Nature protection and conservation.

Environmental protection focuses on the prevention of damage. This is carried out through legislation, financial controls, permit procedures, voluntary measures and increasing environmental awareness.

Nature conservation focuses on preserving biodiversity. Endangered species, both flora and fauna, have a better chance of survival in national parks.

Everyone is in a position to influence the state of the living environment. Consumer habits and making them more environmentally friendly have a key role here. Nature conservation enjoys strong support among citizens.

The Ministry of the Environment implements policy on the environment. The Finnish Environment Institute (SYKE) studies phenomena related to changes in the environment and develops solutions for managing such changes.

The sections responsible for the environment and natural resources of the Centres for Economic Development, Transport and the Environment deal with environmental issues in their own regions. The sections responsible for environmental permits in the Regional State Administrative Agencies deal with and decide on environmental permits under the Environmental Protection Act and the Water Act. Local authorities are responsible for local environmental protection and monitoring, and they decide on applications for environmental permits from small plants.

To conserve habitat in terrestrial ecoregionsand stop deforestation is a goal widely shared by many groups with a wide variety of motivations.

To protect sea life from extinction due to overfishing is another commonly stated goal of conservation — ensuring that "some will be available for our children" to continue a way of life.

The consumer conservation ethic is sometimes expressed by the four R's: " Rethink, Reduce, Recycle, Repair" This social ethic primarily relates to local purchasing, moral purchasing, the sustained, and efficient use of renewable resources, the moderation of destructive use of finite resources, and the prevention of harm to common resources such as air and water quality, the natural functions of a living earth, and cultural values in a built environment.

The principal value underlying most expressions of the conservation ethic is that the natural world has intrinsic and intangible worth along with utilitarian value — a view carried forward by the scientific conservation movement and some of the older Romantic schools of ecology movement.

More Utilitarian schools of conservation seek a proper valuation of local and global impacts of human activity upon nature in their effect upon human well being, now and to our posterity. How such values are assessed and exchanged among people determines the social, political, and personal restraints and imperatives by which conservation is practiced. This is a view common in the modern environmental movement.

These movements have diverged but they have deep and common roots in theconservation movement.

In the United States of America, the year 1864 saw the publication of two books which laid the foundation for Romantic and Utilitarian conservation traditions in America. The posthumous publication of Henry David Thoreau's Walden established the grandeur of unspoiled nature as a citadel to nourish the spirit of man. From George Perkins Marsh a very different book, Man and Nature, later subtitled "The Earth as Modified by Human Action", catalogued his observations of man exhausting and altering the land from which his sustenance derives.

Date: 2015-01-29; view: 1218