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In this section

• 1. Evolution
• 2. Impacts
• 3. Revolutions
• 4. Resources
• 5. Sustainability

Summary

• Help
• Links
• Sources
• Bibliography
• Perspectives
• Contacts

Contents

Evolution

1. Aims
2. The early Earth
3. The origins of life
4. The earliest evidence of life
5. An Oxygen Revolution and the evolution of more complex organisms
6. Prokaryotes, eukaryotes, and DNA
7. Endosymbiosis and the evolution of eukaryotes from prokaryotes
8. The origins of multi-cellular life
9. Interruption of the evolution of multi-cellular life by major glaciations
10. Shifting continents and evolution
11. Skeletal life forms
12. The end of the dinosaurs - the K-Pg boundary
13. Human evolution
14. Tool-using hominids

Impacts

1. Aims
2. Use of fire
3. Water resource development
4. Forest clearance
5. Fossil fuel burning
6. Urbanisation
7. The 'anthropocene'
8. Leibig's Law of the Minimum
9. Carrying capacity and technological development
10. Trade
11. The emergence of environmental limitations of a new kind
12. Complex interrelationships between human activities and biological, chemical and geophysical processes
13. The implications of human activities for the global environment
14. Dimensions of the study and management of environmental issues

Revolutions

1. Aims
2. Four major defining transitions (revolutions)
3. The Paleolithic era
4. The Neolithic revolution
5. The industrial revolution
6. Environmental impacts of the industrial revolution
7. The environmental revolution
8. Changes in the relationship between people and their environments with successive revolutions
9. The emergence of a new environmentalism

Resources

1. Aims
2. Definition of an environmental resource
3. Resources as manageable environmental attributes
4. Resource exploitation involving nature, technology, economy and society
5. Feasibility hurdles for resource exploitation
6. Renewable resources
7. Non-renewable resources
8. Threats to sustainability from depletion of non-renewable resources
9. Environmental resources as economic assets
10. Weak and strong sustainability
11. The principle of weak sustainability
12. The principle of strong sustainability
13. Safeguarding the interests of future generations

Sustainability

1. Aims
2. Environmental sustainability and a new paradigm for development
3. Bruntland principles of sustainable development
4. Sustainable development and consistency between environmental protection and economic growth
5. Sustainable environmental development and resource exploitation
6. Social ownership of sustainable development
7. A vision of sustainable development
8. Multi-level commitment to environmentally sustainable development
9. Commitment at international level
10. Commitment at national level
11. Commitment at regional level
12. Commitment at business level
13. Commitment at community level