Human activities over the last three centuries have significantly transformed the Earth's environment, primarily through the conversion of natural ecosystems to agriculture. This study presents a simple approach to derive geographically explicit changes in global croplands from 1700 to 1992. By calibrating a remotely sensed land cover classification data set against cropland inventory data, we derived a global representation of permanent croplands in 1992, at 5 min spatial resolution [Ramankutty and Foley, 1998]. To reconstruct historical croplands, we first compile an extensive database of historical cropland inventory data, at the national and subnational level, from a variety of sources. Then we use our 1992 cropland data within a simple land cover change model, along with the historical inventory data, to reconstruct global 5 min resolution data on permanent cropland areas from 1992 back to 1700. The reconstructed changes in historical croplands are consistent with the history of human settlement and patterns of economic development. By overlaying our historical cropland data set over a newly derived potential vegetation data set, we analyze our results in terms of the extent to which different natural vegetation types have been converted for agriculture. We further examine the extent to which croplands have been abandoned in different parts of the world. Our data sets could be used within global climate models and global ecosystem models to understand the impacts of land cover change on climate and on the cycling of carbon and water. Such an analysis is a crucial aid to sharpen our thinking about a sustainable future.

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1029/1999GB900046

Estimating historical changes in global land cover: Croplands from 1700 to 1992

Human activities over the last three centuries have significantly transformed the Earth's environment, primarily through the conversion of natural ecosystems to agriculture. This study presents a simple approach to derive geographically explicit changes in global croplands from 1700 to 1992. By calibrating a remotely sensed land cover classification data set against cropland inventory data, we derived a global representation of permanent croplands in 1992, at 5 min spatial resolution (Ramankutty and Foley, 1998). To reconstruct historical croplands, we first compile an extensive database of historical cropland inventory data, at the national and subnational level, from a variety of sources. Then we use our 1992 cropland data within a simple land cover change model, along with the historical inventory data, to reconstruct global 5 min resolution data on permanent cropland areas from 1992 back to 1700. The reconstructed changes in historical croplands are consistent with the history of human settlement and patterns of economic development. By overlaying our historical cropland data set over a newly derived potential vegetation data set, we analyze our results in terms of the extent to which different natural vegetation types have been converted for agriculture. We further examine the extent to which croplands have been abandoned in different parts of the world. Our data sets could be used within global climate models and global ecosystem models to understand the impacts of land cover change on climate and on the cycling of carbon and water. Such an analysis is a crucial aid to sharpen our thinking about a sustainable future.

Estimating historical changes in global land cover: Croplands

The anthropogenic era is generally thought to have begun 150 to 200 years ago, when the industrial revolution began producing CO2 and CH4 at rates sufficient to alter their compositions in the atmosphere. A different hypothesis is posed here: anthropogenic emissions of these gases first altered atmospheric concentrations thousands of years ago. This hypothesis is based on three arguments. (1) Cyclic variations in CO2 and CH4 driven by Earth-orbital changes during the last 350,000 years predict decreases throughout the Holocene, but the CO2 trend began an anomalous increase 8000 years ago, and the CH4 trend did so 5000 years ago. (2) Published explanations for these mid- to late-Holocene gas increases based on natural forcing can be rejected based on paleocli- matic evidence. (3) A wide array of archeological, cultural, historical and geologic evidence points to viable explanations tied to anthropogenic changes resulting from early agriculture in Eurasia, including the start of forest clearance by 8000 years ago and of rice irrigation by 5000 years ago. In recent millennia, the estimated warming caused by these early gas emissions reached a global-mean value of ∼0.8 ◦ C and roughly 2 ◦ C at high latitudes, large enough to have stopped a glaciation of northeastern Canada predicted by two kinds of climatic models. CO2 oscillations of ∼10 ppm in the last 1000 years are too large to be explained by external (solar-volcanic) forcing, but they can be explained by outbreaks of bubonic plague that caused historically documented farm abandonment in western Eurasia. Forest regrowth on abandoned farms sequestered enough carbon to account for the observed CO2 decreases. Plague-driven CO2 changes were also a significant causal factor in temperature changes during the Little Ice Age (1300-1900 AD).

https://courses.washington.edu/holocene/Ruddiman-Holocene_Carbon_Cycle_Anthropocene-ClimChange03.pdf

The Anthropogenic Greenhouse Era Began Thousands of Years Ago

This article explores the concept of ecological sustainability and applies it to organizations by utilizing a systems framework and multiple levels of analysis. The implications for ecological sustainability of dyadic relationships between the organization and entities at the individual, organizational, political-economic, social-cultural, and ecological environment levels are examined. Critical factors that influence the degree to which an organization's behaviors are ecologically sustainable are examined, and behavioral and structural elements that are likely to be manifested by ecologically sustainable organizations (ESOs) are suggested.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/258960.pdf

Weaving An Integrated Web: Multilevel and Multisystem Perspectives of Ecologically Sustainable Organizations

▪ Abstract This review asks the question: What new avenues of social science enquiry are suggested by new ecological thinking, with its focus on nonequilibrium dynamics, spatial and temporal variation, complexity, and uncertainty? Following a review of the emergence of the “new ecology” and the highlighting of contrasts with earlier “balance of nature” perspectives, work emerging from ecological anthropology, political ecology, environmental and ecological economics, and debates about nature and culture are examined. With some important exceptions, much social science work and associated popular and policy debates remain firmly wedded to a static and equilibrial view. This review turns to three areas where a more dynamic perspective has emerged. Each has the potential to take central elements of new ecological thinking seriously, sometimes with major practical consequences for planning, intervention design, and management. First is the concern with spatial and temporal dynamics developed in detailed and s...

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New Ecology and the Social Sciences: What Prospects for a Fruitful Engagement?

Changing the face of the earth

Human society has constructed many varied notions of the environment. Scientific information about the environment is often seen as the only worthwhile knowledge. This ignores the complexities created by interaction between people and the environment. Idealist thinking argues that everything we know is based on a construct of our minds and that all is possible. Can both be correct and true? Interpreting Nature explores the position of humanity in the environment from the principle that the models we construct are imperfect and can only be provisional. Having examined the way in which the natural sciences have interrogated nature, the types of data produced and what they mean to us, this looks at the environment within philosophy and ethics, the social sciences and the arts, and analyses their role in the formation of environmental cognition.

Interpreting Nature: Cultural Constructions of the Environment

Preface to the First Edition. Preface to the Second Edition. Acknowledgements. Units and References. 1. General Introduction. 2. Organizing Concepts. 3. Hunter--Gatherers. 4. The Development of Agriculture. 5. Advanced Solar Agriculture. 6. Industrialism: Energy after the Nineteenth Century. 7. Industrialisation: the Impact on Related Systems. 8. New Energies, New Thinking?. 9. Meditations. Index.

I. G. Simmons

Papers

Changing the face of the earth

Interpreting Nature: Cultural Constructions of the Environment

Interpreting Nature: Cultural Constructions of the Environment

Changing the Face of the Earth: Culture, Environment, History

The Environment in British prehistory