Duke University

Duke University could be a personal analysis university settled in Durham, North geographical region, us, supported by Methodists and Quakers within the contemporary city of Trinity in 1838, the college rapt to Durham in 1892. This University was established in 1924; by Chief Executive Duke was tobacco and wattage businessman. At that period the establishment modified its name to honor his deceased father, Washington Duke.

Environmental Degradation by Population Growth

To most of the people growth of human population at alarming rate at least in the present century is the most significant cause of the lowering of environment quality and ecological balance. In fact, there are conflicting ideas and views regarding the exact principal cause of environmental degradation wherein the lowering of environmental quality and ecological imbalance have been assigned to overpopulation, or to the failures of the social system or to modern technologies.

Industrial Development and Environmental Degradation

Industrial due to advancement in science and technology started in 1860 England and soon spread over Western Europe and North America. No doubt rapid rate of industrial development has given economic prosperity to human society, has given new dimension to socio-economic structure and has provided material comfort to the people of industrially developed countries but it has also created many-fold environment problems. In fact, the glittering effects of industrialization have so greatly affected the mind of the general public that industrialization is now being considered as the parameter of modernity and as a necessary element of socio-economic development of nation.

Cause of earthquakes

Earthquakes are caused due to disequilibrium in any part of the crust of the earth. A number of caused have been assigned to cause disequilibrium in the earth's crust such as volcanic eruptions, faulting and folding, up warping and down warping, hydrostatic pressure of man-made water bodies like reservoirs and lakes, and late the plate movements. The occurrence of severe devastating earthquake of San Fransisco (U.S.A) in 1960 led H.F. Reid, one of the official investigators of San Fransisco Earthquake Disaster, to advance his important ELASTIC REBOUNB THEORY to explain the mode and causes of earthquake mainly caused by fractures and faults in the earth's crust and upper mantle. Recently, PLATE TECTONIC THEORY has been accepted as the most plausible explanation of earthquakes.

Natural hazards

Natural environmental hazards and disasters involve comparatively rare high-intensity processes and extreme events caused by both terrestrial and atmospheric processes. The study of natural hazards includes the consideration of identification of specific events, finding of their causative factors, assessment of their impacts on human and other biological communities, prediction of such events and finding their remedial measures. Natural hazards fall in two broad categories (1) planetary hazards and (2) extra-planetary hazards or extra-terrestrial natural hazards.

Aspect and approaches to environmental management

On an average environmental management involves (1) judicious and gainful utilization of natural resources for socio-economic development and (2) Maintenance of environmental quality by perusing ecological principle. Broader objectives of environmental management include (i) to restrict and regulate the exploitation and utilization of natural resources, mainly non-renewable natural resources; (ii) to regenerate degraded environment and to renew natural resources (iii) to control environmental degradation and pollution (iv) to reduce the impacts of extreme events and natural disaster (v) to make optimum utilization of natural resources by recycling and reusing waste materials produced from one activity to another economically and environmentally viable activity (vi) to review and revise the existing technologies of production in terms of their adverse effects on the environment (vii) to formulate laws and regulations for the implementation of environment protection and conservation programs to maintain the environment quality.

International Co-operations for Environmental Management

The international communities are well aware and seized of global environmental and ecological problems and various efforts have been initiated to control global warming and halt probable climate change. There are several organization, government agencies, intergovernmental agencies, non-government organizations (NGO) which have undertaken various action plan and projects to study the relationships between man and environment interactions between man and nature, the environmental problems resulting there from and remedial measures therefore.

Major Global Problems

The most significant global environment problem faced by the world community is related to global environmental changes consequent upon global warming resulting from a host of causal factors viz. ozone depletion, emission of greenhouse gases at alarming increasing rate, deforestation etc. the probable net result of global warming would be climatic change at local, regional and global levels.

