Green Culture: An A-to-Z Guide

Air Pollution: Contaminants or substances in the air that interfere with human health or produce other harmful environmental effects.

Albedo: The ratio of light reflected by a surface to the light falling on it.

Alternative Energy: Usually environmentally friendly, this is energy from uncommon sources such as wind power or solar energy, not fossil fuels.

Anthropocentric: Literally “human-centered.” Anthropocentrism is the belief, taken for granted in most cultures through most of human history and argued more explicitly by some schools of philosophy today, that humans are the figurative “center of the universe,” and that ethical systems should thus be principally concerned with human benefit.

Anthropogenic: Man-made; used especially to underscore the human origins of a substance or phenomenon, as in “anthropogenic climate change” or “anthropogenic toxic compounds.”

Behavioral Change: As it affects energy efficiency, behavioral change is a change in energy-consuming activity originated by, and under control of, a person or organization. An example of behavioral change is adjusting a thermostat setting or changing driving habits.

Best Available Control Measures (BACM): A term used to refer to the most effective measures (according to Environmental Protection Agency guidance) for controlling small or dispersed particulates and other emissions from sources such as roadway dust, soot and ash from woodstoves, and open burning of rush, timber, grasslands, or trash.

Biodiversity: The total variety of life on Earth. Modern science considers biodiversity to be an inherently good thing for the ecosystem, and for the loss of species and of species diversity to be an alarming consequence of environmental damage. From an evolutionary standpoint, genetic diversity—the diversity of genes within a species—is also especially important.

Biomass: Any organic matter that is available on a renewable basis, including agricultural crops and agricultural wastes and residues, wood and wood wastes and residues, animal wastes, municipal wastes, and aquatic plants.

Brownfields: Abandoned, idled, or under-used industrial and commercial facilities/sites where expansion or redevelopment is complicated by real or perceived environmental contamination. They can be in urban, suburban, or rural areas. The Environmental Protection Agency's Brownfields Initiative helps communities mitigate potential health risks and restore the economic viability of such areas or properties.

Carbon Footprint: A popular term describing the impact a particular activity has on the environment in terms of the amount of climate-changing carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases it produces. A person's carbon footprint is the amount of greenhouse gases that his or her way of life produces overall. It is also a colloquialism for the sum total of all environmental harm an individual or group causes over their lifetime. People, families, communities, nations, companies, and other organizations all leave a carbon footprint.

Carbon Offsets: Financial instruments, expressed in metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, which represent the reduction of carbon dioxide or an equivalent greenhouse gas. Carbon offsets allow corporations and other entities to comply with caps on their emissions by purchasing offsets to bring their totals down to acceptable levels. The smaller voluntary market for carbon offsets exists for individuals and companies that purchase offsets in order to mitigate their emissions by choice. There is a great deal of controversy over the efficacy and truthfulness of the offsets market, which is new enough that, in a best-case scenario, the kinks have not yet been worked out, while in the worst, it will turn out to be a dead end in the history of environmental reform.

Certified Organic: Food products that meet or exceed standards set forth by the U. S. Department of Agriculture National Organic Program (NOP). Products “made with organic ingredients” include 70 percent organic ingredients and cannot contain the organic label. “Organic” products must have at least 95 percent organic ingredients and may feature the USDA organic seal. “100% Organic” is the most stringent, but does not count water or salt.

Climate Change: A term used to describe short- and long-term effects on Earth's climate as a result of human activities such as fossil fuel combustion and vegetation clearing and burning.

Closed-loop Recycling: The system of recycling in which a used product is broken down and remanufactured into a very similar, if not exactly the same, product (e.g., recycling a plastic soda bottle into a plastic water bottle).

Compost: A process whereby organic wastes, including food wastes, paper, and yard wastes, decompose naturally, resulting in a product rich in minerals and ideal for gardening and farming as a soil conditioner, mulch, resurfacing material, or landfill cover. Consumers can make their own compost by collecting yard trimmings and vegetable scraps.

