This innovative interdisciplinary study focuses on the history, science, and policy of tree planting and water conservation in South Africa. South Africa’s forestry sector has sat—often controversially—at the crossroads of policy and scientific debates regarding water conservation, economic development, and biodiversity protection. Bennett and Kruger show how debates about the hydrologica…
Volcanic eruptions have killed thousands of people and damaged homes, villages, infrastructure, subsistence gardens, and hunting and fishing grounds in Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. The central business district of a town was destroyed by a volcanic eruption in the case of Rabaul in 1994. Volcanic disasters litter not only the recent written history of both countries—particularly …
The world has changed dramatically. We no longer live in a world relatively empty of humans and their artifacts. We now live in the “Anthropocene,” era in a full world where humans are dramatically altering our ecological life-support system. Our traditional economic concepts and models were developed in an empty world. If we are to create sustainable prosperity, if we seek “improved huma…
This book is for the general reader interested in the human place in nature and the future of civilisation. It is based on the biohistorical approach to the study of human situations. This approach recognises human culture as a new and extremely important force in the biosphere. The book discusses the evolution of life and the essential ecological processes on which all life, including human ci…
Between the Plough and the Pick deepens our understanding of informal, artisanal and small-scale mining, popularly known as ASM. The book engages with wider scholarly conceptualisations of contemporary global social, agrarian and political changes, whilst underlining the roles that local social‑political-historical contexts play in shaping mineral extractive processes and practices. It shows …
What do climate models predict for the rainfall where you live? What about evaporation or runoff? Should your local community consider constructing new dams or do the existing water storages appear adequate? What about the availability of water for irrigation farming? Do the predictions differ between different climate models or do all the models basically predict the same changes in water avai…
Northern Australia is one of few tropical places left on Earth in which biodiversity—and the ecological processes underpinning that biodiversity—is still relatively intact. However, scientific knowledge of that biodiversity is still in its infancy and the region remains a frontier for biological discovery. The butterfly and diurnal moth assemblages of the area, and their intimate associatio…
Meeting the goals enshrined in the Paris Agreement and limiting global temperature increases to less than two degrees above pre-industrial levels demands rapid reductions in global carbon dioxide emissions. Reducing energy demand has a central role in achieving this goal, but existing policy initiatives have been largely incremental in terms of the technological and behavioural changes they enc…
Sustainable Food System Assessment provides both practical and theoretical insights about the growing interest in and response to measuring food system sustainability. Bringing together research from the Global North and South, this book shares lessons learned, explores intended and actual project outcomes, and highlights points of conceptual and methodological convergence.Interest in assessing…
Fred Chappell, Jeff Daniel Marion, Jim Wayne Miller, and Robert Morgan are primarily folk artists who write poetry about people doing common, everyday tasks.