Human Impact On The Environment Ancient Roots, Current Challenges

About this book

Human Impact On The Environment explores the way in which human culture and technology have altered the environment through time. The contributors, drawn from a wide variety of disciplines, including anthropology, biology, history, physics and atmospheric science, explore the relationship between humans and the environment as an ongoing process, not just as a recent artifact of the post-Industrial Revolution world. Through an examination of the past and an analysis of the present, they cast light on the short-term strategies and long-term consequences of human behaviour on the environment.

Contents

- Introduction
- From Small Groups to Large: The Impact of Hunting, Farming, and Cities
- The Impact of Early People on the Environment: The Case of Large Mammal Extinctions
- The Impact of Food Production: Short-Term Strategies and Long-Term Consequences
- The Epidemiology of Civilization
- The Industrial Era: New Societies, New Technologies, New Problems
- The Revolution in the Family and the World We Have Made
- Pollution and the Emergence of Industrial America
- Exhaustibility of British Coal in Long-Run Perspective
- The Environment Goes Global: Issues of the Late Twentieth Century
- Global Climate Change
- Global Water Resources: The Coming Crises
- Tropical Forests and Human Society
- Designing the Future: Coping with the Crises
- Creating an International Process to Address Greenhouse Warming
- Human Impacts
- African Search for Solutions
- Transitions to a Sustainable Society

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Biography

Judith E. Jacobsen is a writer, lecturer, and consultant on world population issues. John Firor is a senior scientist and director emeritus at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.