Conservation: Preserving and renewing, when possible, human and natural resources.

Conscientious Consumption: An ethic that acknowledges the power of consumer activism in the movement toward sustainability.

Dioxin: Any of a family of compounds known chemically as dibenzo-p-dioxins. Concern about them has arisen from their potential toxicity as contaminants in commercial products. Tests on laboratory animals indicate that it is one of the more toxic anthropogenic (man-made) compounds.

Energy: The capability of doing work; different forms of energy can be converted to other forms, but the total amount of energy remains the same.

Energy Star: A joint program formed between the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy to identify and label high-efficiency building products.

Entropy: A measure of the unavailable or unusable energy in a system.

Environmental Equity/Justice: Equal protection from environmental hazards for individuals, groups, or communities regardless of race, ethnicity, or economic status. This applies to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies, and implies that no population of people should be forced to shoulder a disproportionate share of negative environmental impacts of pollution or environmental hazard due to a lack of political or economic strength.

Epidemiology: Study of the distribution of disease, or other health-related states and events in human populations, as related to age, sex, occupation, ethnicity, and economic status in order to identify and alleviate health problems and promote better health.

Ethics: The study of moral questions. Ethics can refer to specific types of ethics (such as applied ethics or medical ethics) or to specific systems of ethics (such as Catholic ethics or Marxist ethics). Though the religions of the world always include an ethical dimension to their belief systems, ethics and religion are not coequal, and the term “secular ethics” is sometimes used to describe systems of ethics that derive their conclusions from logic or moral intuition rather than from religious teachings or revealed truths. Secular ethics and religious ethics can and often do reach the same conclusions, and may do so by the same means; there are both secular and religious articulations of utilitarianism, for instance. Major types of ethics include descriptive ethics (which describes the values people live by in practice), moral psychology (the study of how moral thinking develops in the human species), and applied ethics (addressing the ethical concerns of specific real-life situations and putting ethics into practice).

Exposure: The amount of radiation or pollutant present in a given environment that represents a potential health threat to living organisms.

Fair Trade: A certification scheme that evaluates the economic, social, and environmental impacts of the production and trade of agricultural products, in particular coffee, sugar, tea, chocolate, and others. Fair trade principles include fair prices, fair labor conditions, direct trade, democratic and transparent organizations, community development, and environmental sustainability.

Farmers' Market: Farmers' markets are places where local farmers gather to sell their produce or specialty goods in a specific area at a designated time. All food bought at a farmers' market is probably not produced using green or organic practices, but in general, the selection of organic food is broader than at a supermarket.

Fugitive Emissions: Emissions not caught by a capture system.

FSC: The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) is an international nonprofit organization promoting responsible stewardship of the global forests. FSC certifies forests and forest products that fulfill their requirements for responsible forest stewardship.

Geothermal Energy: Any and all energy produced by the internal heat of the earth.

Greenhouse Effect: The warming of Earth's atmosphere attributed to a buildup of carbon dioxide or other gases. Some scientists think that this buildup allows the sun's rays to heat the Earth, while making the infrared radiation atmosphere opaque to infrared radiation, thereby preventing a counterbalancing loss of heat.

Greenhouse Gas Emissions: Any emissions that are released by humans (though naturally occurring in the environment), mainly through the combustion of fossil fuels, and have a warming potential as they persist in the atmosphere, contributing to the greenhouse effect.

Green Purchasing: The practice of selecting products and services that minimize the ecological impact of an individual or organization's day-to-day activities. Many organizations implement a green purchasing policy with guidelines for purchasing agents to select the “greenest” products and services available.

Greenwashing: A marketing ploy for businesses to jump onto the green movement bandwagon. They are not genuinely interested in sustainability, but are simply trying to improve their standing with the public by paying lip service. A company interested in “going green” for public relations reasons is greenwashing.

Hybrid Vehicle: Vehicles that use both a combustible form of fuel (gasoline, ethanol, etc.) and an electric motor to power them. Hybrid vehicles use less gasoline than a traditional combustion engine, and some even have an electric plug-in to charge the battery.

