Search Results

The chapter discusses the relationship between population growth and the natural environment as mediated through economic development. It discusses both the classical and the neoclassical theories of relationship between population growth and economic development with varying implications of the importance of population growth and environmental resource limitations in development theory and policy. It analyses the relationship between fertility behaviour and economic growth and reviews the theory and evidence of demographic transition in terms of micro-economic logic of income – price based choice of family size, gender power structure, property rights, family institution and cultural norms at the different stages of development. Finally the chapter discusses the impact of population growth on environment by way of direct pressure on resource use due to reproductive externalities and focuses on the vicious circular relationship among high fertility, poverty, low female empowerment and over use of commons in the rural sector with its policy implications.

This final chapter explores the future challenges for agroecosystem biology. Factors such as population growth and the requirement for increased agricultural production are considered, alongside environmental factors such as climate change. The chapter explores the potential encroachment of new farmland into natural habitats and the limiting factors for agricultural growth (such as land and water availability). The use of new developments to overcome these limiting factors to agricultural growth is discussed. The chapter concludes with consideration of the potential biological impacts of further expansion and change to global agriculture, and of the implications of agricultural management on biological and other environmental factors.

The editors provide a historic overview of African American entrepreneurship in Chicago. Beginning with the pioneering entrepreneurial exploits of Jean Baptiste Point Du Sable, persons of African descent have long engaged in commercial activities in the Windy City. Early on, during the nineteenth century, most black Chicago businesspersons featured whites as their primary clients. Yet, because the twentieth century featured a simultaneous rise in both the city’s African American population and white antagonism toward blacks, a new breed of black entrepreneur emerged that focused upon serving the needs of a perceived “Black Metropolis.” This ultimately resulted in Chicago’s primacy as a center of black business activity. However, in the early twenty-first century, due to a variety of circumstances, Chicago’s African American business community has diminished.

Relative to the problems we face, our politics are about the most miserable that can be imagined. Those who purport to represent us and who on rare occasions try to lead us have been unable to take even the smallest steps to promote energy efficiency to avoid possibly catastrophic climatic change a few decades from now. They have failed to stop the hemorrhaging of life and protect biological diversity, soils, and forests. They ignore problems of urban decay, suburban sprawl, the poisoning of our children by persistent toxins, the destruction of rural communities, and the growing disparity between the rich and the poor. They cannot find the wherewithal to defend the public interest in matters of global trade or even in the financing of public elections. Indeed, the more potentially catastrophic the issue, the less likely it is to receive serious and sustained attention from political leaders at any level. Our public priorities, in other words, are upside down. Issues that will seem trivial or even nonsensical to our progeny are given great attention, while problems crucial to their well-being are ignored and allowed to grow into global catastrophes. At best they will regard us with pity, at worst as derelict and perhaps criminally so. The situation was not always this way. The leadership of this country was once capable of responding to threats to our security and health with alacrity and sometimes with intelligence. In light of the dismal performance of the U.S. political system relative to the large environmental and social issues looming ahead, we have, broadly speaking, three possible courses of action (assuming that we choose to act). The first is to turn the management of our environmental affairs over to a kind of permanent technocracy—a priesthood of global managers. The idea that experts ought to manage public affairs is at least as old as Plato. In its current incarnation, some propose to turn the management of the earth over to a group of global experts. Stripped to its essentials, this means smarter exploitation of nature culminating in the global administration of the planet with lots of satellites, remote sensing, and geographic information systems experts mapping one thing or another.

