Meaning of Environment: Environment can be defined as a sum total of all the living and non-living elements and their effects that influence human life. While all living or biotic elements are animals, plants, forests, fisheries, and birds, non-living or abiotic elements include water, land, sunlight, rocks, and air.

Meaning of environmental degradation: Environment constitutes a very important part of our life. To understand life without studying the impact of the environment is simply impossible. The need to protect the environment we can ignore only at our peril. We use environmental resource in our day to life. Those resource are renewable and non renewable. We have to be more cautious on COM summing nor renewable resources like coal and petroleum, which are prone to depletion. All human activities have an impact on the environment. But in the last two centuries or so the human influence on the environment has increased manifold due to the rapid population.

Growth and the fast development in science and technology. These two are the major factors in reducing the quality of environment and causing its degradation.

The environmental degradation poses a great danger to man's own survival. It should be realised, sooner than later, that conservation and improvement of the environment are vital for the survival. And well being of mankind. Natural resources of land, air and water have to be used wisely as a trust to ensure a healthy environment for the present and future generations