Irradiation: Exposure to radiation of wavelengths shorter than those of visible light (gamma, x-ray, or ultraviolet), for medical purposes, to sterilize milk or other foodstuffs, or to induce polymerization of monomers or vulcanization of rubber.

LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design): An organization that created the Green Building Rating System, which encourages and accelerates global adoption of sustainable green building and development practices through the creation and implementation of universally understood and accepted tools and performance criteria.

LD 50/Lethal Dose: The dose of a toxicant or microbe that will kill 50 percent of the test organisms within a designated period. The lower the LD 50, the more toxic the compound.

Life Cycle of a Product: All stages of a product's development, from extraction of fuel for power to production, marketing, use, and disposal.

Lifetime Exposure: Total amount of exposure to a substance that a human would receive in a lifetime (usually assumed to be 70 years).

Lowest Acceptable Daily Dose: The largest quantity of a chemical that will not cause a toxic effect, as determined by animal studies.

Megawatt: One thousand kilowatts, or 1 million watts. It is the standard measure of electric power plant generating capacity.

Moral Relativism: The acknowledgment that different cultures have different moral standards. There are various levels of moral relativism, from the weak descriptivist articulation that simply acknowledges and describes those differences, to the normative position which says that there is no universal moral standard, only culturally derived morals. Moderate positions often propose that there are certain key moral standards that form a universal ethical core, such as taboos on murder, incest, or parental neglect. The question of which moral standards are universal becomes important when cultures deal with one another and when international bodies mediate between them. Most differences are not about matters as obvious or seemingly clear-cut as murder, but may instead bear on matters of justice or on the distribution of responsibility. The questions of who has the responsibility to do something about climate change, or of the ethical importance of avoiding polluting behaviors, vary widely around the world. The opposite of relativism is universalism.

Net Metering: A method of crediting customers for electricity that they generate on-site in excess of their purchased electricity consumption. Customers with their own generation offset the electricity they would have purchased from their utility. If such customers generate more than they use in a billing period, their electric meter turns backward to indicate their net excess generation. Depending on individual state or utility rules, the net excess generation may be credited to the customer's account (in many cases at the retail price), carried over to a future billing period, or ignored.

Net-Zero Energy: Characteristic of a building that produces as much energy as it consumes on an annual basis, usually through incorporation of energy production from renewable sources such as wind or solar.

NGO: A nongovernmental organization operating independently from government that does not function as a private business. Also known as civil society organizations, these groups typically act in the public interest or at some broader political, cultural, or social goals.

NIMBY: An acronym for “not in my backyard” that identifies the tendency for individuals and communities to oppose noxious or hazardous materials and activities in their vicinity. It implies a limited or parochial political vision of environmental justice.

Normative: Describing how a thing ought to be. A normative statement describes what should be done, regardless of what is done. Normative ethics are concerned with how people ought to behave and what actions they ought to take. “Alcohol intake impairs judgment” is a descriptive statement; “Drunk driving is wrong” is a normative statement.

North—South: A model of the world that contrasts the industrialized, developed, wealthy countries of the global north with the developing, poorer countries of the global south. Geography applying to this model is partially figurative, with Australia and New Zealand included in the global north, and a number of African, Middle Eastern, and Asian nations in the northern hemisphere included in the global south. The term became popular in the wake of the Cold War, when a new way of distinguishing between the developed (first and second worlds) and developing (third world) was desired. However, while there are many political and cultural ties between the nations of the global north, the global south—much like the third world—is varied enough to invite criticism of the model's accuracy and usefulness.

Pacific Gyre: Otherwise known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, it is a gyre of small bits of marine garbage, including chemical sludge and pelagic plastic, thought to be larger than the state of Texas.

Persistent Toxic Chemicals, Persistent Pollutants: Detrimental materials, like Styrofoam or DDT, which remain active for a long time after their application and can be found in the environment years, and sometimes decades, after they were used.

Photochemical Smog: Air pollution caused by chemical reactions of various pollutants emitted from different sources.

