B. L. Turner II - Böcker

The human-environment conditions in the Americas on the eve of the sixteenth-century European conquest have of late attracted growing interest in both academic and public circles. Focusing on Middle America, this book completes a trilogy which has made the most comprehensive survey ever achieved of pre-Colombian agriculture and culture throughout the continents. It addresses the question of what lands were permanently occupied; how they were used; and what the environmental and social implications of this use were. The answers to these questions are central to such wide-ranging themes as indigenous land rights, the conservation and preservation 'ethic' of these native people, and the global carbon cycle. The kind, scale, and location of land use is documented and mapped in detail. The book not only demonstrates the sophistication of the agricultural landscapes and their local integration, but also investigates the omissions and land degradation of the native agriculturalists. Drawing on this wealth of data the authors make a stimulating contribution to the debate about resource, land, and population in the Americas.

This highly topical study of tropical deforestation in Mexico reports on the first phase of the Land-Cover and Land-Use Change in the Southern Yucatan Peninsular Region Project (LCLUC-SYPR): a large, multi-institutional, and team-based study designed to understand and project land changes in a development frontier that pits the rapidly growing needs of smallholder farmers to cut down forests for cultivation against federally sponsored initiatives committed to various international programmes of forest preservation and complementary economic programmes.The SYPR project is a response to inderdisciplinary defined research themes deemed critical to global environmental change and complementary international research agendas (e.g. environment and development, ecosystem assessment, biotic diversity). Pivotal among these agendas are those posed by the Land-Use/Cover Change (LUCC) effort of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme and the International Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change Programme as it is linked through such US sponsors as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the National Science Foundation (NSF). The themes (i.e. questions and subjects) posed by these programmes and organization are 'integrated' or 'synthesis' in kind, meaning that they rest within the intersection of formal disciplines and are intended to fit into a larger, systems framework about human-environment relationships and the structure and function of the biosphere.The editors of this volume, as most of its contributors, come from the disciplines of geography, ecology, and economics. The lead editor, the geographer B. L. Turner II, has spent most of his career in pursuit of understanding different aspects of tropical deforestation and agriculture.

The Earth as Transformed by Human Action is the culmination of a mammoth undertaking involving the examination of the toll our continual strides forward, technical and social, take on our world. The purpose of such a study is to document the changes in the biosphere that have taken place over the last 300 years, to contrast global patterns of change to those appearing on a regional level, and to explain the major human forces that have driven these changes. The first section deals strictly with the major human forces of the past 300 years and the second is a detailed account of the transformations of the global environment wrought by human action. The final section examines a range of perspectives and theories that purport to explain human actions with regard to the biosphere.