Environments and Ecosystems
What do we mean when we say "The environment" ?
Here is one dictionary definition –
1. the natural world, within which people, animals, and plants live.
2. all the external factors influencing the life of organisms, such as light or food supply
3. the conditions that surround people and affect the way they live
Encarta® World English Dictionary © 1999 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
It kind of suggests that environment is a big thing – “the environment” usually means either the whole of the world or the part of it that we are talking about.
Within “the environment” are lots of smaller environments – the sea is an obvious one, others are; mountains, ice caps, lakes, rivers, rain forests, tundra, deserts – you get the idea. They are all places with distinctly different conditions – temperature, rainfall, soil type, weather etc.
The Ocean
Deserts
Rainforests
Mountains
What About Ecosystems?
Ecosystems are sometimes confused with environments - if we talk about ecosystems we are talking about things that live together and the environment they live in.
Chaos theory suggests that stable ordered systems tend towards becoming unstable and that a very small change can have huge consequences.
Ecosystems are fragile and depend on the stability of their environment. Small changes in an environment can have huge consequences on its inhabitants and changes in one environment will often trigger changes in nearby environments - for example deforestation removes the protective cover of the trees and when it rains on steep slopes the soil is washed away often huge mudslides or mud avalanches had down the valleys destroying roads and villages, rivers and lakes become choked with silt and many water creatures cannot survive in the cloudy water. hundreds of miles downstream lakes behind artificial dams become silted up and thousands of miles the fine sediment is washed into the sea blanketing and killing sea grass and coral ecosystems along the coastlines. Check out how seriously they take the threat of mudslides in the USA on the American Red Cross site
For more info on environments and ecosystems click here
Tourism - a wonderful industry giving us access to wonderful places across the world or an ecological disaster in disguise?
This chart shows the rise in official tourist numbers since 1950 and includes a projection for 2010.
Deforestation - largely driven by economics but also caused by natural and manmade forest fires, deforestation strips the landscape of trees and leaves the fragile soil open to attack from the weather. bare mountains stand where once were lush rainforests - To find out more click here
