agrarian v. industrialized system
-An agrarian system is a concept used to describe the dynamic set of economic and technological factors that affect agricultural practices
- Industrial society is associated with the emergence of industrialization which transformed much of Europe and United States by replacing essentially agriculture based societies with industrial societies based on the use of machines and non-animal sources of energy to produce finished goods.
-In agrarian societies more than 90 percent of the population was rural. In industrial societies more than 90 percent is urban
-In agrarian societies 90-95 percent of the population was engaged in what sociologists call the “primary” industries (farming and extracting raw materials). In the United States today it is 4.9 percent.
macroscopic understanding of environmental and society.
“Pollution problems can be generalized as a change in element ratios in environmental cycles through the addition of waste flows from some industry or human settlement.” (p 23)
Geothermal Energy
- “uses the difference in temperature within the earth to circulate hot steam to operate machinery or generate electricity” (p107).
-Most geothermal facilities operate virtually emission free
-Geothermal energy has the smallest land use of any major power generation technology
-one fourth of our current electrical need would be able to be supplied by geothermal energy
- really only successful/ effective to use in New Zealand, Iceland, Italy, and California
not just power sources for civilization (p. 107):
- convert heat to land forms and purify atmospheres, rivers, glaciers and land surfaces.
- tapping sources takes power away from their roles in supporting civilization indirectly
Energy for Mining
- deposits are not economical when a substance is below the concentration at which it can stimulate auto-catalytic concentration (p121)
- Auto-catalytic reactions are chemical reactions in which at least one of the products is also a reactant
- ores at Mahd al-Dhahab may contain about an ounce of gold per ton of rock
Gaia Hypothesis
- the idea that life organizes the earth for the continuation of life (Lovelock)
- ecosystems could control their climate
- views the Earth as a single organism
- sea creatures produce sulfur and iodine in approximately the same quantities that is required by land creatures
- when atmospheric carbon dioxide levels rise, the biomass of photosynthetic organisms increases and thus removes more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere
