SEVEN ENVIRONMENTAL PRINCIPLES

Nature Knows Best

One must not go against the natural processes if one would like to ensure a continuous and
steady supply of resources. One natural process that needs serious attention is nutrient cycling.
For example, burning of farm wastes instead of allowing them to decompose naturally disrupts
the cycle.

All forms of life are Important

Each organism plays a fundamental role in nature. It is easy to appreciate the beautiful
butterflies, especially knowing their important role in pollination, but when it comes to unlovely,
wriggly, and troublesome creatures, this principle is unusually overlooked. Awareness of the
snakes' role in limiting the rat population and of the spiders' role in checking the population of
mosquitoes and flies may, however, change this attitude.

Everything is connected to everything else

In an ecosystem, all biotic and amniotic components interact with each other to ensure that
the system is perpetuated. In a lake ecosystem, the organisms are linked to one another through
their feeding habit/level and are also dependent on other physico-chemical factors in the lake
(e.g. amount of nutrients, amounts and types of gases, temperature, PH, etc.).

Everything changes
The environment is constantly changing, change may be linear, cyclical or random. As
example of linear change is evolution of species, which has brought about higher and more
complex types of organisms. Cyclical change may be exemplified by seasons and the rhythms in
floral and faunal life stages. An example of random change is the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo,
which brought about great upheaval in many parts of Luzon and changes in the topography of
the land.

Everything must go somewhere

By-products of consumption go back to the environment. Everything that we throw away –
pieces of paper, left-over food, peelings of fruits, plastic wrappers, used containers – have to go
somewhere. Even plants and animals have their own wastes – feces, urine, dead leaves and
branches. It is the law ofnature that the by-products of metabolism return to the soil, acted upon
first by worms, bacteria andfungi, and then converted into minerals, to be again absorbed by
plants and eaten by animals.

Ours is a finite earth

Everything that we need is provided by nature in abundance – food, water, energy, minerals
and air, however, some resources that we depend upon nowadays are extracted excessively but
are slow to replace. These non-renewable resources experience limits of supply. For instance,
fossil fuels producedover thousands of years may be exhausted in a hundred years.