NSES Content Standard F  Science in Personal and Social Perspectives: Natural hazards Grades 5-8, page 168 Human activities also can induce hazards through resource acquisition, urban growth, land-use decisions, and waste disposal. Such activities can accelerate many natural changes.

 
Benchmark 4B The Physical Setting: The Earth
Grades 6-8, page 69
The benefits of the earth's resources--such as fresh water, air, soil, and trees--can be reduced by using them wastefully or by deliberately or inadvertently destroying them. The atmosphere and the oceans have a limited capacity to absorb wastes and recycle materials naturally. Cleaning up polluted air, water, or soil or restoring depleted soil, forests, or fishing grounds can be very difficult and costly.

Benchmark 4C The Physical Setting: Processes that Shape the Earth
Grades 6-8, page 73
Human activities, such as reducing the amount of forest cover, increasing the amount and variety of chemicals released into the atmosphere, and intensive farming, have changed the earth's land, oceans, and atmosphere. Some of these changes have decreased the capacity of the environment to support some life forms.

Benchmark 5E The Living Environment: Flow of Matter and Energy
Grades 9-12, page 121
At times, environmental conditions are such that plants and marine organisms grow faster than decomposers can recycle them back to the environment. Layers of energy-rich organic material have been gradually turned into great coal beds and oil pools by the pressure of the overlying earth. By burning these fossil fuels, people are passing most of the stored energy back into the environment as heat and releasing large amounts of carbon dioxide.

Benchmark 8C The Designed World: Energy Sources and Use
Grades 6-8, page 194
Different ways of obtaining, transforming, and distributing energy have different environmental consequences.