable living. They assert that parenting can be an important way that individuals can exert a positive environmental influence, by educating the next generation and as a way to remain engaged in one's commitment to environmental action.
Provision, supply and expenditure in general
A study that reviewed 217 analyses of on-the-market products and services and analyzed existing alternatives to mainstream food, holidays, and furnishings, concluded that total greenhouse gas emissions by Swedes could be lowered by as of 2021 up to 36–38 % if consumers – without a decrease in total estimated expenditure or considerations of self-interest rationale – instead were to obtain those they – using available data – could assess to be more sustainable. Provision, supply/availability, product development/success/price, comparative benefits as well as incentives, purposes/demands and effects of expenditure-choices are part of or embedded in the human neuro-socioeconomic system and therefore overall largely beyond the control of an individual seeking to make rational and ethical choices within it even if all relevant life-cycle assessment/product and manufacturing information was available to this consumer . and it leads the consumer
See also
Buddhist economics
Circles of Sustainability
Citizen Science, cleanup projects that people can take part in.
Cradle-to-cradle design
Circular economy
Climate-friendly gardening
Downshifting
Eco-communalism
Ecodesign
Ecological economics
Ethical consumerism
Foodscaping
Frugality
Simple living
Sufficiency economy
Sustainability
Sustainable architecture
Sustainable design
Sustainable development
Sustainable event management
Sustainable landscaping
Sustainable House Day (in Australia)
Permaculture
The Venus Project
Transition Towns
References
External links
INHERIT Project, a Horizon 2020 Project to identify ways of living, moving and consuming that protect the environment and promote health and health equity.
Environmentalism
Intentional living
Simple living
Living
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