Acid Rain

Acid rain fall-out of acids caused by sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides with rainfall and thus increases in the amount of acidity of rainwater. As pointed   out above rainwater is not pure because atmospheric carbon dioxide is dissolved in the rainwater which thus because moderately acidic, the pH being generally 5. The water with Ph value of 7.0 is called neutral water whereas the pH value below it makes the water alkaline. The water becomes more injurious when the pH fall below 4.

Sulphur dioxide emitted from man made sources in large quantities into the atmosphere combines with water to form sulphur and sulphuric acids (H2SO4). These acids fall on the earth's surface with rainfall and thus the fall of highly acidic water are called acid rain. The pH of rainwater in some localities of the USA mainly in West Virginia has gone down to 1.5 pH of rainwater in Europe is as low as 2.4 whereas the normal range of pH of neutral water must be 7.0.

The main sources of acid rains are oxides of sulphur and nitrogen which are emitted from industrial establishments and different types of vehicles. These pollutions are spread in atmosphere by wind and from acids after reacting with water in the atmosphere. It may be pointed out that acid rains are not confined to the source areas of the emissions of oxides of sulphur and nitrogen rather they cover much larger areas far away from the source pollutants being in gaseous phase are carried away and spread over larger areas through winds and clouds. For example, oxides of sulphur and nitrogen spewed from several mills in Germany and U.K have caused widespread acid rains in Scandinavia countries with the result most of the lakes in Scandinavia countries have lost their biological communities and are now biologically termed as dead lakes.

Dead lake means destruction and death of all aquatic lives including plants and animals in lakes, ponds, and rivers. Acid rains also affect human community adversely, though the mode of human disease and death due to acid rains has not been properly understood as yet. The productivity of soils is also significantly lowered because of acid rains as increased acidity destroys mineral elements and other nutrients of the soils.

Acid rain is not a local problem or a problem of a particular country, rather it is an international problem because air pollutants emitted from a particular country are carried in the atmosphere by the winds and are spread over other countries. Thus the problem of acid rains should be tackled at international level.

World Common Environmental Issue

Present world is facing many environmental hazards and being problematic living support system of entire living beings. Environment is the common house for entire living and non-living things. But, the right of the other except man is losing by the human self-fish activities. Declining environmental condition is common concern matter all developed and developing countries that made think about improvement of environment condition for sustainable development and balance between sources and human. As a result many international conferences are held in order to manage environment depletion condition. These conferences find out the common issues and declare to manage.

1 Global change: - climate change, global warming, ice melting and sea level rising, change in atmosphere gaseous composition, change in water, air and soil quality, land use change, ecosystem services change and life system change.

2 Technological and Toxic Hazards, Incidence of disease infection

3 Natural resource degradation, life support bio-resource deletion, deforestation, desertification and land degradation

4 poverty, regional disparity, and inequality of development pattern

5 Loss of biodiversity and threat to cultural heritage

6 Solid waste management and technological appropriateness

7 Regional cooperation and world unity for long term solution

Common Goals of Environmental Policies

World circumstantial degradation of natural resources, wild animal, and environmental pollution has been brought every community, fund and organization and nation for conservation of environment and natural resources for long time sustainable development in common practice. Declining condition of natural environmental source, highly pressure of population, atmosphere pollution, industrial production, and production of greenhouse effect gases negatively effects on global climate change bringing challenge for biosphere global ecological situation make the world’s developed and developing countries in united for conservation of environment, sustainable development of economics, human and security for entire living system by making polices.

There has been seen many international conferences held for improve and conservation of environmental situation. Many policies and strategies have made these conferences and still applying it all the developed and developing countries. 

American geologist George Perkins published the book ‘Man and Nature’ in 1864 that notified to the American government about negative effect on ecological situation by the uncontrolled grazing and rapid chopping down tree on slope area. This is known as the first practice for environmental conservation. This message helped to the American government to build national policies in 1873 for conservation of forest and started to control the hunting activities of wild animals and species. 

The world’s common policies for conserve environmental situation

1 Maintains the essential ecological processes and life support systems on which we survive.

2 preserve the genetic diversity on which ecological processes of life support system are based.

