Environmental Protection

Environmental protection is the set of actions or measures that societies take to ensure the health of their life support systems: air, water, land, and biomass. The measures can take many forms, such as passing laws that limit or forbid the use of a certain resource or the performance of some activities in specific areas (e.g., offshore oil drilling, agricultural practices on certain lands), fines for discharging pollutants into the air or water, subsidies for purchasing energy-efficient lighting, heating and cooling technologies, encouraging recycling and waste reduction, emissions trading, and smart growth of human settlements, among others.

Human beings obtain food, energy, and materials from the Earth's ecosphere and lithosphere, water from the hydrosphere, and oxygen from the atmosphere. These resources are termed environmental goods and services. If they are overused, they can be depleted or damaged, depending on the rate at which they can be renewed. For example, air pollution depletes clean air supplies and, if recurrent, can take place at a faster pace than the environment's ability to purify it. This contamination hinders the environmental service of air purification and risks human health. Environmental protection is important since human life is adapted to and depends on the current state of the environment. Furthermore, the rate of depletion of environmental goods and services has a temporal and geographic dimension—temporal in that the depletion of a resource today leaves less of that resource for future generations and geographic in that the use of resources from one region to be consumed in another leads to environmental problems in the region of origin.

All the spheres are interrelated through biological, chemical, and physical processes (such as biogeochemical cycles and temperature gradients). Every living being on Earth is constantly interacting with its environment and altering it. The result of such a transformation is a resource that another being uses or another process transforms. For example, underground carbon and sulfur are released into the atmosphere through volcanic eruptions as a part of the biogeochemical cycles of carbon and sulfur. Sulfur then [Page 984]contributes to cloud formation, whereas carbon contributes to plant growth. Plants are eaten by animals, which are themselves often eaten by others. Animal wastes become part of the lithosphere through decomposition by bacteria and other creatures to become part of the soil, enriching it with nutrients. In the long run, the tendency is for these processes to interact in a balanced fashion. If there is a disturbance, such as an increase in the population of a particular species, then this system can be thrown off balance as that species depletes its food and water resources and some of its members die until balance is restored.

Humans, like other life forms, play their part in transforming their surroundings and create by-products in the process of procuring their livelihoods. They mine and extract resources, transforming them into goods for consumption. In the process of doing so, they create wastes. As the human habitat expands, it alters land cover and displaces whatever ecosystem was there before. As the human population has expanded, increased its affluence, and developed new technologies, the amount of goods and services that it takes from the environment has increased.

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