- Industry: Biology
- Number of terms: 15386
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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 ...
Annual or seasonal shedding of foliage from trees and shrubs. Conserves water by cutting down on transpiration and nutrients by reducing what the leaves required. Deciduous trees are useful in gardens because they give shade in summer, let in light in winter, and drop leaves that enrich the soil when decomposed. They are best transplanted when dormant (late autumn to early spring).
Industry:Biology
A form of small-scale agriculture that produces yields without introducing artificial fertilizers or pesticides. The basic aim is to grow things naturally with a minimum of mechanical interference. Organic farming grew in popularity from Sir Albert Howard's published observations of Indian farming techniques (1940).
Industry:Biology
Urban systems whose dominant members occupy various niches, some of which compete. Rather parasitic, the large ones, in that they take from all over without giving, bereft as they are of natural producers. Because of their exclusive emphasis on growth and productivity, they are locked into an ecological immaturity that wastes resources and widely and indiscriminately pollutes. For all these reasons they are as unsustainable as the civilizations that spawn them.
Industry:Biology
Marine invertebrates that secret a calcium carbonate exoskeleton and live symbiotically with algae, with the algae providing nutrients like carbon and the coral nitrogen, phosphorous, and an abode. Corals are perforate (porous skeleton) or imperforate (solid skeleton). Colonial corals live in deep water, and reef-building corals in warm, shallow water where their zooxanthellae algae can receive sunlight. When corals die, their outer skeletons remain, growing the reefs layer upon layer (see Atoll). As of the second millennium, two fifths of the world’s coral had disappeared due to industrial pollution, and all of the remainder is under threat.
Industry:Biology
Saprophytic (decay-fed), spore-making plants without chlorophyll: rusts, molds, smuts, mildews, mushrooms, and yeasts. Their long hyphae filaments aerate and bind soils, aid water transport, cycle nutrients, decompose organic matter, and allow roots to absorb nutrients from the ground.
Industry:Biology
A chunk of DNA that allows organisms to pass on adaptations and acquired features by making a protein through codon sequences. DNA duplication errors often create new genes. Gregor Mendel discovered genes and wrote about them--he called them "factors"--in 1865, but his work was ignored for 45 years. See DNA.
Industry:Biology
A hooved mammal that eats its food, regurgitates it (cud), and eats it again, a procedure made possible by a four-chambered stomach. Ruminants include cattle, bison, sheep, deer, goats, elk, giraffes, antelopes, and camels. Their specialized stomach evolved to extract the maximum of nutrients from low-quality food.
Industry:Biology
Cycling of nitrogen from the air and soil to plants, animals, and then back to the environment. Bacteria, legumes, and algae convert atmospheric nitrogen into nitrates that enter plant roots before turning into protoplasm that decomposers eventually break down again.
Industry:Biology
Formulated by philosopher Edward Goldsmith as corrections to the reductive laws of thermodynamics. The Laws postulate that living things seek to preserve their structure, grow toward climax (maturity) rather than entropy (nonexistence), move into mutualism and wholeness, and survive and flourish through spontaneous, adaptive self-regulation.
Industry:Biology
A relatively new discipline operating on an ancient assumption: the deepest levels of the psyche are tied to the Earth (unlike environmental psychology, which looks in linear fashion at the impact of surround on psyche). Theodore Roszak, for instance, posits an “ecological unconscious” at the core of the psyche; Stephen Aizenstat describes a “world unconscious” similar to what early philosophers described as the anima mundi or world soul. As with deep ecology, ecopsychology insists that to be healthy, our relations with the Earth must be reciprocal, not exploitive. "Ecopsychology is the effort to understand, heal, and develop the psychological dimensions of the human-nature relationship (psychological, bio-social-spiritual) through connecting and reconnecting with natural processes in the web of life. At its core, ecopsychology suggests that there is a synergistic relation between planetary and personal well being; that the needs of the one are relevant to the other. " -- Robert Greenway, Amy Lenzo, Gene Dilworth, Robert Worcester, Linda Buzzell-Saltzman.
Industry:Biology
