Preface to the Sixth Edition xi Acknowledgments xii PART I: THE PAST AND PRESENT 1 1 INTRODUCTION 3 The development of ideas 3 The development of human population and stages of cultural development 7 Hunting and gathering 11 Humans as cultivators, keepers, and metal workers 13 Modern industrial and urban civilizations 18 Points for review 22 Guide to reading 22 2 THE HUMAN IMPACT ON VEGETATION 23 Introduction 23 The use of fire 24 Fires: natural and anthropogenic 25 The temperatures attained in fires 27 Some consequences of fire suppression 28 Some effects of fire on vegetation 29 The role of grazing 30
[...]... Part I The Past and Present 2 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 1 3 INTRODUCTION The development of ideas To what extent have humans transformed their natural environment? This is a crucial question that intrigued the eighteenth century French natural historian, Count Buffon He can be regarded as the first Western scientist to be concerned directly and intimately with the human impact on the natural environment. .. Commission) Our common future Montreal Protocol on substances that deplete the ozone layer Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Global Environmental Facility Earth Summit in Rio and Agenda 21 United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification International Human Dimensions Program on Global Environmental Change Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse... 500 1000 The modernization cycle 10 5 0 AD 1500 2000 a widening range that eventually came to include the whole earth The evolving impact of humans on the environment has often been expressed in terms of a simple equation: I=PAT where I is the amount of pressure or impact that humans apply on the environment, P is the number of people, A is the affluence (or the demand on resources per person), and... around the Asian shores to Tokyo, form an economic core area based primarily on fossil fuel use Societies have increasingly divorced themselves from the natural environment, through air conditioning for example These societies have also had major impacts on the environment The Pacific global era Since the 1960s there has been a shifting emphasis to the Pacific Basin as the primary focus of the global economy,... warn about CFCs and ozone hole Worldwatch Institute established Convention on Long-range Transboundary Air Pollution IUCN’s (International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources) World Conservation Strategy British Antarctic Survey finds ozone hole over Antarctic International Geosphere Biosphere Program (IGBP) Chernobyl nuclear disaster World Commission on Environment and Development... S W ‘Changes in the evolution of fluvial landscapes xv in the Piedmont of Georgia, USA in response to landuse change between 1700 and 1970’, from Man-induced soil erosion on the southern Piedmont (Soil Conservation Society of America, © Soil Conservation Society of America, 1974); Viles, H A ‘Conceptual model of the impact of effective precipitation’ from Journal of nature conservation, 11, 2003; Vinnikov,... Steffen et al., 2004) The huge increase in interest in the study of the human impact on the environment and of global change has not been without its great debates and controversies, and some have argued that environmentalists have overplayed their hand (see e.g., Lomborg’s The skeptical environmentalist, 2001) and have exaggerated the amount of environmental harm that is being caused by human activities... interpretations of global population trends over the past two to three million years (Whitmore et al., 1990) The first, described as the ‘arithmetic-exponential’ view, sees the history of the global population as a two-stage phenomenon: the first stage is one of slow growth, while the second stage, related to the industrial revolution, displays a staggering acceleration in growth rates The second view,... – one of the major transformations in nature brought about by human actions Studies of the torrents of the French and Austrian Alps, undertaken in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, deepened immeasurably the realization of human capacity to change the environment Fabre and Surell studied the flooding, siltation, erosion and division of watercourses brought about by deforestation in the. .. of one of the basic laws of ecology: that everything is connected to everything else and that one cannot change just one thing in nature Considerable interest in conservation, climatic change and extinctions arose amongst European colonialists who witnessed some of the consequences of westernstyle economic development in tropical lands (Grove, 1997) However, the extent of human influence on the environment . alt="" ON THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT The Human Impact THIA01 06/20/2005, 02:02PM1 THIA01 06/20/2005, 02:02PM2 Andrew Goudie ON THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT Past, Present, and Future Sixth Edition The Human Impact THIA01. 02:02PM5 Deforestation 32 Secondary rain forest 38 The human role in the creation and maintenance of savanna 39 The spread of desert vegetation on desert margins 42 The maquis of the Mediterranean lands 48 The. 131 Vegetation modification and its effect on river flow 133 The human impact on lake levels 137 Changes in groundwater conditions 140 Water pollution 143 Chemical pollution by agriculture and other activities