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The period since 1950 has brought "the most rapid transformation of the human relationship with the natural world in the history of humankind". [106] Through 2018, humans have reduced forest area by ~30% and grasslands/shrubs by ~68%, to make way for livestock grazing and crops for humans. [107]
Human ecology has a history of focusing attention on humans' impact on the biotic world. [1] [34] Paul Sears was an early proponent of applying human ecology, addressing topics aimed at the population explosion of humanity, global resource limits, pollution, and published a comprehensive account on human ecology as a discipline in 1954. He saw ...
Human history is the record of humankind from prehistory to the present. Modern humans evolved in Africa around 300,000 years ago and initially lived as hunter-gatherers.They migrated out of Africa during the Last Ice Age and had spread across Earth's continental land except Antarctica by the end of the Ice Age 12,000 years ago.
Environmental history is the study of human interaction with the natural world over time, emphasising the active role nature plays in influencing human affairs and vice versa. Environmental history first emerged in the United States out of the environmental movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and much of its impetus still stems from present-day ...
In the year 2015, 1.8 million people world wide died because of water pollution and over 1 billion people became ill. [8] Low-income and third-world communities are especially endangered, because they often live close to industries with high emission. [ 8 ]
An early concept for the Anthropocene was the Noosphere by Vladimir Vernadsky, who in 1938 wrote of "scientific thought as a geological force". [17] Scientists in the Soviet Union appear to have used the term Anthropocene as early as the 1960s to refer to the Quaternary, the most recent geological period.
This was compared against climate reconstructions for the last 90,000 years. The researchers found correlations of human spread and species extinction indicating that the human impact was the main cause of the extinction, while climate change exacerbated the frequency of extinctions. The study, however, found an apparently low extinction rate ...
Over the last two decades, the world's oceans have absorbed 20 to 30% of emitted CO 2. [6]: 450 Thus, around half of human-caused CO 2 emissions have been absorbed by land plants and by the oceans. [73] This fraction of absorbed emissions is not static. If future CO 2 emissions decrease, the Earth will be able to absorb up to around 70%.