ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES

BSC SEM III

SEC 1 – MULTIDISCIPLINARY NATURE OF

ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES
ENVIRONMENT
AL STUDIES
Key Terms: Ecology
• Environment

Environmental Studies

Why Environmental Studies?

Objectives, Scope & Importance

of the course
 • Ecology is the science of studying the
interactions of organisms with their
Environment and with one another. It
comes from the Greek words ‘oikos’
ECOLOGY (home/habitat) and ‘logos’
(study/science).
 What is Environment ?

Scientifically Environment
means all of the outside
The term is derived from a
forces, events, and things
French word ‘Environ’
that act on a thing. The
which means ENCIRCLE.
environment is everything
that is around something.
 • It is the complex set of physical, geographic,
biological, social, cultural and political
conditions that surround an individual or
organism and that ultimately determines its
form and nature of its survival. – from World
Bank report on education

ENVIRONME It includes:
1) All factors living and nonliving that affect an
NT individual organism or population at any point
in the life cycle.
2) Set of circumstances surrounding a particular
occurrence.
3) All the things that surrounds us.
 Environmental studies deals with every
issue that affects an organism living on the
earth.

It is an applied science as its seeks practical

answers to making human civilization
sustainable on the earth’s finite resources.
Environmental
Studies ?
It is essentially a multidisciplinary approach

Its components include Biology, Geology,

Chemistry, Physics, Engineering, Sociology,
Health Sciences, Anthropology, Economics,
Statistics and Philosophy.
 • Not just collection of information
• For awareness – social and individual
• Conflict between development and
environmental conservation
• BALANCE
INTRODUCTI At one end it studies how the life
process of a tribal community protects
ON the environment surrounding it; On the
other hand it probes what will be the
effect of state of the art technology on
human environment! Thus the scope of
environmental studies is extremely
wide and covers some aspects of
nearly every major discipline.
 Develop CONCERN for our
own environment.

Objective of
this Course
The concern leads us to ACT at
your own level to protect the
environment we all live in.
 There is the need for information -
the need to use resources more
equitably.
The three
reasons for There is a need to change the way
studying the - based on observation and self
state of the learning.
environment pro-environmental action -
including activities we can do in
our daily life to protect it.
 ????
WHY WE HAVE TO STUDY A
COURSE IN
‘ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES’ ???
WHY WE 1. Is there any way
HAVE TO out ! If I want degree
STUDY A I got to do it!!
COURSE IN
‘ENVIRONM It is prescribed in the
ENTAL
STUDIES’ ?? Syllabus
?
 2. Legal Obligations

Supreme Court in it’s judgment has made learning of the

subject mandatory at under graduate level (1991).

University Grants Commission has directed all affiliated

institutions to compulsorily teach the subject, for all the
branches of engineering (2004).
 3. We are Victims of our own acts

Our Consumption
pattern & Lifestyles

Indiscriminate Use
Pollution from production
of
Of Artificial Resources
Natural Resources

Degradation of Our Environment

We ourselves are
Victims
4. You are going to be Modern day
Professionals

Being Modern day Professionals, You will be

required to encounter Environment related
problems at all levels-
 “If you plan for one year,
plant paddy.
WHY
If you plan for ten years,
SHOULD
plant trees.
WE TEACH !
But if you plan for hundred
years, educate people.”
 A Soft Drink bottling unit of company X was
established in Plachimada, a village in Kerala state, in
the year 2000. Company dug bore wells to extract
No Water? clean drinking water for soft drink. Company had
obtained clearance from the state’s Environment
Drink Monitoring Authority and had been permitted by the
local body to start the production.
Thanda!
Case Study of Production unit was extracting water to an extent of
3,50,000 Liters Per Day (LPD) { 3,50,000 LPD means
Plachimada per capita daily consumption of 5,000 people.} Unit in
it’s full production capacity had planned to draw
15,00,000LPD of water { Equal to LPCD of 21,430
people.}
 By 2002, all the open wells- they were the main
source of water for the people- not only in the village ,
but surrounding 10 villages dried out. With most
common life sustaining resource not available, people
No Water? were pushed to desperation.
Drink
They started mass protests against the company and
Thanda! demanded immediate closure of the unit. The local
body sensing the heat of people’s anger, withdrew the
Case Study of permission to run the unit.
Plachimada
(Cont…) The company has sought the intervention from the
court of law and the litigation is in Highest court of
the land. Mean while, there is no respite for company
from protesting public. The protest has spread not just
across the region but across the world !
HENCE THERE IS AN URGENT NEED TO
UNDERSTAND THE PROBLEMS WE ARE FACING AND
FORESEE THE CALAMITIES THAT MAY FALL ON US IF
WE DO NOT HEED THE RATIONAL WARNINGS.

