Using and shaping the land: a long-term perspective

doi:10.1016/S0264-8377(00)00040-5

Land Use Policy

Volume 18, Issue 1, January 2001, Pages 1-8

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0264-8377(00)00040-5 Get rights and content

Abstract

This paper forms the introduction to a special issue of Land Use Policy based upon a selection of papers presented at the “Using and Shaping the Land” symposium that took place at the conference “Nature, Society and History: Long-Term Dynamics of Social Metabolism” in autumn 1999 in Vienna. This introductory paper offers a framework and an analysis of the following questions: What is the relationship between land use and social metabolism — i.e., socio-economic material and energy flows? How may specific environmental transformations be apprehended, and what have been the dynamics of change over the long haul? Lastly, how does land-use and land-cover change, as identified in the papers, relate to global change? The paper offers an ecumenical view of land-use change, and points towards a broader framework for analysis.

Introduction

This special issue brings together selected papers from the symposium “Using and Shaping the Land” which was one of the six symposia at the conference “Nature, Society and History: Long-Term Dynamics of Social Metabolism” that took place from 30 September to 2 October 1999 in Vienna, Austria. This conference addressed, among others, the following practical questions formulated in the conference's mission statement: “How can we reshape our systems of production and our patterns of consumption — our societal metabolism — to be sustainable over the long term? How can we foster new forms of social and economic organization that enhance, rather than degrade, the carrying capacity of the earth's ecosystems? This current ecological challenge is the contingent result of the long-term historical development of anthropogenic systems. Modern systems of industrial metabolism — encompassing material and energy flows — are also an outcome of this history. Hence, an understanding of industrial metabolism is crucially dependent upon an understanding of long-term historical dynamics.”¹

Within this framework, the symposium from which the current special issue was derived asked the following questions: “What is the relationship between land use and social metabolism? How did societies in the past use and shape the land? What are the ecological impacts of globalization especially since the time of world exploration? What is the relation between land use and global change?” (see Footnote 1) The relationship between socio-economic metabolism and land-use change is dynamic, and must be treated through historical and spatial analysis.

A theme of this special issue, then, is a historical perspective. It is only over a longer period of time that relations between changes in socio-economic organization, land use and land cover become apparent (Batterbury and Bebbington, 1999). Reference to ‘before’ and ‘after’ specific events need not adopt the millennial timeframe of some environmental histories, nor adopt the impressive sweep of global histories. Local (see the paper by Riera et al.), regional (papers by Garcia Latorre et al., Klepeis et al. and Hoshino), and national (papers by Bicik et al. and Krausmann) accounts of change dominate the case studies presented here. The majority of the contributions, with the exception of Klepeis et al., come from industrialized countries and their timeframe, while disparate, allows a comparison of the driving forces of changes in land use and land cover associated with industrialization and gradual settlement on three continents.

Section snippets

Theoretical considerations

When viewed in a long-term perspective, the relations between societal metabolism and land use become especially informative. The industrialization process offers a formidable example. From the perspective of societal metabolism research, industrialization is, among other things, characterized by the large-scale utilization of fossil fuels (and other forms of energy; e.g., nuclear energy and hydropower) instead of area-dependent biomass (Sieferle, 1997; Smil, 1992). Many other changes in

Methodological advances

By its very nature, the study of changes in land use and land cover is an interdisciplinary endeavour. True interdisciplinary research requires more than the collection and analysis of brute facts — it involves “a combination of knowledge and feeling, of measurement and judgement, of information and ethics, of explanation and participation” (O’Riordan, 2000, p. 15). Therefore, the historical analysis of land-use change requires a diverse range of skills and methods, and a certain intuition to

Environmental history and land-use change

To think of environmental history, and historical ecology, is to bring attention to the fact that a complete explanation of ecological structure and function must include the actual sequence and the timing of the causal events that produce an observed structure or function (Winterhalder, 1994). While it may be possible to reconstruct all the important dimensions of physical objects without recourse to their history, such a task becomes impossible when studying living objects (Batterbury and

Conclusions for future studies

Studies in the field of land-use and land-cover change require ‘conceptual frameworks’; those terrible things that students are always being invited to ‘explore’ or ‘develop’ before they are released into the real world to conduct research. The papers in this volume suggest some ways in which good studies on land-use and land-cover change may be carried out, and the tools they may use. More coherence and direction in land-use studies carried out by different researchers at different sites could

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the Scientific Committee of the conference (M. Fischer-Kowalski, R.P. Sieferle and E. Rosa), the organizers (W. Bruckner, B. Smetschka and V. Winiwarter), all the speakers at the session, the editor of Land Use Policy, A. Mather, and the referees of the papers.

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Using and shaping the land: a long-term perspective

Abstract

Introduction

Section snippets

Theoretical considerations

Methodological advances

Environmental history and land-use change

Conclusions for future studies

Acknowledgements

Industrial Metabolism, Restructuring for Sustainable Development

Environmental histories, access to resources and lansdscape changean introduction

Land Degradation and Development

African history and environmental history

African Affairs

The Conditions of Agricultural Growth, The Economics of Agrarian Change Under Population Pressure

Third World Political Ecology

Society's Metabolism, on the childhood and adolescence of a rising conceptual star

Society as hybrid between material and symbolic realms, toward a theoretical framework of society-nature interrelation

Advances in Human Ecology

Energy in Farm Production

Runaway WorldHow Globalisation is Reshaping our Lives

Der Energie-Stoffwechsel

Indicators of sustainable land useconcepts for the analysis of society-nature interrelations and implications for sustainable development

Environmental Management and Health

Human Adaptation

Land-use change and the carbon cycle

Global Change Biology

The U.S. carbon budgetcontributions from land-use change

Science

The Kung SanMen, Somen and Work in a Foraging Society

Geography and the global environment

Annals of the Association of American Geographers

Ecological Economics