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The Control Commission of Cordillera Blanca Lakes, which was established in 1951 to prevent glacial lake outburst floods caused by climate change and glacier retreat in the Andes, had far-reaching effects on the economic development of Ancash and the Callejón de Huaylas. Engineers who examined glacial lakes brought development interests that had long inspired Peruvian policymakers and developers. They hoped to exploit Andean natural resources to promote national economic development and modernization. Glacial lake flood prevention programs provided a springboard for the expansion of hydroelectricity, road building, tourism, and wage labor. This process whereby disaster spurred economic development is referred to as "disaster economics," which the Lakes Commission carried out after 1951. Economic development directly and indirectly followed the science, technology, engineering, and policies implemented after catastrophes to prevent additional disasters, thereby revealing the social construction of science and engineering.

This part of the text presents the English translation of six chapters in Book X of Mongmin simsŏ on administration for district magistrates. The chapters discuss the following: cultivating and managing mountain forests, managing waterways and reservoirs, repair of the yamen office, repair of the fortress, construction and maintenance of roads, and manufacturing goods.

This chapter examines the impact of road construction on economic growth and poverty reduction in Yunnan and Guizhou. Yunnan leaders' road construction policy focused resources on building highways, which stimulated the exports of the province and supported the development of the tourism industry. The Guizhou government, on the other hand, concentrated on rural roadways, becoming in the process a leading province in the density of such roadways. The policies of both provinces fall into the category of market facilitation because the intention of each roadway was to expand market opportunities and access. Although the two provinces adopted a similar role for the state, they nevertheless did so while following different strategies. Yunnan leaders adopted a strategy that most clearly emulates the developmental state, promoting large-scale construction intended to maximize economic growth largely through industry. Guizhou leaders, in contrast, focused on small-scale activities and poverty reduction, which is more consistent with a micro-oriented state.

In the 1930s California auto clubs and their legislative advocates sought to safeguard the state gasoline tax revenues while also showing that they were helping ease the overall tax burden. The Hayden-Cartwright Act undermined state-level efforts to use highway revenues for other purposes, underscoring again how powerful economic groups used the complex jurisdictional layering of the U.S. political system to secure political advantages. The political controversies of the 1930s reveal that a desire for highways was only one of several reasons why California spent so much money on road construction in the 1930s and afterward. The state highway department, highway contractors, labor unions, oil companies, and automobile clubs fought to preserve dedicated highway funds. California had trapped itself in a landscape of freeways and highways, and a slight shift in transportation dollars toward mass transportation could do little to reverse the tide.

While convict laborers continued to play an important role in road construction in Florida in the 1930s and 1940s, the character of prison road labor changed in significant ways, as did material conditions in State Road Department convict camps. For example, the de-skilling of road work, due in part to technological changes within the industry, tangibly transformed inmates' work days and leisure time. This chapter charts the initial stages of the evolution of the chain gang into the modern road prison. At the same time, black prisoner complaints to the NAACP in the mid-1930s and the heel-string-cutter scandal of the early 1940s challenged the image of a satisfied and well-treated inmate population in Florida.

The PLA now far outnumbered the Tibetan army. However, while the presence of this large influx of troops provided military security for the Chinese side, it further strained relations with the sitsab and placed the Chinese in a precarious situation with regard to food. Beijing's long-term answer was to develop a secure motor road network between western China and Tibet. Until this was completed, Beijing rightly felt that the PLA's stay in Tibet would be insecure, so the Chinese immediately launched a crash program to complete two roads to Lhasa. Later, Mao ordered a major change in tactics on 13 September 1951, when he instructed the Southwest Bureau to make food production an equal priority with road construction. Mao also instructed the Eighteenth Army Corps to disperse troops quickly from Lhasa to other areas in order to reduce the demand for food there.

Chapter 6 explores Lake District tourism during the inter-war period, focusing on what impacts mass-motorization made on roads, tourist behaviour, local life, and the cultural value of the Lake District. The growth of charabanc and coach travel brought increasing numbers of day trips and tours from ever more distant places, creating a new battlefield for local complaints and conflicts. When a mountain electric railway from Ambleside to Keswick was proposed in 1921, many were convinced that it would be preferable to the constant streams of dust-raising charabancs. Eventually, a groundswell of opinion arose that mountain solitudes and walkers’ and cyclists’ rights should be protected from the ‘rash assault’ of unlimited road construction and queues of cars. Amid this motor-age controversy Wordsworth was once again summoned to give voice to modern discontents. Controversial plans to construct new roads over Wrynose and Hardknott Passes, and a by-pass road through Dora’s Field below Rydal Mount, were abandoned.

