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Let us get acquainted with some of this new terminology:
Sustainability:
Making sure that we only use resources that we can replace.
Ecology:
Word derived from the Greek oikos, which means house or place in which to live. Ecology reminds us that human beings are part of the house called Earth. Ecology attempts to understand the multifaceted web of linkages in particular environment or ecosystem: a meadow, a mangrove swamp, an island, a continent, an ocean, or the Earth itself.
Global warming:
A thickening of the atmosphere by our waste industrial gases, principally carbon dioxide produced when on earth we burn coal or petrol or any fossil fuel, which causes more of the sun's heat to be retained near the surface of the earth. Global warming has increased by 30% from 1850 till 1980 and it is forecast to increase to reach 75% by 2060. Temperatures will rise by 3 degrees, and by 7 at the poles, the glaciers will melt and the level of the seas will rise by 5-7 meters. The water will cover many coastland towns.
Deforestation:
A few thousand years ago a rainforest belt covered 14% of the earth land surface. Humanity has already destroyed half of that. The logging industry threatens large areas of rainforest around the world. Most of the harm has been done in the last 200 years - in particular since 1945. Latin America has 57% of the remaining rainforest. SE Asia and the Pacific Island have 25%; Africa has 18%. Between 40-50% of all types of living things, 5 million species of plants, animals, insects, live in tropical rainforests, though these cover less then 2% of the globe. The deforestation affected even indigenous people: anthropologists estimate that in 1500 the Amazon basin had a population of 6-9 million. In Brazil today there are less then 200,000 Indians; about half the 230 tribes who lived in Brazil at the turn of the century are now extinct.
Environment:
Territory lived in by a particular human group. The earth, in such way, assumes emotional, juridical and political meanings, universally diffused and significant. The bonds between the person and the territory are so radical, that they create a psychological and juridical attachment, which leads man, both as an individual and as a community, to identify prosperity and existence with the earth as an essential to life. For this patch of earth, he is able to suffer, to fight and even to die.