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Ecology

The relationship between organisms and their environment. The Gaia Hypothesis is an ecological hypothesis that proposes that living and non-living parts of the earth are viewed as a complex interacting system that can be thought of as a single organism. The concept of industrial ecology takes these ideas and applies them to industrial activity. Industrial ecology is the shifting of industrial processes from linear (open loop) systems, in which resource and capital investments move through the system to become waste, to a closed loop system where the outputs from one process (wastes) become inputs for new processes. (Source: The Natural Step).An ecosystem is a natural unit consisting of all plants, animals and micro organisms in an area functioning together with all the non-living physical factors of the environment. Ecological footprinting refers to a measure of human demand on nature, which compares human consumption of the planet's renewable resources with the earth's ecological capacity to regenerate them. An ecological footprint deals only with demands placed on the environment (biocapacity), and does not include social or economic dimensions of sustainability.

Related terms:

• Eco-efficiency
• Life cycle assessment (LCA )
• Pollution
• Resource depletion
• Waste triangle - reduce, reuse, recycle
• Water quality
• Zero carbon/waste/Water