The Amazon River Forest: A Natural History of Plants, Animals, and People
An investigation, based on both fieldwork and historical sources, of changing land use practices in the Amazonian floodplain forest.
An investigation, based on both fieldwork and historical sources, of changing land use practices in the Amazonian floodplain forest.
This study explores the hypothesis that a serious reduction in “landscape efficiency,” typified by significant landscape degradation, underlies the increase observed in external inputs and the corresponding loss of energy efficiency that the agrarian system has undergone over the last 150 years.
Imperfect Balance offers a balance of accessible writing and scholarly approaches to understanding the Western Hemisphere’s incredibly diverse landscapes, the human forces that shaped them, and the impact of this interaction on sustained human settlement.
Stoll traces the origins of nineteenth-century conservation, which grew out of a rich and heated discussion, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, about soil fertility, plant nutrition, and livestock management. More fundamental than any other resource, soil “became the focal point for a conception of nature as strictly limited.” The problem gave rise to a major disagreement about the wisdom of territorial expansion.
Disrupted Landscapes focuses on the emblematic case of postsocialist Romania, in which the transition from collectivization to privatization profoundly reshaped the nation’s forests, farmlands, and rivers.
Yonten Nyima Yundannima provides an empirical analysis of rangeland use rights privatization through an empirical case study from Pelgon county in the Tibet Autonomous Region in China. She criticizes the applicability of the tragedy of the commons model to Tibetan pastoralism, arguing that this has led to a disruption of the essence of pastoralism in the region.