- Industry: Biology
- Number of terms: 15386
- Number of blossaries: 0
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Terrapsychology is a word coined by Craig Chalquist to describe deep, systematic, trans-empirical approaches to encountering the presence, soul, or "voice" of places and things: what the ancients knew as their resident genius loci or indwelling spirit. This perspective emerged from sustained ...
How well a soil hosts exchanges of cations between its minerals and its plant roots. In general, soils high in clay and organic matter carry a negative charge that retains plant nutrient cations against leaching away. High CEC usually correlates with high fertility.
Industry:Biology
Biological variety of the kind that preserves species and their DNA. R. H. Whittaker categorized it (1972) as alpha, the number of species in an ecosystem; beta, the diversity between ecosystems; and gamma, the diversity of entire regions. Depleted biodiversity leads to population crashes, declines in genetic variability, and extinctions.
Industry:Biology
The growing conviction that oil production has peaked in most oil-rich parts of the world and is now declining. Once laughed at by conservatives and pro-industrial energy advocates, the idea now gains ground as oil production continues to drop and gasoline prices soar.
Industry:Biology
The angular distance clockwise along the horizon between north and the position of a celestial object. A star hanging exactly over the northern point on the horizon has an azimuth of 0°, for example, and one located exactly east an azimuth of 90°. Azimuth is combined with altitude (the distance of an object above the horizon) to calculate the direction of an object as seen from a specific earthly location.
Industry:Biology
A nonwoody angiosperm whose flowers back seasonally. Herbs are grown for seasonings, for medicinal use, and for attracting beneficial insects like bees into gardens. They do best in at least six hours of sunlight daily and are harvested as the first flower buds open.
Industry:Biology
An organism's total biochemical activity. All the physical and chemical factors in the production (anabolism) and breakdown (catabolism) of protoplasm and energy. Also: all the enzymatic reactions that go on the cells. Metabolism is the fire of biological life.
Industry:Biology
Having established control over all local irrigation, Egyptian and Babylonian rulers made water available for obedient subjects and shut it off for dissenters. Although Karl A. Wittfogel coined this term (1957) to apply only to Oriental despots, its practice is worldwide, as in the Los Angeles water wars of urban expansion and assimilation and Israel's diversion of the Jordan, a project that led to the Six Day War of 1967. The definition could be broadened to apply to enterprises like OPEC that monopolize vital resources.
Industry:Biology
A chemical transformation in which electrons are removed from one substance (oxidation) and added to another (reduction). The reductant transfers electrons to the oxidant. Redox reactions transfer biological energy. In photosynthesis, carbon dioxide is reduced into sugars; in respiration, sugars are oxidized to make carbon dioxide and water.
Industry:Biology
Gushing milk through a filter to spread out the fat globules into a mist (liposomes). This is done to keep cream from rising to the top. Homogenized milk is suspected by some of contributing to several health problems, including hardening of the arteries and diminished resistance to cancer.
Industry:Biology
A term coined by Arne Naess in his 1973 article “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movements” to challenge the exclusively human-centered view of the natural world by looking more deeply into questions of our place in it (as opposed to surface environmental reform that addresses problems but not their psychological or philosophical underpinnings). Its two fundamental norms, irreducible to any others: self-realization (as opposed to ego-realization) and biocentric equality that opposes anthropocentrism as the heart of our problem with nature. Naess’s motto: “Simple in means, rich in ends. ” After working out a philosophical platform with George Sessions while camping in Death Valley in 1984, Naess later defined “deep” in terms of a persistent questioning (problematizing) and a pursuit of deep (significant) change. Deep ecologists see identification--with plants and animals, places, the world--as the basis of empathy and relationship. (David Kidner prefers “resonance” between self and other to "identification. ") Warwick Fox believes that unlike social ecology and ecofeminism, deep ecology moves the source of our war against nature from intraspecies (human) to interspecies, a move that transcends blaming politicians or industrialists by focusing on their justification: anthropocentrism, which lovelessly regards the world as a thing for human use.
Industry:Biology
