Cel IT™

ELE - Contexts

Environment

Extension Activities:

Your Mission:

Investigative and describe relationships between humans and their environments, and identify related issues and scientific questions

Describe the distribution and characteristics of water in local and global environments, and identify the significance of water supply and quality to the needs of humans and other living things.

How is the quality of the natural environmentdirectly related to people’s quality of life. Examine how population growth and economic development put pressure on the sustainability of the natural environment?

Resources

Check out these links to help

Environment Statistics

Natural Environment

Pressure for expansion of urban area into peripheral areas will have effects on the natural ecosystems of both the land and sea. What can be done?

Issues such as environmental pollution, waste generation and management, heritage protection and preservation of indigenous wildlife in built-up areas are all important issues to be considered as urban areas grow and develop. Do you agree?

Consider this every time a physical environment is changed, all the plants and animals in that environment must adapt to the changes or become extinct. Slow changes give living things time to adapt by the process of evolution over many generations. Fast changes usually don't give living things time to adapt, so they must either move elsewhere or become extinct.

What is the importance of our Natural Environment?

The places where we live, work, shop, and play affect human health and the natural environment. [How and where construction and development occurs can affect energy use, outdoor and indoor air quality, ecosystem quality and services, and natural and animal habitat protection.]

Natural environment is of crucial importance for social and economic life. We use the living world as a resource for food supply, an energy source, a source for recreation, a major source of medicines and natural resources for industrial products [In this respect the diversity of nature not only offers a vast power of choice for our current needs and desires. It also enhances the role of nature as a source of solutions for the future needs and challenges of humanity.]
In the past, human interaction with nature, although often having a disruptive effect on nature, often also enriched the quality and variety of the living world and its habitats - e.g. through the creation of artificial landscapes and soil cultivation by local farmers. [Since agriculture traditionally depends on sound environmental conditions, farmers have a special interest in the maintenance of natural resources and for centuries maintained a mosaic of landscapes which protected and enriched the natural environment.]

Outcome:

To understand that human pressure on environments is greater than before in terms of magnitude and efficiency in disrupting nature and natural landscapes.

Project Question:

What defines natural environment - understanding the terminology and concepts?

Develop your own area of interest and formulate questions that you want answered and relate to your understanding of 'natural environment'. For example

1. research, analyze, and collect data on how the natural environment influenced the Indigenious people long ago, and how it still influences us today, or

2. how does the environment play a major role in determining where and how people live, or

3. to what extent does physical environment influence a people's way of life?

Outcome:

To explore an understanding of the power that the natural environment has in terms in shaping the culture of our human existence.

Project Question:

Discuss whether the changes to the environment which are caused by people, and these usually occur in relatively short periods of time will have an impact on the Earth over time.

Overview:

Students will develop their own understanding of the Environment and Sustainability through: -

Economic and environmental benefits through green building principles and smart growth and by preserving open space and farmland.
Factory farms as sustainable technology
understanding how the earth provides a habitat for life and a resource for society;

This unit of study focuses on:

understanding the need for humans and animals to cohabitate and need to make the environment cleaner.
The more we know about issues, such as acid rain, global warming, oil spills, endangered species, pollution in the ocean, and non-native species, the better we understand the need for co-existence.

References