Bifalgorithm post · Health Education · Environmental Health

Natural Environment

Natural Environment (Health Education · Environmental Health) — "The natural environment encompasses all living and non-living things occurring naturally, mean…

Ideas in this flowchart

  • The natural environment consists of naturally occurring living and non-living elements.
  • It refers to things that are not artificial.
  • The term usually applies to Earth or parts of Earth.
  • Its interacting elements affect human survival and economic activity.
  • The natural environment can be understood through distinct components.
  • Complete ecological units function as natural systems without massive human intervention.
  • Universal resources and physical phenomena lack clear-cut boundaries.
  • Ecological units include vegetation, microorganisms, soil, rocks, atmosphere, and natural phenomena within their boundaries.
  • Universal resources and phenomena include air, water, climate, energy, radiation, electric charge, and magnetism.
  • The natural environment contrasts with the built environment.
  • Urban development and agricultural conversion greatly modify landscapes into simplified human environments.
  • Even modest human constructions, such as mud huts or photovoltaic systems, create artificial modifications.
  • Structures made by nonhuman animals, such as beaver dams and termite mounds, are considered natural.
  • Naturalness varies along a continuum from completely natural to completely artificial.
  • Different components of the same environment can have different degrees of naturalness.
  • An agricultural field may have forest-like soil composition but a substantially different soil structure.
Feed/

Natural Environment

Channel

Health Education

1 page

"The natural environment encompasses all living and non-living things occurring naturally, meaning in this case not artificial. The term is most often applied to the Earth or some parts of Earth. This environment encompasses the interaction of all living species, climate, weather, and natural resources that affect human survival and economic activity. The concept of the natural environment can be distinguished as components: complete ecological units that function as natural systems without massive civilized human intervention, including all vegetation, microorganisms, soil, rocks, atmosphere, and natural phenomena that occur within their boundaries and their nature; and universal natural resources and physical phenomena that lack clear-cut boundaries, such as air, water, and climate, as well as energy, radiation, electric charge, and magnetism, not originating from civilized human activity. In contrast to the natural environment is the built environment. In such areas where man has fundamentally transformed landscapes such as urban settings and agricultural land conversion, the natural environment is greatly modified into a simplified human environment. Even acts which seem less extreme, such as building a mud hut or a photovoltaic system in the desert, modify the natural environment into an artificial one. Though many animals build things to provide a better environment for themselves, they are not human, hence beaver dams and the works of mound-building termites are thought of as natural. People seldom find absolutely natural environments on Earth, and naturalness usually varies in a continuum, from 100% natural in one extreme to 0% natural in the other. More precisely, we can consider the different aspects or components of an environment, and see that their degree of naturalness is not uniform. If, for instance, in an agricultural field, the mineralogic composition and the structure of its soil are similar to those of an undisturbed forest soil, but the structure is quite different."

Flowchart preview
Series cover
👍
0
0 comments0 shares

Sign in to view and post comments.