3 Ensure the sustainable utilization of species and ecosystems which support millions of biological communities.

Environmental Education

We know that, we can't live with out good environmental situation. But the condition of the environmental situation is getting worse day to day in our life. The awareness for improving environmental situation has been starting in 1960, and held many international conferences for conserve of environmental situation. But environmental situation is not in improving condition. These conferences declared many policies and strategies to improve environmental situation and invest much properties. Human Environmental international conference made international level government policy for conservation of biosphere in 1972 (Sweden).

Men's Interactions with the Environment

Men are an important part of the bio-tic component of the environment and simultaneously they are an important factor of the environment. Thus, men play important roles in the natural environmental system in different capacities such as biological, social, economic, and technological. All the natural functions of human beings such as birth, growth, health, and deaths are affected and determined by natural environment in the same manner as the cases of other organisms. However, men being most developed and advanced animal both physically and mentally and technologically, is capable of making substantial changes in natural environment so as to make it suitable for his own living.

Human Population and Environment

The environment affects population through biophysical limitations, behavioral controls, and resource availability. Weather and climate affects of human well-being and health. The study of attitudes of human body to changes in the atmospheric environments is known as human bio-meteorology, which lays emphasis on to establish how much of the overall biological variability the result of change in weather, climate, and season is. Three levels of climate environment affect human behavior whereas, micro-climate, which represents weather conditions surrounding an individual living thing, ecological climate, its represent weather elements of the habitat of living thing, geographical climate, weather situation of larger area unit and longer temporal span.

Human body can function properly only in certain suites of environmental conditions in terms of oxygen, heat, light, humidity and precipitation, wind, atmospheric electricity and space. Even the survival of human body depends on the above factors. Lack of required amount of oxygen at higher altitudes makes human survival impossible. Excessive heat and humidity retard body and mental growth whereas very high or very low temperature on the one hand adversely affects human body and on the other hand makes food a scarce commodity to support human life.

Various combinations of environment factors have not only affected but conditioned racial characteristics in different parts of the earth's surface. Environment also effect conditions thoughts, ideologies, and culture of human being. Other hand social, economic, and political behaviors influenced to certain extent by man's perception of environmental factor and his response to these factors. Frequency and magnitude of extreme natural events and environmental factors like earthquake, floods, droughts, landslides, and atmospheric storms influence man's perception of natural environment and decide his reactions and response to these events.

The most significant aspect of the environment of the environment in influencing human activity is the availability of natural resources. The rich or poor quality and quantity all the availability of renewable and non-renewable resources decide the type of human activities towards economic viability, social organizations, political stability, and international relations. In matter of fact, the level of economic development largely depends on natural resources.

Demography and Economics

The meaningful contribution to demography both in theory and application has come from economists. Population studies are being an essential part of course contents in graduate studies in economics. Population size, its distribution and skill quality ate key factors in the total production and utilization process. Labor supply and labor productivity are dependent upon the size and skill composition of the population supply. Resource management, employment generation and distortion in income distribution are key issues that confront today's economists more than what they did hundred years back. There can be no uncertainty that raising the level of living of people is very closely related to the population growth.

Population explosion in the developing countries has left some of their economic programs. Investment priorities of economic and development planning have often been derailed by the rapid population growth. Globalization and cheap labor in the developing countries have become contentious issues in World Tread Organization. Economic issues have effects direct or indirect on fertility, mortality, emigration and immigration, population density, migration towards urban from rural and many human activities.

Demography and Anthropology

These both disciplines share human population as their research subject though they focus on complementary aspects. Demography's primary concern is with the dynamic forces defining population size and structure and their variation across time and space, social and cultural anthropology focuses on the social organization shaping people's production and reproduction. Given these different focuses the methodological approaches too are quite different demography's stress is on collected data, mathematical modeling and the estimation testing system, anthropology is mostly qualitative based on case studies and inductive. Anthropological demography an emerging branch uses anthropological theory and methods to investigate demographic events. The main theoretical concepts in anthropological demography are known as culture, gender, religious institutions and political economy. Generally, its theoretical research approach includes a mix of quantitative and qualitative methodologies applied to case studies. The ethnographic research and participant observation are often central to this approach as is interpretative reading o primary data historical material.   

