SOME HUMAN DIMENSIONS OF ENV. PROBLEMS

• All human activity takes place in a biosphere which is essentially closed in terms of matter and energy, except for the influx of solar radiation.

• Humans modify their natural surroundings, and these in turn affect humans, and so on.

• Humans' interactions with our environments are mediated through social institutions, cultural beliefs and technology

• Present social institutions evolved when the scale of human activity relative to the regenerative capacity of the biosphere was small

• The scale of human activity relative to the regenerative capacity of the biosphere is no longer small.

• Human belief systems & their institutional expressions have not yet caught up with this new situation.

• Every level of organization of human activity is being called on to adapt to this new situation

• The causes and the solutions to environmental problems may lie in individual, group, nation, and global levels of action.

• Environmental problems involve human-environment interactions that threaten something valued by some humans.

• Environmental issues involve disagreements about the existence, nature, causes, and solutions of environmental problems.

• Solving environmental problems depends on our abilities to influence each other, cooperate with each other, and to be critical of the information we receive.

• Environmental policy must be based on science and learning (about how the non-human world behaves), in addition to traditional principles of equity and efficiency.

• The precautionary principle: Demonstrate (scientifically) low likelihood of harm before undertaking potentially harmful activities!

• The combination of geometric growth rates of human activity, plus unknown thresholds, lag-times, and discontinuities in the responses of natural systems to perturbations calls for application of the precautionary principle.