Loose Leaf for Environmental Geology

"Environmental Geology, 5e focuses on the fascinating interaction between humans and the geologic processes that shape Earths environment. Because this text emphasizes how human survival is highly dependent on the natural environment, students should find the topics to be quite relevant to their own lives and, therefore, more interesting. One of the key themes of this textbook is that humans are an integral part of a complex and interactive system scientists call the Earth system. Throughout the text the author explains how the Earth system responds to human activity and how our actions affect the very environment in which we live. A key point is that our activity often produces unintended and undesirable consequences. A good example from the text is how engineers have built dams and artificial levees to control flooding on the Mississippi River. But this has caused unintended changes in the geologic environment. For thousands of years, the rate at which the river deposited sediment in the Mississippi Delta was approximately equal to the rate that the sediment compacted under its own weight. Because the two rates were similar, the land surface remained above sea level. However, by using dams and artificial levees to confine the Mississippi River to its channel, humans disrupted the delicate balance between sediment deposition and compaction"--