- 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 ...
Originally a Darwinian hypothesis twisted around by philosopher Herbert Spencer to justify any desired might-makes-right form of social injustice as natural and inevitable. Very often “fittest” means the most cooperative--see Mutualism.
Industry:Biology
A surface that blocks water from going into the soil: highways, streets, parking lots. In urban areas the resulting storm runoffs spread pollution and waste, erode whatever soils they reach, and threaten communities with flash flooding.
Industry:Biology
Vandana Shiva's term for what usually goes by the name of development and in actuality results in widespread poverty and ecological destruction. Maldevelopment contrasts with "realwealth," the actual richness and diversity of a community.
Industry:Biology
What homeowners need when their homes have been constructed on slipping hillsides, canyon floors, eroding coastlines, floodplains, and swathes of chaparral by developers working in complete disregard of the forces and cycles of nature.
Industry:Biology
Marshy land covered by shrugs and mosses. Their acidic soils accumulate peat, the thick, carbonized vegetable tissue decomposed in water. The words "bogeyman" and "heathen" derive from outcasts who inhabited these poorly drained areas.
Industry:Biology
Chellis Glendinning’s term for the secondary cravings we use to fill our “original trauma” of separation from the natural world. She follows Paul Shepard in thinking of the search for identity as not only psychological, but ecological.
Industry:Biology
Sodium chloride. Also, compounds produced when an acid's hydrogen atom is replaced by a metal atom. Also, what unscrupulous fast food restaurants do with french fries and potato chips in order to sell more drinks to thirsty customers.
Industry:Biology
Local but geographically separated populations of a species that are linked only by organisms that migrate between them. Although local groups might die out, the migrants keep the species alive. (Term coined by Richard Levins, 1969. )
Industry:Biology
Supposed huge diversification of multicellular life forms in the Earth's oceans during the Cambrian Period 570 million years ago. All that’s certain is that organisms living before the “explosion” did not leave behind many fossils.
Industry:Biology
A diagram showing the flow of energy through the trophic levels of a food chain or web. About 10% of the usable energy at one trophic level makes it to the next. Many small organisms are needed to feed relatively few larger ones.
Industry:Biology