In the towns and cities across America, it is common to find a town square with a large monument to one military hero or another. Seldom, however, does one find the designers of those towns or town squares similarly memorialized. A smarter and more durable society would first acknowledge those with the foresight and dedication to design our places well, not just those who defended them in times of trouble.We need to recognize a higher order of heroism—those who helped avoid conflict, harmonized human communities with their surroundings, preserved soil and biological diversity, and created the basis for a more permanent peace than that possible to forge by violence. These are quiet heroes and heroines who work mostly out of the light of publicity. The few who do receive public acclaim are mostly reticent about the attention they get. Some like Frederick Law Olmsted, Aldo Leopold, and Rachel Carson develop a wide international following. Most, however, labor in obscurity, content to do their work for the satisfaction of doing things well. John Lyle, professor of landscape architecture at California Polytechnic Institute, was such a man. I met John in the mid-1980s during a visit to Cal Poly. During the two days we spent together, we talked about his concept of regenerative design and his plans for the Center for Regenerative Studies, now named the Lyle Center, and walked over the site—located between a large landfill and the university. In subsequent years, John and I met at conferences and sometimes collaborated on design projects, including one located in a remote, hilly, southern rural community. Our first site visit coincided with an ice storm the previous day that had covered the region with an inch of ice. We got within a mile of the site in a rental car, but had to make our way down a long, steep hill with a sheer drop of several hundred feet on one side. For the final mile on what passed for a dirt road in that part of the country, the rental car was useless, so we began to slip, slide, and tumble our way down the hill. Near the bottom, the road banked steeply to the right, but we had to reach a trail on the left side.

Whatever their particular causes, environmental problems all share one fundamental trait: with rare exceptions they are unintended, unforeseen, and sometimes ironic side effects of actions arising from other intentions. We intend one thing and sooner or later get something very different. We intended merely to be prosperous and healthy but have inadvertently triggered a mass extinction of other species, spread pollution throughout the world, and triggered climatic change—all of which undermines our prosperity and health. Environmental problems, then, are mostly the result of a miscalibration between human intentions and ecological results, which is to say that they are a kind of design failure. The possibility that ecological problems are design failures is perhaps bad news because it may signal inherent flaws in our perceptual and mental abilities. On the other hand, it may be good news. If our problems are, to a great extent, the result of design failures, the obvious solution is better design, by which I mean a closer fit between human intentions and the ecological systems where the results of our intentions are ultimately played out. The perennial problem of human ecology is how different cultures provision themselves with food, shelter, energy, and the means of livelihood by extracting energy and materials from their surroundings (Smil 1994). Ecological design describes the ensemble of technologies and strategies by which societies use the natural world to construct culture and meet their needs. Because the natural world is continually modified by human actions, culture and ecology are shifting parts of an equation that can never be solved. Nor can there be one correct design strategy. Hunter-gatherers lived on current solar income. Feudal barons extracted wealth from sunlight by exploiting serfs who farmed the land. We provision ourselves by mining ancient sunlight stored as fossil fuels. The choice is not whether or not human societies have a design strategy, but whether that strategy works ecologically and can be sustained within the regenerative capacity of the particular ecosystem. The problem of ecological design has become more difficult as the human population has grown and technology has multiplied. It is now the overriding problem of our time, affecting virtually all other issues on the human agenda.

Plum Creek begins in drainage from farms on the west side of the city of Oberlin, Ohio, and flows eastward through a city golf course, a college arboretum, and the downtown area. East of the city, the stream receives the effluent from the city sewer facility before it joins with the Black River, which flows north through two rust-belt cities, Elyria and Lorain, before emptying into Lake Erie 25 miles west of Cleveland. Plum Creek shows all of the signs of 150 years of human use and abuse. As late as 1850 the stream ran clear even in times of flood, but now it is murky brown year-round. Because of pollution, sediments, and the lack of aquatic life, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency considers it to be a “nonattainment” stream. Yet it survives, more or less. To most residents of Oberlin, Plum Creek is little more than a drain and sewer useful for moving water off the land as rapidly as possible. Few regard it as an aesthetic asset or ecological resource. The character of Plum Creek changes quickly as it flows eastward into downtown Oberlin. Runoff from city streets enters the stream where the creek runs under the intersection of Morgan and Professor Streets. One block to the east, a larger volume of runoff polluted by oil and grease from city streets enters the creek as it flows under Main Street, past a Midas Muffler shop, a NAPA Auto Parts Store, and City Hall, located in the flood plain. Where Plum Creek flows under Main Street, an increased volume of storm water and consequently increased stream velocity have widened the banks and cut the channel from several feet to a depth of 10 feet or more. The city has attempted to stabilize the stream by lining the banks with concrete or by riprapping with large chunks of broken concrete. The aquatic life that exists upstream mostly disappears as Plum Creek flows through the downtown. Bending to the northeast, the creek passes through suburban backyards, past the municipal wastewater plant, a Browning Ferris Industries landfill, and on toward the west fork of the Black River and Lake Erie.

