The natural environment or natural world encompasses all living and non-living things occurring naturally, meaning in this case not artificial. The term is most often applied to the Earth or some parts of Earth. This environment encompasses the interaction of all living species, climate, weather and natural resources that affect human survival and economic activity.
The concept of the natural environment can be distinguished as components:
In contrast to the natural environment is the built environment. Built environments are where humans have fundamentally transformed landscapes such as urban settings and agricultural land conversion, the natural environment is greatly changed into a simplified human environment. Even acts which seem less extreme, such as building a mud hut or a photovoltaic system in the desert, the modified environment becomes an artificial one. Though many animals build things to provide a better environment for themselves, they are not human, hence beaver dams, and the works of mound-building termites, are thought of as natural. (Full article...)
Plug-in electric cars have several benefits compared to conventional internal combustion engine vehicles. All-electric vehicles have lower operating and maintenance costs, and produce little or no local air pollution, thus (depending on the electricity source) reducing societal dependence on fossil fuels and significantly decreasing greenhouse gas emissions, but take time to recharge and are heavily reliant on sufficient charging infrastructures to remain operationally practical. Plug-in hybrids provide most of electric cars' benefits when they are operating in all-electric mode, though typically having shorter all-electric ranges, but have the auxiliary option of driving as a conventional hybrid vehicle when the battery is low, using its internal combustion engine (usually a gasoline engine) to alleviate the range anxiety that accompanies current electric cars. (Full article...)
... that Carol Van Strum, an environmental activist who wrote the book A Bitter Fog, accumulated 20,000 documents across 40 years that revealed corporate and government cover-ups?
Wind Power is the conversion of wind energy into more useful forms, usually electricity, using wind turbines. The energy is generated in the form of electricity by converting the rotation of turbine blades into electrical current by means of an electrical generator. Wind power is used in large scale wind farms for national electrical grids as well as in small individual turbines for providing electricity to rural residences or grid-isolated locations.
Through legal interventions, advocacy and public campaigns, contribution to documentary films, television debates and press articles she has successfully mainstreamed and built consciousness about previously unknown environmental hazards, notably noise pollution and sand mining, and has won national and International awards for her work. She also set up the first network for protection of activists in India after an attack on her by the sand mafia is 2004. (Full article...)
The Brundtland Commission officially dissolved in 1987 after releasing Our Common Future, also known as the Brundtland Report. The document popularized the term "sustainable development" and won the Grawemeyer Award in 1991. In 1988, the Center for Our Common Future replaced the commission. (Full article...)
The following are images from various environment-related articles on Wikipedia.
Image 1Loch Lomond in Scotland forms a relatively isolated ecosystem. The fish community of this lake has remained stable over a long period until a number of introductions in the 1970s restructured its food web. (from Ecosystem)
Image 3Blue Marble composite images generated by NASA in 2001 (left) and 2002 (right) (from Environmental science)
Image 4View of Earth, taken in 1972 by the Apollo 17 crew. Approximately 71% of Earth's surface (an area of some 361 million square kilometers) consists of ocean (from Ecoregion)
Image 5Sequence of a decomposing pig carcass over time (from Ecosystem)
Image 6Terrestrial Ecoregions of the World (Olson et al. 2001, BioScience) (from Ecoregion)
Image 10Few creatures make the ice shelves of Antarctica their habitat, but water beneath the ice can provide habitat for multiple species. (from Habitat)
Image 11Wetland habitat types in Borneo (from Habitat)
Image 13Environmental science examines the effects of humans on nature, such as the Glen Canyon Dam in the United States (from Environmental science)
Image 14Global oceanic and terrestrial phototroph abundance, from September 1997 to August 2000. As an estimate of autotroph biomass, it is only a rough indicator of primary production potential and not an actual estimate of it. (from Ecosystem)
Image 18Dense mass of white crabs at a hydrothermal vent, with stalked barnacles on right (from Habitat)
Image 19Biodiversity of a coral reef. Corals adapt and modify their environment by forming calcium carbonate skeletons. This provides growing conditions for future generations and forms a habitat for many other species. (from Environmental science)
Image 32Proportion of forest area by forest area density class and global ecological zone, 2015, from Food and Agriculture Organization publication The State of the World's Forests 2020. Forests, biodiversity and people – In brief (from Ecoregion)
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