This would allow us to rebuild a healthy relationship with nature. A cleaner environment would also reduce the health problems humans face, including lungs diseases, heart attacks, infections, and cancer caused by the pollutants existing in our environment. Content Creators. Why It's Important to Protect our Environment. Recent Posts See All.
Post not marked as liked. Can We All Be Influencers? The Decline of Democracy in Pakistan. Post not marked as liked 2. This includes investigating the subsystems and other parts of natural systems, the relationships among them, and the processes at and above the level of the individual organism that allow biological systems to persist and evolve as dynamic entities.
Modern ecology emerged from the study of natural history, which focused primarily on compiling descriptions and catalogues of plants and animals and which generally considered biological systems including species to be static entities.
Thus, ecology and evolutionary biology are closely allied and are considered one field by many biologists. Although ecology developed during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a natural science, many of its concepts and principles have been applied to other fields, ranging from human social development to social and cultural systems and to epidemiology.
Also, the traditional focus on the study of natural systems such as forests, grasslands, wetlands, rivers, lakes, and oceans has increasingly been extended beyond purely natural systems. Recently, a social-ecological systems perspective and resilience theory have developed within the field of ecology to deal explicitly with humans and nature as a single, integrated, and complex system.
This integrative approach to understanding living systems has been found necessary to meaningfully address issues such as sustainability, a concept that implies the dependence of human health and well-being on healthy ecosystems. In this way ecology has become as much a worldview as a scientific discipline.
A baseline is a point of departure; a benchmark; a point along a continuum that marks progress toward a goal [5]. Central to the design of the National Environmental Legacy Act Legacy Act or Act is the collection of baseline data about natural resources, the definition of the nature and quality of the environmental legacy to be preserved, and ongoing monitoring to ensure preservation of the desired legacy. None of these are simple tasks, and they have been made infinitely more complicated by the accelerated pace of anthropogenic change, which has resulted in both shifting and already-shifted baselines.
The pitfall of shifting baselines is that environmental degradation often goes unrecognized by successive generations, which may not appreciate the degraded state of what they perceive as a pristine and functional ecosystem.
The shifting-baselines phenomenon poses several major challenges to designing an effective Legacy Act. First, if we fail to consider historical environmental conditions and set conservation goals based on already-shifted baselines, we may constrain — even doom — the resource legacy we seek to transfer.
Second, resource management decisions that fail to address gradual environmental change may subtly shift baselines, diminish the environmental legacy, and eventually push ecosystems to the brink. Finally, accelerated anthropogenic change ensures that some baselines will shift irreversibly, and in some cases, new, transformed ecosystems will emerge and stabilize within foreseeable generations.
Failure to understand and address these challenges in ways more sophisticated than the traditional metrics of species counts, acreage amounts, and pollutant levels could doom Legacy Act. To preserve the options available to future generations, an effective legacy act must consider the legacy of ecological functions, processes, services, and their interactions, as well as the ability of ecosystems to absorb and adapt to change.
Over the past four decades, environmental law has evolved into a legal system of statutes, regulations, guidelines, requirements, policies, and case-specific judicial and administrative interpretations that address a wide-ranging set of environmental issues and concerns [6].
These laws and requirements address not only the natural environment, including the air, water, and land, but also how humans interact with that natural environment and ecological systems. In addition, this system of environmental laws involves multiple layers of regulatory controls, since not only the federal government, but also state and local levels of government, have imposed interrelated and sometimes overlapping environmental requirements. This legal system is complex in itself and is made even more challenging by the difficulty of the interdisciplinary subject matter to be regulated health, safety, and environment and the quickly evolving scientific and technical issues typically presented in environmental cases.
Environmental laws and policies are predominantly goal-oriented [7]. Standards, principles and procedures for the protection of the environment are often instrumental to achieve, say, the conservation of fragile ecosystems and endangered species, the preservation of fresh water and other natural resources, the restoration of contaminated soils as well as the stratospheric ozone layer, and the protection of human health.
