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The nature–culture divide is the notion of a dichotomy between humans and the environment. [1] It is a theoretical foundation of contemporary anthropology that considers whether nature and culture function separately from one another, or if they are in a continuous biotic relationship with each other.
If stable states exist, gradual changes in environmental factors may have little effect on a system until a threshold is reached, at which point a catastrophic state shift may occur. Understanding the nature of these thresholds will help inform the design of monitoring programs, ecosystem restoration, and other management decisions.
The Western Climate Initiative, to identify, evaluate, and implement collective and cooperative ways to reduce greenhouse gases in the region, focusing on a market-based cap-and-trade system. [22] A significantly profound challenge is to identify the natural environmental dynamics in contrast to environmental changes not within natural variances.
The balance of nature, also known as ecological balance, is a theory that proposes that ecological systems are usually in a stable equilibrium or homeostasis, which is to say that a small change (the size of a particular population, for example) will be corrected by some negative feedback that will bring the parameter back to its original "point of balance" with the rest of the system.
Ecoregions of North America, featuring the 50 United States, the District of Columbia and the five inhabited territories. The following is a list of United States ecoregions as identified by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). The United States is a megadiverse country with a high level of endemism across a wide variety of ecosystems.
The United States is part of North America. The environment of the United States comprises diverse biotas, climates, and geologies. This diversity leads to a number of different distinct regions and geographies in which human communities live. This includes a rich variety of species of animals, fungi, plants and other organisms.
In 1997, Grimm and Wissel made an inventory of 167 definitions used in the literature and found 70 different stability concepts. [5] One of the strategies that these two authors proposed to clarify the subject is to replace ecological stability with more specific terms, such as constancy , resilience and persistence .
The phrase "coupled human–environment systems" appears in the earlier literature (dating back to 1999) noting that social and natural systems are inseparable. [7] [8] "In 2007 a formal standing program in Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems was created by the U.S. National Science Foundation."