Planned Obsolescence: The art of making a product break/fail after a certain amount of time. The failure of the product does not occur in a period of time that you will blame the manufacturer, but soon enough for you to buy another one and make more profit for the manufacturer.

Political Ecology: A field of research concerned with the relationship of systems of social and economic power to environmental conditions, natural resources, and conservation.

Pollution: Generally, the presence of a substance in the environment that, because of its chemical composition or quantity, prevents the functioning of natural processes and produces undesirable environmental and health effects. Under the Clean Water Act, for example, the term has been defined as the man-made or man-induced alteration of the physical, biological, chemical, and radiological integrity of water and other media.

Pollution Prevention: Identifying areas, processes, and activities that create excessive waste products or pollutants in order to reduce or prevent them through alteration, or eliminating a process. Such activities, consistent with the Pollution Prevention Act of 1990, are conducted across all Environmental Protection Agency programs and can involve cooperative efforts with such agencies as the Departments of Agriculture and Energy.

Polychlorinated Biphenyls: A group of toxic, persistent chemicals used in electrical transformers and capacitors for insulating purposes, and in gas pipeline systems as lubricant. The sale and new use of these chemicals, also known as PCBs, were banned by law in 1979.

Postconsumer Waste: In the recycling business, material that has already been used and discarded by consumers, as opposed to manufacturing waste. Using products with “post-consumer” recycled content actually keeps waste out of landfills and incinerators, unlike “post-industrial” recycled content, most of which would get recycled anyway.

Power: Energy that is capable or available for doing work; the time rate at which work is performed.

Precautionary Principle: A philosophy which states that policy makers should not wait for scientific proof of harmful effects before taking steps to limit harmful environmental and human health impacts from new products or activities. Specific areas of application include genetically modified food products and chemicals that may have harmful developmental effects in low doses.

Radioactive Waste: Any waste that emits energy as rays, waves, streams, or energetic particles. Radioactive materials are often mixed with hazardous waste, from nuclear reactors, research institutions, or hospitals.

Recycling: The process by which materials that would otherwise become solid waste are collected, separated or processed, and reused in the form of raw materials or finished goods.

Risk: A measure of the probability that damage to life, health, property, and/or the environment will occur as a result of a given hazard.

Risk Assessment: Qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the risk posed to human health and/or the environment by the actual or potential presence and/or use of specific pollutants.

Semiconductor: Any material that has a limited capacity for conducting an electric current.

Smog: Air pollution typically associated with oxidants. The word is a portmanteau of “smoke” and “fog.”

Sustainability: To give support to, relief to, to carry, withstand, or to meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs.

Sustainable Seafood: The act of not overfishing, which causes the possibility of extinction or adverse effects on a habitat.

Toxicity: The degree to which a substance or mixture of substances can harm humans or animals.

Turbine: A device for converting the flow of a fluid (air, steam, water, or hot gases) into mechanical motion.

U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA): Established by President Lincoln in 1862, the USDA is an umbrella organization encompassing all aspects of farming production that has executive and legislative authority to assure food safety and protect national resources. Active operating units include the National Organic Program, Agricultural Resource Service, Food Safety and Inspection Service, Risk Management Agency, and Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service.

VOCs (Volatile Organic Compounds): Gases emitted from liquid or solid substances that may cause short-term and long-term harmful health effects. Examples of products containing VOCs include paints and lacquers, paint strippers, cleaning supplies, pesticides, building materials and furnishings, office equipment such as copiers and printers, correction fluids and carbonless copy paper, graphics and craft materials including glues and adhesives, permanent markers, and photographic solutions.

Water Pollution: Includes chemicals and debris that render water unusable for natural habitat, human consumption, and recreation.

Watershed Approach: A coordinated framework for environmental management that focuses public and private efforts on the highest-priority problems within hydrologically defined geographic areas taking into consideration both ground and surface water flow.

Wildlife Refuge: An area designated for the protection of wild animals, within which hunting and fishing are either prohibited or strictly controlled.