This goal oriented feature is evident in national as well as international law. It is apparent also when legal approaches to managing environmental problems are compared with economic or market-based instruments, such as emission trading, environmental taxes and voluntary agreements and codes of conduct.
National statutes and international treaties, standards, instruments and procedures are assessed with these underlying objectives in mind, and mainly analyzed in terms of effectiveness and achievability of the set objectives.
Even sustainable development, as an overarching societal objective with obvious environmental connotations, reflects this goal-oriented conception of environmental law and policy. Yet, environmental law also involves priorities, conflicts and clashes of interests — and concerns for justice and fairness. In fact, any drafting, negotiation, adoption, application and enforcement of environmental laws—indeed comprehending environmental law in general—induces justice considerations, i.
Although well established concepts in environmental law, whether based on custom or statutes, appear neutral on their face, a closer study, or simply placing them in a context, may reveal disproportionate burdening or restricting effects for certain groups or categories when these concepts are applied. It may also show how certain interests or subjects are ignored or demeaned.
Such concerns are indeed raised in local as well as global contexts, and they also include structural issues, such as gender, class, ethnicity and — on a global scale — North—South relations. International environmental law is notoriously uncertain in relation to the normative content of its norms [8]. There are many factors which contribute to this state of affairs, one of them, for example, being the method of international law making, which in many cases is based on the principle of the balancing of the interests of all interested parties, such as the management and apportionment of rights in relation to international watercourses and the responsibility of States for environmental damage, which relies to a certain degree on this principle.
Other factors, which play a significant role in environmental norm-setting, are the competing interests and differentiation in the legal position of developed and developing States, i. Policy makers responding to these demands increasingly understand that environmental protection must be addressed in a holistic and expansive manner [9].
Local problems cannot be separated from national, regional, or even global conditions. As a result, the interface of domestic both national and local and international environmental law has rapidly expanded. Such an evolution corresponds to the physical reality of a biosphere composed of interdependent elements that do not recognize political boundaries and the increasingly transnational character of the human activities that harm nature and its processes.
Internationalization of markets and the emergence of a global civil society present new opportunities as well as new challenges. Overconsumption threatens to exhaust living and nonliving resources, whereas rising greenhouse gas emissions detrimentally modify the global climate.
New problems resulting from technology and changes in the nature or scope of human activities are constantly being identified, such as the introduction of unprocessed endocrine-disrupting pharmaceuticals into fresh water. As a consequence, there is a constant need to develop and revise the national and international legal framework.
The geographic scope of environmental law is global, but so are its interdisciplinary requirements. Beyond such obvious topics as water law and endangered species legislation, laws and policies concerning energy, trade, investment, transportation, and consumer protection also affect environmental conditions. At the center of the problems, impacts, and solutions are individuals with rights guaranteed by national and international law. The relevance of economics for the evaluation and design of environmental policy has numerous dimensions [10].
Some relate to the basis for environmental decision making, e. First, environmental resources, amenities, and quality have economic value. Second, while markets are useful in providing society with goods and services in general, there are serious market imperfections what some describe as market failures that justify government intervention to protect the environment.
Third, in the proper context, economics can contribute to evaluating and prioritizing alternative policies for improving the environment, both within a given area of concern such as the reduction of air pollution from a variety of sources and among different areas of concern such as air pollution, water pollution, and hazardous wastes. Fourth, economics, through the application of cost-benefit analysis, offers an alternative policy rationale for determining whether, and to what extent, a environmental problem should be controlled or addressed.
Finally, market-based instruments are increasingly promoted as complements to, and sometimes as substitutes for, traditional regulatory approaches. This is illustrative of the fact that economics and law compete politically for dominance in environmental policy formulation.
In contemporary environmental law and policy, economic analysis provides the dominant theoretical framework for thinking and reasoning about environmental protection [11]. Join our community of educators and receive the latest information on National Geographic's resources for you and your students. Skip to content.
Image buffalo and crane Wildlife and land preservation efforts help protect diverse wildlife populations such as this Asian water buffalo Bubalus bubalis and grey heron Ardea cinrea in Yala National Park, Sri Lanka.
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