WISE PEOPLE SAY

BETTER TO BE LATE THAN NEVER
 • Natural and Man made Environment
• When we look around the area we live in
(natural surrounding) it was originally a forest, a
Scope and river, a mountain, a desert or a combination of
these – the natural landscape.
Importance Modified heavily by human
beings!
Web of life?

We use water – drink and other activities

We breath air

We use resources – food is made

We depend on community of living - we are a part of it.

plants and animals – forms the web!
 Our dependence on nature is so
great that we can’t continue to
live without protecting earth’s
PROTECTIN resources
G EARTH’S
RESOURCES Most traditions refer our
environment as “Mother Earth”
and learned respecting nature is
vital for their livelihoods.
  Agriculturist
 industrialist
• Application of technological innovations.
eg: BT cotton, megadams, industries, fertilizers
and pesticides.
OUR INTERACTION • Natural resources: use of large amount of
WITH EARTH natural resourses like water, minerals, wood,
petroleum products etc.
• Exhaustion of nonrenewable resources:
minerals, oils etc if used extensively with out
any thought for present and future
generations.
• Natural resources can be compared with
money in our bank.(Sustainable utilisation).
• Consumer oriented society
 • Limited Natural Resources
• Added to this is misuse of resources. We waste
or pollute large amounts of nature’s clean water.
OUR INTERACTION • Water Pollution (Gastro-intestinal diseases and
many pollutants are known to cause cancer)
WITH EARTH
• We create more and more materials like plastic
that we discard after a single use; and we waste
colossal amounts of food, which is discarded as
garbage.
• Air Pollution (Respiratory diseases)
• Industries – Fertilizers, waste generation
• Way of life – vehicles, plastics
 • Manufacturing processes create solid
waste byproducts that are discarded,
as well as chemicals that flow out as
liquid waste and pollute water, and
gases that pollute the air. Increasing
OUR INTERACTION amounts of waste cannot be managed
WITH EARTH by natural processes. These
accumulate in our environment,
leading to a variety of diseases and
other adverse environmental impacts
now seriously affecting all our lives.
 • In such a alarming state of affairs,
Improving this situation will only
happen if each of us begins to take
actions in our daily lives that will help
WHAT TO preserve our environmental resources.
We cannot expect Governments alone
DO? to manage the safeguarding of the
environment, nor can we expect other
people to prevent environmental
damage. We need to do it ourselves. It
is a responsibility that each of us must
take on as ones own.
 In order to appreciate the vast
areas of Environmental Concerns
An Overview which this subject aims to address,
it is needed to have a bird’s eye
of Present view of the present state of
state of Environment at both National and
International levels.
Affairs
He are some quick points:
 PRESENT ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES OF
GLOBAL CONCERN

The main environmental issues today are wide ranging and all-
encompassing: deforestation, biodiversity, soil erosion, climate
change, pesticide build-up, industrial and municipal pollution.
Main cause: anthropogenic interventions in the natural and self-
sustaining cycles. All these problems can be categorized into
three main issues:
1. Population explosion
2. Land degradation
3. Environmental pollution: Industrialization,
agriculture/fertilizer/pesticide/green house gases, air
pollution, acid rain, ozone depletion, green house effect, water
pollution, deforestation.
 Environment problems in India can be
put into three classes:

Poverty
Environment
Problems in
India Problems arising as negative effects of
the very process of development.

Problems arising from improper

implementation of the directives and
laws of Environmental protection.
 Short term economic
Over draft/use, benefit – indicator of
Misuse/Unwisely use, progress!
Wastage, Greed/Need, • v/s Long term ecological
etc. – leads to stress! benefit

Result: Forests – disappear

Unsustainable
use:
Rivers – run dry Deserts – spread

Conclusion: Human
Air, Water, Soil –
well being seriously
polluted
affected!
 For every resource to use, we must ask questions
ourselves:
Where does it originate?
For every
resource to Who uses it most intensively?

use, we must What is the value of resource?

ask questions
How is it over used / misused?
ourselves:
Who is responsible for its improper use? (Resource
collector/middleman/enduser)
How can we help to conserve it and prevent its
unsustainable use?
 ASSIGNMENT – I

Activity 1
• Take any article that you use in daily life –a bucket full of water, or an item
of food, a table, or a book.
• Trace its components journey backwards from your home to their origins as
natural resources in our environment.
• How many of these components are renewable resources and how many non-
renewable?
Activity 2
Try to answer the following questions for one of the components in the article
you chose in activity 2:
• Are you using that resource unsustainably?
• In what ways could you reduce, reuse and recycle that resource?
• Is there an unequal distribution of this resource so that you are more fortunate
than many others who have less access to it?
VIDEO
14 MIN