Land Degradation: Creation and Destruction - Softcover

Johnson, Douglas L.; Lewis, Laurence A.

9780742519480: Land Degradation: Creation and Destruction

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0742519481 ISBN 13: 9780742519480

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2006

This up-to-date, second edition of Land Degradation explores substantial decreases in the land's biological productivity or usefulness to humans due to human activities. Case studies—including tourist impacts in Europe, the environmental footprints of urban areas, wetland drainage for agriculture in the American Midwest, run-on farming in the Negev, land degradation in the Amazon Basin, and irrigation in Egypt—cover the history of land degradation, identify the level of human responsibility in transforming natural landscapes into sustainable agro-ecosystems, look at local and regional effects of human interactions with the environment, and reveal both negative and positive aspects of land modification. Extensively illustrated, Land Degradation can be used as the primary text in a course of the same name or as a supplement in courses covering land use, environmental change, and sustainability.

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From the Back Cover:

Land degradation describes a decline in natural, biological productivity that is either irreversible or which may not be recovered for at least one human generation. The complex causes and forms of land degradation - as well as the means of managing and controlling it - form the subject of this book.

Land degradation is not a new phenomenon. For at least 100,000 years a principal activity of human culture has been to adjust and to modify the landscape in order to provide food, shelter and warmth. Degradation probably began in earnest with the human control of fire, but the advances in technology and the relentless increase in human population of the last century have magnified both the degree of the problem and the area of the Earth that it affects. This book examines the history and current state of land degradation through an analysis of the linkages between natural and human systems and does so in a wide range of environmental, economic and historical settings.

The authors characterize land degradation as either unintentional and unforecast or intentional and creative, where zones have been deliberately sacrificed in order to achieve greater total productivity in the meeting of social needs. This distinction provides an important basis for analysing the economic and cultural causes of degradation. To this the authors add the further dimension of degradation that takes place through processes that are themselves either wholly or partly natural. The failure to recognise the complex causes of land degradation is, they argue, one of the main reasons why it has been so difficult to control.

The book is written in a clear, non-technical and accessible style, and detailed case studies are presented from both the developed and the developing world. This is a book which will be of central interest to students of environmental science and environmental management.

About the Author:

Douglas L. Johnson is professor of geography at Clark University.

Laurence A. Lewis is professor of geography at Clark University.

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