One General environmental laws, principles and rules of ecology

2  General principles of environmental management
2.1 Planning and forecasting the use of natural resources
Environmental management involves the rational use of natural resources and is based on planning and forecasting their consumption.
In environmental management, two levels of management can be considered:
- management of natural systems;
- management of nature users (management of environmental protection and rationalization of the use of natural resources).
The management of natural systems can be “hard” and “soft”, and the management of natural resources can be command-administrative and economic.
As examples of “hard” management, clear cutting of forests or development of virgin lands without adherence to proper farming practices, “soft” - selective cutting down and use of scientifically based agricultural practices that promote self-healing of forest wealth and soil fertility can serve. “Tough” management gives a quick and high economic effect in the form of increasing the volume of production or reducing the cost of its production. This effect is short-lived, since as a result of “hard” management, there are sharp irreversible changes in the natural environment, a decrease in its productivity and pollution, leading to environmental, economic and social damage.
These levels of management are interrelated. The first level of management is based on the study and use of natural laws, in particular, environmental laws and is carried out through the second level, based on legal and economic laws.
Natural resources and resource cycle
Natural resources are a combination of natural bodies and natural phenomena that people use in their activities aimed at maintaining their existence.
One of the signs by which natural resources are classified is their exhaustion and renewability (Fig. 1).
Inexhaustible resources are primarily processes and phenomena external to the Earth, such as solar energy and its derivatives: wind energy, energy of moving water, energy of the earth's interior. In this classification, water and air belong to both inexhaustible and exhaustible resources (Fig. 9.) In quantitative terms, these elements of the environment are almost unchanged, and therefore, they are inexhaustible. But cultural and domestic, economic and industrial needs require air and water of a certain quality, which deteriorate as a result of human activity. To maintain water quality, sophisticated water treatment and water treatment technologies are used. To preserve the purity of the air, a dust and gas cleaning technique is used, as well as a complex of sanitary and hygienic and architectural planning measures. Thus, to make these natural resources inexhaustible in human power.
Exhaustible resources are divided into:
- renewable, capable of self-reproduction: flora and fauna, the world of microorganisms;
- non-renewable, formed in the bowels of the Earth in very distant from us periods for many millions of years: ore and non-metallic minerals;
- relatively renewable, capable of reproduction in rates lagging behind the pace of consumption. For example, the process of the formation of a chernozem layer of soil 1cm thick lasts for centuries, and is destroyed much faster. For the renewal of timber stocks also requires more than a decade.
To obtain energy, to create the necessary products, a person finds, extracts and transfers to the processing sites the necessary natural resources, involving them in the resource cycle. A resource cycle is a set of transformations and spatial movements of a certain substance or group of substances that occur at all stages of human use. There are several resource cycles in nature management, which, despite their relative independence, are closely related to each other. These resource cycles include the cycle of soil and climatic resources and agricultural raw materials, the cycle of raw materials, the cycle of energy resources, the cycle of wildlife resources.
The cycle of raw materials is closely connected with the production of energy, i.e., with the cycle of energy resources.
The word “cycle” implies a closed process. In nature, all substances are in closed biochemical cycles. The presence of such cycles does not allow substances to pass into another state, excluding their further transformations.
Not closed resource cycle
The resource cycle, sometimes called the anthropogenic circulation of matter, is not actually closed, as can be seen from Fig. 2. At each stage of its inevitable losses resulting from the characteristics of technology, or any objective or subjective reasons.
It is believed that at all stages of the resource cycle, about 98% of the extracted mineral raw materials are dispersed in the environment.
Items of mass consumption as a result of wear, corrosion or loss of need for them somehow end up in the environment, polluting it. Many wastes are converted into water, soil and atmosphere, becoming even more dangerous to human health, which are secondary pollution.
A special case is represented by cultivated ecosystems, that is, cultivated agricultural land that is unable to heal itself due to depletion of the soil due to harvest, in which organic and mineral matter is concentrated. As a result, destructive organisms or soil-formers do not receive material for decomposition and mineralization and ensure their own needs for matter and energy. Therefore, a person is forced to fully take on the restoration of fertility, spending for this purpose specially produced substances, such as fertilizer and energy.
Thus, in the process of harvesting crops from the soil annually 5-7 million tons of nitrogen, 3-5 million tons of phosphorus, up to 10 million tons of potassium. The removed elements are reimbursed with a significant deficit due to the addition of hundreds of millions of tons of manure, thousands of tons of mineral fertilizers, as well as biological fixation of nitrogen by nodule bacteria of leguminous plants.
Thus, a person closes, as it were, a significant proportion of the natural cycle, within which the resource cycle is carried out. The quantities of the substance involved in the anthropogenic circulation are already commensurate with the quantities of the substance in natural biochemical cycles.
As they pass through the resource cycle, substances previously concentrated in one or another localization location disperse. Not the original, but the substances that are transformed or lost during the resource cycle that pollute the environment are scattered. Thus, the main objective cause of environmental pollution is the openness of the resource cycle.
Environmental pollutants include not only toxic and hazardous industrial wastes, but also practically harmless substances that form as by-products, such as: manure masses in agriculture, carbon dioxide, sunken wood. The fight against such pollution is also relevant.
An important point in environmental management is planning and forecasting the use of natural resources. This applies particularly to the use of such renewable and relatively renewable resources, such as flora and fauna, as well as soil fertility. Planning for the use of land resources provides for the development and implementation of rational crop rotations, planning for the use of forest resources, and drawing up plans for felling, taking into account the restoration of forests. When planning, one should take into account the ever increasing rates of use of natural resources and make a prospective calculation of their consumption on the basis of mathematical forecasting methods. At the same time, an operational plan is developed for the implementation of a complex set of environmental protection works.The theoretical basis for such development can be network management methods. These include: methods of network planning, methods of mathematical programming, expert methods of forecasting, methods of mathematical-statistical forecasting.