The Force of Environmental Science:
Environmental science embraces now virtually all disciplines which are concerned with the physical, chemical, and biological surroundings in which organisms live.
Earth and Life sciences are also concerned with process and change, but environmental science is especially concerned with changes wrought by human activities, and their immediate and long-term implications for the welfare of living organisms, including humans.
In many areas of environmental science issues acquire political overtures that can, and often does, lead to controversies. For instance, we may as a body suggest that a particular activity is harmful, then modification of that activity may require national legislation or an international treaty and, almost certainly, there will be an economic price that not everyone will have to pay or pay equally. Environmental policies set, by the British Government for example, will be aimed, rightly, towards the long-term. In the short-term, there will be financial losers and, not surprisingly, such groups of people or organisations will often complain.
Ladies and gentlemen, over the last 30-years or so we have grown anxious about the condition of the natural environment and increasingly determined to minimise avoidable damage to it. In most countries – including the United States and European Union – there is now a legal requirement for those who propose any major development project to calculate its environmental consequences, and the resulting environmental impact assessment is taken into account when deciding whether to permit work to proceed. Certain activities are forbidden on environmental grounds, by granting protection to particular areas, although it has to be said that such protection is rarely absolute. It follows that people engaged in the construction, extractive, manufacturing, power-generating or power-distributing, agricultural, forestry, or distributive industries are increasingly expected to predict and take responsibility for the environmental effects of their activities. Consequently, they should have a general understanding of environmental science and its application. For this reason, many skilled professions across the board now include an element of environmental science within their core remits. Many accountants, for example, are now required to report environmental audits and the impacts and attributed costs associated with company practice.
In the near future the Blog Author, Mark Dowe, is to be involved with certain ‘mapping’ functions in regards to the implementation of a Geographical Information System (GIS). This work will be closely monitored by Government agencies in Scotland to which the Executive in Scotland has pledged major financial resources. For example, I will be involved within a comprehensive study to be undertaken in Scotland of an important estuary. The work involved will require mapping the solid geology of the underlying rock, identifying the overlying sediment, measuring the flow and movement of water and the sediment it carries, tracing coastal currents and tidal flows, analysing the chemical composition of the water and monitoring changes in its distribution and temperature at differing times and in different parts of the estuary, sampling and recording the species living in and adjacent to the estuary and measuring their productivity. Such tasks will, undoubtedly, engage scientists from a wide range of disciplines: environmental science exists most obviously as a body of knowledge in its own right when a team of specialists assembles in addressing issues like this. Consider the studies of global climate change. Such studies engage the attention of climatologists, palaeoclimatologists, glaciologists, atmospheric chemists, oceanographers, botanists, marine biologist, computer scientists, and many others, working in institutions all over the world.
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