welcome to our first lecture on environmental science so today the goal is really just to get you to be able to define and describe the environment so what the environment is and what that what that term includes and a very brief description of what environmental science is as a field of study so when you think about the environment if somebody just asks you what is the environment you probably list off the birds and the other animals are around you maybe some plants and a variety of other things but the environment is essentially everything it is the the air you are breathing in the air pollution you're breathing in the water you're drinking the the contaminants and pollutants that are also affecting your water and the sources of those it's your neighbors the noise made by your neighbors everything that you're interacting with or that either indirectly or directly would be part of your environment and so the environment is really a very large ambiguous description of your surroundings and that includes pretty much every everything and so that means the environment people who study the environment study a lot of different pieces of it for example i study uh the biological components of it primarily so i study predator prey interactions and ecology and how animals interact with their environment but the environment would also be studied by people who want to look at how water is used and how water is used for agriculture or people who want to look at geology and how the rocks have formed in a given area and so the environment is really broad now when you combine the terms to make environmental science then you're looking at how do we study the environment to get get rigorous falsifiable information out of it so you can kind of think of science as either being a verb or noun now if you think about science as a noun you can think about your textbooks science over many many years has developed a huge body of knowledge and you as a student are interfacing with that knowledge and that body of knowledge on an everyday basis in that way it's a noun now we also often think about science as a verb so it's a way of thinking it's a way of going about answering questions in a way that produces reliable results you've probably heard of the scientific method which we'll be talking about next week so in that way it's a way for us to gather information that we can at least trust is reasonably reliable and we then use science and use the process of science to gain more knowledge now that knowledge can be made through observations like watching how birds behave in regards to various environmental factors through experimentation so maybe putting different fertilizers on different fields to see how much we can affect crop growth or through just exploration learning what's out there in the natural world and figuring new things out a good example of this is a blood pressure medicine that came from studying viper venom in south america and so we gain knowledge to a variety of ways but we use similar methods so what we call the scientific method or methods to study the environment and again the environment's really broad so environmental science is like an all-encompassing field of study just looking at how things interact with their surroundings so on some scale you think about the entire globe being the environment on an even larger study might be able to think beyond that but we generally think on a smaller scale like the environment of clovis or the central valley or california uh and if you think about how clovis is we are heavily influenced by the sierra nevadas because we get a lot of air pollution we get our water from there um but most of our wind currents flow from west to east so we're influenced heavily from everything to the west and so depending on how you how you're looking at the environment on any given question dictates the scope that you want to address it now we are going to kind of divide out the environment here in several different ways the first way we'll be looking at biotic and abiotic worlds so biotic is anything that was or is living so an owl would be a biotic or a biotic thing we are biotic beings so biotic means just life and so the decomposing leaves would be biotic the bacteria in the soil would be biotic anything that's alive or used to be alive now every living thing relies on abiotic uh things so abiotic means non-living so we rely on the air to br that we breathe in to survive the air would be abiotic we sit on a an earth right we walk around the earth every day the earth is abiotic it's primarily made of rock water is an abiotic thing anything that's not living or was never living and those two the abiotic world and abiotic worlds are heavily interactive the biotic world adjusts the abiotic world and relies on the abiotic world now more recently at least if you think on the geologic scale humans have become an all-encompassing factor that you have to take into account whenever you talk about anything related to environmental science so humans affect both the biotic and abiotic worlds and we have mucked about with those interactions in pretty much every way possible and so one of the primary things that we're going to talk about this semester is how humans have influenced the environment so take a quick second answer a few questions regarding uh answering a few questions about whether or not these things are biotic or abiotic now another way you could subdivide environmental science is into natural systems so systems that don't have anything to do with humans existed before humans did don't require humans to operate or anything like that and human systems which are human populations activities driven by by humans um and those two worlds interact very very heavily so if you talk about the abiotic and biotic subdivisions we just we just went over those would fall underneath the natural systems idea so the owls and the rocks and the minerals and the trees those exist outside of whether our humans did or not so those are within the natural systems now all of our activities are building houses our agriculture our mining for resources our air pollution all of that influences both the biotic and abiotic worlds right and so those all those things cross and have one big interaction that produces a lot of different outcomes and those outcomes are a lot of what we're gonna be talking about in this course so we're going to be talking about land and water use so how do we use water what implications to have on the environment and how we polluted it we're also going to talk a lot about pollution both in the water in the soil in the air noise pollution even but ways that humans have harmful impacts on the environment we're going to talk a lot about energy so how does energy how do we create energy how do we switch to renewable energies what are the implications and consequences of energy production how do we um minimize those and of course when everybody thinks about the environment that one of the first things they can think about is climate change for good reason and so we're going to be talking a lot about climate change climate change is driven current the current climate change is driven by by human activities so a human system that has implications for every single biotic and abiotic system out there so we're gonna be talking a lot about these interactions um and so now you should be able to describe what is the environment and a brief description of what environmental science is in the next video we're going to be talking about the earth so a quick overview of the layers of the earth in the atmosphere and what the earth is composed of