In this chapter, I will explore the concept of sustainability, as viewed in the United States and around the world, and examine how we have arrived at our current thinking about conservation practices in a continually evolving, complex geopolitical sphere. I will do this to link delta restoration with the broader, global issues of providing food and clean water as described in the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (http:// www.un.org/millenniumgoals). Many people have written on global environmental sustainability, so I will only briefly summarize these views here and conclude with a brief statement about delta sustainability. During the short time that humans have been on this planet, we have altered nearly 50% of the land surface, and 50% of the wetlands in the world have been lost—a consequence of the unsustainable mindset of human civilizations. Sustainability embodies “stewardship” and “design with nature,” with well-defined goals and an agreed upon “carrying capacity,” that can be developed and modeled by scientists and planners. The most popular definition of sustainability can be traced to a 1987 United Nations conference, in which sustainable development programs were described as those that “meet present needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs.” Robert Gillman, editor of In Context magazine, extends this goal-oriented definition by stating “sustainability refers to a very old and simple concept (The Golden Rule) … do unto future generations as you would have them do unto you.” These well-established definitions set forth an ideal premise, but they do not specify the human and environmental parameters needed to model and measure sustainable development. So, here are some more specific definitions: “Sustainable means using methods, systems and materials that won’t deplete resources or harm natural cycles.” Sustainability “identifies a concept and attitude in development that looks at a site’s natural land, water, and energy resources as integral aspects of the development.”

After his visit to Egypt in the year 500 B.C.E., Herodotus compared the triangular shape of the lowland region, where the Nile and sea meet, to the Greek letter Δ, thereby introducing the term delta to the geographic literature. In Chapter 1, we defined a delta as “a discrete shoreline protuberance formed where a river enters an ocean or lake … a broadly lobate shape in plain view narrowing in the direction of the feeding river, and a significant proportion of the deposit … derived from the river.” Coastal deltas are geologic structures that are also subcomponents of an estuary, which is commonly defined as a semienclosed body of water, situated at the interface between the land and ocean, where seawater is measurably diluted by the inflow of fresh water. James Syvitski, a world-renowned expert on deltas, describes how a delta’s area can be defined as “1) the seaward prograding [building outward] land area that has accumulated since 6,000 years, when global sea level stabilized a few meters of present level, 2) the seaward area of a river valley after the main stem of a river splits into distributary channels, 3) the area of a river valley underlain by Holocene marine sediment, 4) accumulated river sedi¬ment that has variably been subjected to fluvial, wave, and tidal influences, 5) the area drained by river distributary channels that are under the influence of tide, or 6) any combination of these definitions.” These delta-front estuaries, hereafter referred to as deltas, are dynamic ecosystems that have some of the highest biotic diversity and production in the world. Consequently, an estimated 25% of the world’s population lives in environments that are coastal deltas and their associated estuaries/ wetlands. Deltas provide not only a direct resource for commercially important estuarine species of fishes and shellfish but also shelter and food resources for commercially important shelf species that spend some of their life stages in estuarine marshes. For example, high fish and shellfish production in the northern Gulf of Mexico is strongly linked with discharge from the Mississippi and Atchafalaya river delta complexes and their associated estuarine wetlands.

In order to contextualise texts produced by upper-caste, middle-class bhadramahila, and to get an overview of the condition of women in general in the Bengal Presidency, this chapter uses the conventional archive—official records, censuses, contemporary newspaper reportage, and excerpts from journals. Dealing with the social and cultural base and materialist background that gave impetus to women to write, this chapter will try to provide a holistic picture of similarity and difference between the sensibilities, cultural idioms, lifestyle, and living conditions of women of various strata. In general, though the bhadramahila’s social location and individual positioning in the household differed from that of the lower-caste/class women, they shared cultural experiences and social and domestic conditions that find reflection in literary productions. The trajectories of colonial modernity, conjugal conditions, caste system, female education, and the emerging public sphere are negotiated to highlight the complex manner in which the bhadramahila began to assert her self-identity in print.