Main description:

Drawing on research from eleven countries across four continents, the 16 chapters in the volume bring perspectives from various specialties in anthropology and human ecology, institutional analysis, historical and political ecology, geography, archaeology, and land change sciences. The four sections of the volume reflect complementary approaches to HEI: health and adaptation approaches, land change and landscape management approaches, institutional and political-ecology approaches, and historical and archaeological approaches.

Feature:

Foreword by Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom

Integrates seamlessly research across the social and natural sciences

Provides a nuanced, interdisciplinary, and state-of-the-art set of approaches to addressing issues as diverse as tropical deforestation, health and disease, the creation of rules for resource management, and how best to meet our current environmental dilemmas

Back cover:

Human-environment interaction (HEI) provides a framework that brings together scholarship sharing both disciplinary depth and interdisciplinary scope to examine past, present, and future social and environmental change in different parts of the world. This volume brings senior and junior scholars together, and in so doing connects these historically influential traditions to new and cutting-edge approaches that give us a glimpse into current and future trends in interdisciplinary science of human-environment interaction. The volume offers a microcosm of contemporary HEI research in terms of thematic, theory and methodology, level of analysis, and regional coverage.

Drawing on research from eleven countries across four continents, the 16 chapters in the volume bring perspectives from various specialties in anthropology and human ecology, institutional analysis, historical and political ecology, geography, archaeology, and land change sciences. The four sections of the volume reflect complementary approaches to HEI: health and adaptation approaches, land change and landscape management approaches, institutional and political-ecology approaches, and historical and archaeological approaches.

Contents:

Foreword by Elinor Ostrom

Introduction

Part I: Health and Adaptation Approaches

1. A Half-Century Portrait: Health Transition in the Xavante Indians from Central Brazil 

2. Balancing People, Politics, and Resources in Rural Tibet 

3. Human-Wildlife Contact and Emerging Infectious Diseases

Part II: Land Change and Landscape Management Approaches

4. Change in Natural Resource Management: An Experiment with ‘Participatory GIS’ 

5. Peopled Parks: Forest Change in India’s Protected Landscapes

6. Public-Private Interactions in the Conservation of Private Forests in the United States

7. The Monitoring of Land-Cover Change and Management across Gradient Landscapes in Africa

Part III:  Institutional and Political Ecology Approaches

8. Between Cooperation and Conflict: The Implementation of Agro-Extractive Settlements in the Lower Amazonian Floodplain 

9. Conservation of Natural Resources: Which Matters –Having a Regulation or the Size of the Penalty Imposed?

10. Small-Scale Farmers and the Challenges of Environmental Conservation and Rural Development: Case Studies from the State of São Paulo and the Amazon Region 

11. Institutional Evolution, Forest Conservation, and Rapid Change in Rural Honduras

12. Land-Use Institutions and Natural Resources in Fast-Growing Communities at the Urban-Rural Fringe

Part IV: Historical and Archeological Approaches

13. Agroforestry in Tomé-Açu—An Alternative to Pasture in the Amazon 

14. Changing Driving Forces, Imposed Tenure Regimes, and Tree-Cover Change on Village Landscapes in the West Mengo Region of Uganda, 1890 to 2002

15. Was Agriculture a Key Productive Activity in Precolonial Amazonia? The Stable Productive Basis for Social Equality in the Central Amazon 

Part V. Future Directions

16. Human-Environment Research: Past Trends, Current Challenges and Future Directions