Anthropologists tend to be skeptical about demographer's emphasis on statistical representative their comparable nature of data collected through standardized surveys, they claim that the demographer's pay little attention to their validity of the data, to the analytically models and their interpretation. Despite such divergences scholars in both disciplines have occasionally come together, working in multidisciplinary research teams, and created complex research models to build on mutual strengths and reduce disciplinary limitations thus launching their field of anthropological demography. Anthropological demography within demography is still evolving.

Demography and Sociology

Demography and Sociology both considered as man as a social animal and that as a unit of society human being have to perform a series of activities both as an individual as also as a partner of a larger group. A sociologist uses demography as a tool and supplies of social space for understanding social relations, social issues, social interactions, social reactions and the evolution and continuation of social processes. The study of population would be largely incomplete and could be misleading too if social and cultural issues do not receive the attention it deserves. Demography is not simply a study of population compositions, sex ratio in the population, prevailing or changing birth rate, death rate, migration rate and marriage rate. They are meaningful only in the context of social, cultural and economic background of the human aggregate under scrutiny.

When the demography viewed as an applied science, has closest relation with sociology since study of composition and distribution of a population cannot be understood without reference to the social environment that foster them. When structures and compositions are to be understood about a population, the frequently used criterion is social.

It has a strong social base on both fertility and migration; often they are treated as part of a social phenomenon. Even change in death rates especially age-sex specific death rates and marriage rates are mutual related to social customs and cultural determinants.

The population policy which basically is a demographic issue is discussed and debated in social, cultural and economic context. The measures recommended and practiced for controlling birth rate differ from one country to another primarily because of the social and cultural circumstances prevailing in those countries.

A representative mutual relation appears to exist between social status on the one hand and fertility and mortality on the other. Class position has proved ascendancy over others in explaining fertility, expectation of life and even some of the principle causes of mortality and morbidity in a population.

MACRO-AND MICRO DEMOGRAPHY

The difference between macro and micro study lies in the size of the study aspects unit used in data collection and analysis. Marco Demography studies the total population of a region or country or aggregate of people known to share a common culture or genetic origin or some other common social, economical or other characteristics. Usually the units for macro-demographic studies are the continents, nations or the states or larger administrative units within a country. The studies of slow or rapid growth rate of population birth rate, death rate, sex ratio, dependency ratio, migration, public health system etc. are examples of macro demography. Many other issues as literacy rate, employment, income distribution, proportion-consumption, and living standards, relation between population and economic development and environment are the part of macro-demography.

Units of micro-demography are not only small they are included the larger macro-demography. They constitute the internal or primary elements of macro analysis. This unit is totally dependent on the basic an autonomous units of macro-demography. Micro-demography studies the nature of changes in some of the demographic characteristics of a population group that influence the structure and distribution of the population or help bring some readjustment in population groups. The micro-demography uses individual, family, small community or village as the unit for understanding causal connections to some of the changes observed in the population groups.

Some examples of macro and micro demography:-

Macro mortality studies: - role of vaccination reduction of small pox, polio regional differences in infant mortality; causes of mortality in the country.

Micro-mortality studies: - some communities have reservation against polio vaccination? Role of education in public health awareness; do parents discriminate sons and daughter in matters relating to their health and education?

Macro-fertility study: - the relation between birth rate and economic development, urbanization and industrialization, the differences in birth rate between rural and urban population, religion and birth control etc. often are objectives of macro-fertility study.

Micro-fertility studies: - what is an ideal family size? Cost of rearing a child, family planning awareness and interest in birth control, need for education and aspiration for children are example of micro- fertility studies.

Macro- migration studies: - net migration rate by regions, type of migration in Asia, migration and individual development, sex difference in migration.

Micro-migration studies: - individual and family decisions behind migration, impact of immigration from one to another village or state, why is migration rate high with educated people, how has rural economy been affected by rural-urban migration?

