This textbook entitled Environmental Science: Earth As A Living Planet, tries to impress upon its readers that the earth is a living system. Authors Daniel B. Botkin and Edward A. Keller insist that the goal of their book is to provide readers with the tools necessary to understand “how to think through environmental issues” (vii). As such, the authors provide an array of chapters that cover the most important and useful concepts in the study of the environment. Case studies, learning objectives, chapter summaries, and study questions are just some of the supplementary features of the book that make such a goal more realistic. In this analysis, Part III and Part IV of the book will be critically assessed. Part III is entitled Life and the Environment, containing five chapters that focus on human population, ecosystems, biological diversity, biological productivity and success and restoration of ecosystems. Part IV is entitled Sustaining Living Resources, containing five chapters that pertain to world food supply, the impact of agriculture on the environment, wild life resources, landscapes and seascapes, and environmental health and technology.
In Part III we discover that human population has the greatest impact on the environment in chapter five. In this chapter we find out that the “population issue is the environmental issue” (Botkin and Edwards 94). Like other authors in this project, Botkin and Edwards impart information on such important concepts as the population explosion of recent centuries, the demographic transitions in developed and underdeveloped nations, the maximum carrying capacity, and enormity of environmental damage sustained due to human population. The debate we will see over and over again between population capacity and technology’s ability to increase it is seen here. In chapter six we learn the basic characteristics of ecosystems and how their unique characteristics enable them to sus...