| A | B |
|---|
| agricultural revolution | Gradual shift from small, mobile hunting and gathering bands to settled agricultural communities in which people survived by learning how to breed and raise wild animals and to cultivate wild plants near where they lived. |
| conservation | Sensible and careful use of natural resources by humans |
| conservation biologist | Biologist who investigates human impacts on the diversity of life found on the earth (biodiversity) and develops practical plans for preserving such biodiversity. |
| conservationist | Person concerned with using natural areas and wildlife in ways that sustain them for current and future generations of humans and other forms of life. |
| ecologist | Biological scientist who studies relationships between living organisms and their environment. |
| environmental movement | Efforts by citizens at the grassroots level to demand that political leaders enact laws and develop policies to curtail pollution, clean up polluted environments, and protect pristine areas and species from environmental degradation. |
| environmental scientist | Scientist who uses information from the physical sciences and social sciences to understand how the earth works, learn how humans interact with the earth, and develop solutions to environmental problems. |
| environmentalist | Person who is concerned about the impact of people on environmental quality and believe that some human actions are degrading parts of the earth's life-support systems for humans and many other forms of life. |
| EPA | U.S. Environmental Protection Agency; responsible for managing federal efforts to control air and water pollution, radiation and pesticide hazards, environmental research, hazardous waste, and solid-solid waste disposal. |
| frontier environmental worldview | Viewing undeveloped land as a hostile wilderness to be conquered (cleared, planted) and exploited for its resources as quickly as possible. |
| hunter-gatherers | People who get their food by gathering edible wild plants and other materials and by hunting wild animals and fish. |
| industrial-medical revolution | Use of new sources of energy from fossil fuels and later from nuclear fuels, and use of new technologies, to grow food and manufacture products. |
| information and globalization revolution | Use of new technologies such as the telephone, radio, television, computers, the Internet, automated databases, and remote sensing satellites to enable people to have increasingly rapid access to much more information on a global scale. |
| preservationist | Person concerned primarily with setting aside or protecting undisturbed natural areas from harmful human activities. |
| restorationist | Scientist or other person devoted to the partial or complete restoration of natural areas that have been degraded by human activities. |
| shifting cultivation | Clearing a plot of ground in a forest, especially in tropical areas, and planting crops on it for a few years (typically 2-5 years) until the soil is depleted of nutrients or the plot has been invaded by a dense growth of vegetation from the surrounding forest. |
| slash-and-burn cultivation | Cutting down trees and other vegetation in a patch of forest, leaving the cut vegetation on the ground to dry, and then burning it. The ashes that are left add nutrients to the nutrient-poor soils found in most tropical forest areas. |