DEFINITION OF DEMOGRAPHY

To define demography there need to start with by population. The influence of statistics is immense in demography. As such, population to a demographer refers to an average of people possessing some specified characteristics within a precisely defined area. We can use either geographic or social space or both to demarcate one population from another.

The credit of adding the word Demography to our vocabulary goes to Achillle Guillard. The term has variously been used in economics, geography, sociology, anthropology and other social science. They have defined the term from their own point of view to suit their conveniences. Therefore some definitions are too narrow and some are too broad to include a wide variety of things. Some definitions are as follow:

Demography is a function of fertility, mortality and migration.

                                                                                                   -Gywalli, Damother

The study of the size, composition and the distribution of population is demography.

                                                                                                         -Thomson and Lewis

Demography is the numerical analysis of the state and movement of human population inclusive of census enumerations and registration of vital processes and whatever qualitative analysis can be made of the state and the movement of population on the basis of fundamental census and registration data.

                                                                                                                      -Von Mayor

The mathematical, scientific and statistical study of the size, composition and spatial distribution of the population through the operation of five processes of fertility, mortality, marriage, migration and social mobility its long run goal is to develop theories to explain the events that is charts and compare.

                                                                                                             -Donald J. Bogue

Demography is the study of the size, territorial distribution and composition of the population changes therein and the components of such changes, which may be identified as natality, mortality, territorial movement and social mobility.

                                                                                                      -Hauser and Duncan

Scientific study of human population primary with their size, their structure and their development is demography.

                                                                                         -The Multilingual Dictionary

Demography does not deal with the behavior of individual but only with the aggregates of people or even part therefore the numerical of human population is known as demography.

                                                                                                           -W.G. Barckly

Demography

Statistic and scientific study of population is called Demography. It is a new science in study among other science. Achillle Guillard was the first person who used the term Demography in 1855 in his book Elements de Statistique Humaine on Demography Comparee. The term Demography is derived from two Greek words, Demos, means people and Graphein, to draw or write. Guillard used the term to denote mathematical knowledge of the social, intellectual, physical and ethical aspects of a population.  Demography stands for measurements by statistical methods of various characteristics of human population. Its principle concern is with population size, distribution and growth of population of a region, nation and the world. The constituents of growth of change are births, deaths and migration. Therefore, a demographer's primary concern is with fertility, mortality and population transfer from one region to another. They take keen interest in studying interaction between social, economic and political activities and demography related processes as size, distribution, composition and change in number determined by fertility, mortality and migration.

The demographer study populations with all their characteristics both at a single point and at different points of time. Whereas the former provides valuable information for comparing various population groups spread over space age and sex composition, vital rates, generic composition the latter provides an opportunity to study relation between two population in an area at two points of time, that is those aged x at a time t are survivors of those aged x-n at the time t-n, subject to mortality and migration. This helps projection of population and its composition, changes in birth and death rates and also changes in expectation of life at different ages.

John Graunt was known as founding father of modern demography. Graunt's book Natural and Political Observation Made upon the Bills of Mortality was the first-ever book on experimental and theoretical demography. From the records preserved in churches and cemeteries in London and around, Graunt studied in great details the information recorded for each married and deceased person and analyzed the collected information and tried to estimate, birth, death, marriage, migration rates and their interdependence. Graunt noted that the sex ratio at birth favored male babies. He also noted mortality changes with age. He also observed variations in mortality and causes of mortality with time and space. Based even on utterly inadequate information, Graunt prepared a table for age-specific death rate. This can be regarded as the true ancestor of modern Life table.

William Petty went a step further and tried to relate various population statistics to social, political and economic backdrop. Even with improved techniques of analyze and interpret many population issues. Petty tried to find answer to some such complex issues even though there was no apt technology to support his analysis and research. He tried population projections, and to show how urbanization was related to economic and social structure, to understand population structure and distribution in relation to active age group in the population, he gave considerable thought to problems of unemployment and partial employment and other social problems and tried to estimate gross national productivity.