- Industry: Biology
- Number of terms: 15386
- Number of blossaries: 0
- Company Profile:
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 ...
The political or business practice of masking an environmentally destructive activity by promoting it as environmentally beneficial ("Healthy Forests Initiative") or, at worst, minimally damaging (e.g., the Bush Administration's argument that oil drilling operations in Alaska will only take up a few thousand square miles of the immense Arctic National Wildlife Refuge--which is like claiming that a man spraying toxic fumes into the air all around him takes up only the few inches on which his feet touch the ground).
Industry:Biology
Time required for half of a quantity of particle-emitting material to undergo radioactive decay. Because emission slows as the isotope decreases in radioactivity, taking half the life of its decay is more meaningful than trying to estimate the entire amount. Half-lives range from millionths of a second to millions of years.
Industry:Biology
An aminosugar and polysaccharide (an insoluble carbohydrate spun from interwoven simple sugars) found in some fungi cell walls and in insect exoskeletons. Although abundantly produced--almost as much so as cellulose--some insecticides prevent it from cycling.
Industry:Biology
A method for restoring ecosystems, developed from local Sri Lankan home gardens by the Neo-Synthesis Research Centre (NSRC), that seeks to bring back what grew there originally. Some key assumptions:
* The climax ecosystem is the stablest and most productive. * Convergent evolution has provided patterns useful for ecosystems everywhere. * Keystone species can support these ecosystems. * Humans are integral to the biologically diverse landscapes designed.
Industry:Biology
Several plant species living in brackish or saline estuarine marshes; below them are tidal mud flats, and above them salt marshes. Cordgrass produces five to ten times as much nutriment and oxygen as a comparable acreage of wheat. Very useful for tidal marsh restoration because its roots hold the mud in place as the plants bracket incoming waves while filtering them for nutrients.
Industry:Biology
The hypothesized passing on of something learned, but not through the discredited Lamarckian theory of evolution (the inheritance of what previous generations experienced). Walking upright could be an example, as a band of our ancestors imitated some forgotten hominid who preferred that style of locomotion and then gave rise to descendants whose genes favored the behavior. The Baldwin Effect fills in a gap in how natural selection is thought to work by explaining how learnings normally invisible to it become innate.
Industry:Biology
Paul Shepard's term for the emotional and spiritual stunting that results from growing up in a civilization at war with nature and afraid of close contact with anything wild. An example would be socializing hordes of people to be impulsive consumers, thereby strengthening their least mature tendencies while curtailing their capacity for critical thought.
Industry:Biology
Its layers, which from top to bottom are the O-horizon (or zone of leaching) of freshly fallen plant litter, leaves, an A sublayer of water-holding humus, and another of insoluble minerals, a B-horizon (or zone of deposition) of clay and other inorganic particles, and a C-horizon with rock fragments weathered from the bedrock.
Industry:Biology
