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Ecology is a new science and considered as an important branch of biological science, having only become prominent during the second half of the 20th century. [1] Ecological thought is derivative of established currents in philosophy, particularly from ethics and politics.
In 1967, Roderick Nash published Wilderness and the American Mind, a work that has become a classic text of early environmental history.In an address to the Organization of American Historians in 1969 (published in 1970) Nash used the expression "environmental history", [4] although 1972 is generally taken as the date when the term was first coined. [5]
From ancient times, people suspected that the climate of a region could change over the course of centuries. For example, Theophrastus, a pupil of Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle in the 4th century BC, told how the draining of marshes had made a particular locality more susceptible to freezing, and speculated that lands became warmer when the clearing of forests exposed them to sunlight.
Ecosystems may be habitats within biomes that form an integrated whole and a dynamically responsive system having both physical and biological complexes. Ecosystem ecology is the science of determining the fluxes of materials (e.g. carbon, phosphorus) between different pools (e.g., tree biomass, soil organic material).
The time from roughly 15,000 to 5,000 BCE was a time of transition, and swift and extensive environmental change, as the planet was moving from an Ice age, towards an interstadial (warm period). Sea levels rose dramatically (and are continuing to do so ), land that was depressed by glaciers began lifting up again , forests and deserts expanded ...
In historical ecology, the landscape is defined as an area of interaction between human culture and the non-human environment. The landscape is a perpetually changing, physical manifestation of history. [17] Historical ecology revises the notion of the ecosystem and replaces it with the landscape. While an ecosystem is static and cyclic, a ...
[47] [48] It is intended to serve a similar role to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. [49] Ecosystem services are limited and also threatened by human activities. [50] To help inform decision-makers, many ecosystem services are being assigned economic values, often based on the cost of replacement with anthropogenic alternatives.
Environmental issues are disruptions in the usual function of ecosystems. [1] Further, these issues can be caused by humans (human impact on the environment) [2] or they can be natural. These issues are considered serious when the ecosystem cannot recover in the present situation, and catastrophic if the ecosystem is projected to certainly ...