out of the sea onto land.

Amphibians: newts, frogs, salamanders: backboned animals that can live

in water and on land.

Anabolic: metabolic processes that build tissues and organs. The opposite
of Catabolic.

Anaerobic: chemical reactions in the absence of oxygen and often initiated

by bacteria or archaeans (bacterialike organisms that live in extreme
conditions).

Anagensis: evolutionary change, but without spilling over into speciation.

Analogue Forestry: 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.

Anapsid: a vertebrate whose skull contains no side openings behind the

eyes. The only living examples are turtles.

Anemophilous: seed plants pollinated by the wind.

Angiosperms: flowering plants that place their seeds in fruits. The

monocots have an embryo with a single cotyledon (seed leaf), three-part
flowers, parallel leaf veins, and adventitious root growth. Dicots have two
cotyledons, four- or five-part flowers, and net leaf vein patterns.
Monocots include grasses, orchids, palms, and cattails, and dicots include
oaks, sycamores, and maples. Compare gymnosperms.

Angle of Incidence: angle at which the sun's rays hit the Earth.

Angle of Repose: the steepest angle that slope, rock, or detritus material
settles into without toppling. Builders of flood-prone roads and sliding
hillside homes in California ignore the angle of repose so often that it
could be renamed the angle of depose.

Animals: the animal kingdom branches into the deuterostomes (mouth

and anus develop separately) and the protostomes. Animals are
multicellular and possess mitochondria, a complex nervous system, and
cells protected by a membrane and filled with complex organelles. 75% of
all the animal species are insects.

Last summer I saw a timber wolf trotting sedately across an

open dune above the water, and time without number rabbits,
squirrels and birds, not feeding but seeming to enjoy the
peculiar delight that beaches provide. I cannot speak for them,
but is it wrong to believe that they may know something akin
to the lift of spirit that is mine when standing on the sands? Is
there any reason they too should not have somewhat the
feeling I do there of coming suddenly out of the mountains into
an alpine meadow, or a clearing in dense woods, or a plain
after traversing rugged broken country? -- Sigurd F. Olson

Animism: a derogatory anthropological term for what most human

cultures have believed throughout prehistory: that the Earth is alive and
reactive, as are its many places. Greeks and Romans once thought a
"genius loci" or spirit of place inhabited every hill, grove, and stream.
Such beings still live in all human mythologies. The modern counterpart
is panpsychism, the idea that all things possess qualities of mindfulness or
psyche. With the coming of heavy industry, such ideas gave way to the
financially convenient reduction of the Earth to the status of a lifeless
resource.

Anion: a negatively charged ion. See Cation.

Anorexia: from an ecopsychological perspective, a horror of carnality so

profound that it seeks to etherealize the body itself. Tends to be
overrepresented in highly industrialized nations.

Annuals: pioneer plants which grow, flourish, and die in one season. Their
seeds often germinate during the following wet season. See Perennials.

Antemortem: "before slaughter." The animal examination USDA meat

inspectors conduct shortly before they are butchered (the animals, that
is).
Anther: the pollen-producing tip of a flower's stamen.

Antheridium: the organ that produces antherozoids--male gametes

(sperm cells)--in algae, bryophytes (mosses, liverworts), and
pteridophytes (club mosses, ferns, horsetails). See Archegonium.

Anthophyte: a flowering plant or its closest relatives.

Anthropocentric Detour: deep ecologist George Sessions’ term for the

ideological turn of mind Western civilization has taken, accompanied by
occasional opportunities to return to a less human-centered way of
viewing the world (e.g., Maimonides’ belief that the world was good
before humans were created, and Spinoza’s thought that mind is found
throughout nature). For many deep ecologists, regarding the natural
world only for what it does for us exhibits a regrettable immaturity.

Anthropocentrism: human chauvinism, according to John Seed. An

example is the belief that the Earth is merely a stage for human salvation
or self-development without any intrinsic importance of its own.

Anticline: an arch-shaped fold in layers of rock.

Anticyclone: a high-pressure system that spirals outward clockwise in the

Northern Hemisphere and counterclockwise in the Southern.

Aphelion: the annual point where the Earth is farthest from the sun (152.5
million kilometers). It falls on the 3rd or 4th of July. The opposite of
Perihelion.

Aphids: soft-bodied insects that eat green leaves. Ants corral them and
protect them from predators to milk them of the honeydew they excrete.
Most gardeners consider them pests.

Aphytal: the plantless zone at the bottom of a lake.

Apical Meristem: the tissue-creating cells at the growing tip of a branch or

root.

Aposematism: evolving a type of protective coloration found to be useful

by other species.

Aquaculture: growing and harvesting fish and shellfish in land-based

ponds. Relative protein yields often exceed those of land cropping by 4-20
times. Ponds attract beneficial wildlife, cool the surrounding areas, reflect
sunlight, draw birds, and make convenient places for growing rice and
other moisture-loving plants. See also Hydroponics.

Aquiclude: rock formations impermeable to groundwater.

Aquifer: an underground layer of sand or rock that contains usable water.

Can be unconfined (down to the first impervious rock layer) or confined
(between the first and the second layers). See Artesian.

Archaea: organisms that resemble bacteria but also display characteristics

found in multicellular organisms. They were discovered in 1977 and tend,
like so many humans of that era, to favor extreme environments.

Archegonium: a multicellular female reproductive organ in mosses, ferns,

and the majority of gymnosperms. Normally flask-shaped, it corresponds
to the pistil in flowering plants.

Archipelago: volcanically raised islands that arc near subduction zones

where one continental plate rides over another. See Plate Tectonics.

Arête: a sharp ridge that divides cirques on a glaciated mountain.

Artesian: water pushed upward by the hydrostatic pressure of a confined

aquifer. Overuse of artesian wells lowers the water table and sometimes
makes nearby land sink (subsidence).

Arthropods: jointed, backboneless animals--namely, arachnids, insects,

and crustaceans--often protected by a shell or exoskeleton. In
evolutionary terms, this type of light armoring has proved very successful.

Asexual Reproduction: reproduction without gametes (sperm and egg) in

which a single parent creates a clone of itself, often by budding or dividing
itself. The offspring is genetically identical to the parent. Organisms
reproduced asexually until the evolutionary invention of sex.

Assimilative Capacity: the amount of pollution a self-cleaning body of

water can tolerate.

Atmospheric Deposition: contamination of land or water by atmospheric

pollutants.

Atmosphere, Layers: from lower to higher:

 Troposphere: from the planet surface to roughly 7-17 kilometers up.
It makes up about 75% of the atmosphere. Weather occurs here,
through exchanges of heat. The outer boundary is called the
tropopause.
 Stratosphere: reaches up to about 50 kilometers, where the
stratopause is. Includes the ozone layer.
 Mesosphere: 50-85 kilometers up to the mesopause. Meteorites
break up here.
 Thermosphere: to 640 kilometers up. Auroras appear here. Th