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Encyclopedia of Global Resources part 28

Encyclopedia of Global Resources part 28 provides a wide variety of perspectives on both traditional and more recent views of Earth's resources. It serves as a bridge connecting the domains of resource exploitation, environmentalism, geology, and biology, and it explains their interrelationships in terms that students and other nonspecialists can understand. The articles in this set are extremely diverse, with articles covering soil, fisheries, forests, aluminum, the Industrial Revolution, the U.S. Department of the Interior, the hydrologic cycle, glass, and placer mineral deposits. . | 240 Conservation Global Resources Background The planet Earth may be unable to support future increases in population unless on a worldwide scale humans begin to conser ve and reduce their rates of consumption and increase efforts to recycle resources for new uses. Moreover the current global economy is no longer sustainable and is destroying the environment and providing little to support the globally impoverished. Internationally governments and social activists have begun to work together to establish policies that protect the environment and the sustainability of life while concomitantly fostering harmonious economic growth. Conservation generally refers to the use of resources found in the natural environment in such a way that the resources will serve humans effectively and will be available to humans for as long as possible. Therefore it does not refer to the indefinite preservation of resources in their natural state. Quantitatively effective conser vation could be said to involve obtaining the maximum use for the maximum number of people. The Earth can be viewed as a life-support system composed of four major subsystems through which energy flows and matter cycles. The subsystems are the atmosphere biosphere lithosphere and hydrosphere referring to gases life systems rock and mineral materials and water respectively. As energy flows and matter cycles within and among these subsystems they interact as component parts to compose the Earth s ecosystem an ecosystem may be defined as a community of plants animals and other organisms interacting in an environment . Humans alter the natural cycling of energy and flow of matter in the Earth s ecosystem. We extract things from natural systems convert them into what we perceive as more useful products and then return them to the natural environment in different forms and physical states. In order to achieve more desirable energy conversions we also use energy from the environment. Natural resources are all of the .