Agrarian Landscapes in Transition Comparisons of Long-Term Ecological & Cultural Change

by Redman, Charles; Foster, David R.

• ISBN13: 9780195367966
• ISBN10: 0195367960
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-07-18
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Agrarian Landscapes in Transition researches human interaction with the earth. With hundreds of acres of agricultural land going out of production every day, the introduction, spread, and abandonment of agriculture represents the most pervasive alteration of the Earth's environment for severalthousand years. What happens when humans impose their spatial and temporal signatures on ecological regimes, and how does this manipulation affect the earth and nature's desire for equilibrium? Studies were conducted at six Long Term Ecological Research sites within the US, including New England, the Appalachian Mountains, Colorado, Michigan, Kansas, and Arizona. While each site has its own unique agricultural history, patterns emerge that help make sense of how our actions have affectedthe earth, and how the earth pushes back. The book addresses how human activities influence the spatial and temporal structures of agrarian landscapes, and how this varies over time and across biogeographic regions. It also looks at the ecological and environmental consequences of the resultingstructural changes, the human responses to these changes, and how these responses drive further changes in agrarian landscapes. The time frames studied include the ecology of the earth before human interaction, pre-European human interaction during the rise and fall of agricultural land use, and finally the biological and cultural response to the abandonment of farming, due to complete abandonment or a land-use change suchas urbanization.

Author Biography

Charles Redman received his BA from Harvard University, and his MA and PhD in Anthropology from the University of Chicago. He taught at New York University and at SUNY-Binghamton before coming to Arizona State University in 1983. Since then, he served nine years as Chair of the Department of Anthropology, seven years as Director of the Center for Environmental Studies and, in 2004, was chosen to be the Julie Ann Wrigley Director of the newly formed Global Institute of Sustainability. Redman's interests include human impacts on the environment, sustainable landscapes, rapidly urbanizing regions, urban ecology, environmental education, and public outreach. He is the author or co-author of 10 books (see below). Redman is currently working on building upon the extensive urban-environmental research portfolio of the Global Institute of Sustainability through the new School of Sustainability, for which he serves as Director. The School is educating a new generation of leaders through collaborative learning, transdisciplinary approaches, and problem-oriented training to address the environmental, economic, and social challenges of the 21st century.
David Foster is an ecologist and director of the Harvard Forest at Harvard University where he is a faculty member in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and Principal Investigator for the Harvard Forest Long Term Ecological Research program.

Table of Contents

About the Contributors	p. ix
Introduction	p. 3
Changing Agrarian Landscapes across America: A Comparative Perspective	p. 16
New England's Forest Landscape: Ecological Legacies and Conservation Patterns Shaped by Agrarian History	p. 44
Agricultural Transformation of Southern Appalachia	p. 89
Dustbowl Legacies: Long-Term Change and Resilience in the Shortgrass Steppe	p. 122
The Political Ecology of Southwest Michigan Agriculture, 1837-2000	p. 152
Agrarian Landscape Transition in the Flint Hills of Kansas: Legacies and Resilience	p. 206
Water Can Flow Uphill: A Narrative of Central Arizona	p. 238
Conclusion	p. 272
Index	p. 279
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