Concepts of Environmental Biology : Omkar

Environment encompasses all the conditions and influences that have an effect on the life and development of all organisms on earth. Earth is estimated to be 4500 million years old while the existence of human beings is not more than 2.5 million years ago. Even so, human existence had a wider impact on the quality of earth and its environment. In the past few decades, the human population has expanded exponentially, yet the resources available remain the same. Rapid increase in population has caused intangible damages, like levelling of numerous forests for human accommodation, industrialization, overexploitation of natural resources, thereby creating imbalance between environment and humans. Having said that if we use the available resources in a sustainable way we can stabilise this disturbance but human “greed” come in our way. Human demands have mostly been achieved at the expense of forests, wetlands and marine ecosystems, disrupting ecosystems and causing tremendous loss to the environment. This book attempts to inculcate an understanding of how environment functions and how humans interact with the environment. The language of the book is kept simple to reach a wide range of student backgrounds. Authors have highlighted the basic concepts of environmental biology and the current book integrates the basic principles and components including some new contributions.