Restoration is the complex set of efforts to reverse or mitigate effects of human activity on the landscape. Restoration of California grasslands is now under way at many sites. This chapter discusses grassland restoration efforts, paying special attention to desired species attention and effects of past human activities. It first discusses the constraints on restoration efforts, such as invasive non-native species, land use, viral diseases, road construction, fire, and grazing. The chapter then examines the goals, implementation, and management plan for restoration of California grasslands.

Early modern authorities attempted to promote, restrict, and channel the movement of goods and people for reasons that ranged from economic considerations to political motives and public health. In practice, however, these interferences only had mixed success. In the Holy Roman Empire’s dense landscape of ill-defined, overlapping political entities, the control over moving goods and people was a permanent point of contention. While the Empire’s history has often been written in distinctly diachronic terms, this study approaches the Empire in a spatial perspective and stresses its interest beyond the bounds of German history. Conflicts around the ordering of movement were often framed as matters of safe conduct, a quasi-sovereign right to authorize and protect the movement of various goods and people. While safe conduct always maintained a protective function, at the hands of the Empire’s territorial authorities it became a powerful instrument of political, fiscal, and symbolic power as well as a vehicle for gaining control over important thoroughfares.

In the former opium-growing region of the Golden Triangle a road inaugurated in April 2008 that cuts directly through the formerly isolated high mountain areas of the region is bound to change the social, economic and environmental fabric of the region forever. It is also is the site of competing development regimes. Shifting cultivation in the region shaped the landscape, land cover, and land use across this transect in similar ways up through the end of World War II, and most of the corridor's inhabitants were identified as ethnic “minorities.” Over the past five decades, however, these countries have been under vastly different economic and political regimes influencing land use and land cover in the region today. This chapter examines narratives and policy frameworks from Xishuangbanna Prefecture, the most southern prefecture in Yunnan Province, Northern Laos, and Northern Thailand on how different issues ranging from forest classification, opium eradication, stabilizing shifting cultivators, to promoting trade, and developing infrastructure and markets affected land use and land cover in different ways in each of the three countries where varying policy approaches to land use tenurial regimes and regional projects have profoundly affected the vegetational/institutional structures in a significant biodiversity hotspot.

The cerrados of central Brazil have long been designated savannas without sufficient understanding of the structure and functioning of the different vegetation forms in the region. Excessive emphasis on identifying similarities with other savannas in Africa and Australia, and even within South America outside Brazil, prevented researchers from recognizing the cerrados’ special features and interdependence among themselves in the landscape where they occur. The more extensive cerrado sensu stricto on dystrophic soils, and to a lesser extent the gallery forests known locally as matas de galeria or matas ciliares, dominated the attention of most botanists and other researchers (Ratter and Dargie 1992, Furley 1992, Furley and Ratter 1988, Furley et al. 1992). Even with increasing interest in biodiversity and ecosystem functioning, very little ongoing research is reported on nutrient cycling from the cerrado region (Solbrig et al. 1996). Information available in the literature is restricted to isolated attempts to describe and quantify specific processes like litterfall and decomposition (Peres et al. 1983), rainwater composition (Schiavini 1983, Delitti 1984), soil fertility gradients (Lopes and Cox 1977), leaf nutrient concentrations (Haridasan 1987, 1992, Araújo and Haridasan 1988), primary productivity of the ground layer (Batmanian and Haridasan 1985, Meirelles and Henrique 1992), effects of burning (Coutinho 1990, Kauffman et al. 1994, Miranda et al. 1996c) and activities of soil fauna (Constantino 1988, Egler and Haridasan 1987, Oliveira Jr. 1985) at specific sites within a particular vegetation. Results of long duration experiments from permanent plots or watersheds are not yet reported in the literature. Very little information is available on the food webs or the role of fauna in nutrient cycling. Research on specific processes like CO2 emission on an ecosystem basis is quite recent (Miranda et al. 1996a, b, Mier et al. 1996). The following discussion is therefore restricted to the occurrence of different vegetation forms in the cerrado region and environmental factors affecting their distribution and functioning in relation to nutrient availability and nutrient cycling processes. One of the difficulties in getting information on research already carried out in Brazil is that the dissertations of graduate students in the universities are seldom published in indexed journals.