The earth is a dynamic arrangement of synergistic and interrelated systems that has throughout its existence experienced cataclysmic and devastating events. The earth has had long periods of ice and snow to mass extinctions and occasional hothouse loads of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and the oceans. The main difference between then and now is that this latest dynamic period is primarily if not solely anthropogenic in nature. At the same time, we have put in place a global economic system that sees the earth as a cornucopia of infinite natural resources to be exploited with little regard for the environmental and social consequences of such actions. Modern society has witnessed an alienation from the natural world with consumers losing a sense of the relationship between the consumption of things and consequent environmental degradation. Chapter One summarizes the nature of urban environmental degradation, and its ideological and institutional roots. Chapter Two examines the relationship between cultures and environmental use within various adaptive strategies for exploiting natural resources. Chapter Three focuses on illegal dump sites as degraded landscape elements. Chapter Four evaluates the extract and translocate natural radionuclides by volunteer plants that grow under phosphogypsum stack as a potential phytoremediation technique. Chapter Five concludes with a review of an island biogeography of vultures and environmental variation in the Caribbean.
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