This keynote lecture identifies recent advances in land-use change analysis and reviews the major ecological changes that make such analysis important.
The Basins at Risk project attempts to fill several gaps in research on freshwater resources and international conflict and includes: 'a methodology for identifying and classifying events by their intensity of cooperation and conflict; construction of a geographic information system (GIS) of countries and international basins, both current and historical; and the collection or creation of indicator variables (biophysical, socioeconomic, and geopolitical) for testing of hypotheses about factors associated with water conflict."
The book focuses the population of South Asia. Discussions include history of Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Chapters of the book focus on interaction between demography, climate, health, medicine and culture. (from online abstract).
This is a call to apply population ecology to the study of spatial dynamics of states, groups, and world systems.
The paper examines the environmental history of Madagascar, focusing on the evolution of human settlement and forest cover in a region in the south-central highlands, and it is grounded in the specifics of one landscape -- the Pays Zafimaniry -- whose settlement in the past two centuries has been posited as an exemplar for the prior transformation of the rest of the highlands.
My father told me about Malthus when I was quite young. He said that Malthus had believed wars and plagues were nature's way of dealing with overpopulation. Where he had learned about Malthus, I don't know. He held a good job in a corporate office, but had not completed high school and seldom read anything but the evening paper. His viewpoint was certainly not privileged, and I think it was probably typical of the way Malthus was understood at mid-twentieth century.
Reviews food production trends in the world from 1962-1990 and finds a difference in the responses of countries with ow density compared to those with high density to rising food demand.
Mugisha documents the effect of biophysical-socio-economic factors on land cover/use changes in Uganda over the past 100 years.
Jared Diamond's presentation is available here through Real Player.
Australia is in a relatively unique position to provide baseline data on the impact of agriculture, forestry and urban expansion on a large variety of environmental systems. The major phase of European settlement began just over 200 years ago, and this brought a whole new set of cultural and technological practices that rapidly displaced those used by Aboriginal people. To assess the impact of humans it is necessary to establish proper baseline conditions against which change can be measured.
