By Andrew S. Goudie
The recent variation of this vintage pupil textual content presents an up to date and accomplished view of the most important environmental concerns dealing with the realm this present day, and is an important advent to the previous, current and destiny influence of people on the earth.
- Explores the influence of people upon crops, animals, soils, water, landforms, and the ambience.
- Updated greatly, with many new figures and up to date facts.
- Four thoroughly new chapters discover the ways that worldwide weather switch can have an impression on the earth sooner or later.
- A new layout makes the textual content much more obtainable and straightforward to use.
Visit www.blackwellpublishing.com/humanimpact to entry the art from the e-book.
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Extra resources for The Human Impact on the Natural Environment: Past, Present, and Future
Example text
One further development in human cultural and technological life that was to increase human power was the mining of ores and the smelting of metals. Neolithic cultures used native copper from the eighth millennium bc onwards, but evidence for its smelting occurs at Catal Hüyük in Turkey from the sixth millennium bc. 10), and by 2500 bc bronze products were in use from Britain in the west to northern China in the east. The smelting of iron ores may date back to the late third millennium bc. Metalworking required enormous amounts of wood and so led to deforestation.
Grassland tussock Sand dune Permanent sown pastures Scrub Swamp Arable land naturally, especially by lightning, which on average strikes the land surface of the globe 100,000 times each day (Yi-Fu Tuan, 1971). Some natural fires may result from spontaneous combustion (Vogl, 1974), for in certain ecosystems heavy vegetal accumulations may become compacted, rotted and fermented, thus generating heat. Other natural fires can result from sparks produced by falling boulders and by landslides (Booysen and Tainton, 1984).
Other fires, crown fires, affect whole forests up to crown level and generate very high temperatures In general forest fires are hotter than grassland fires. Perhaps more significantly in terms of forest management, fires that occur with great frequency do not attain too high a temperature because there is inadequate inflammable material to feed them. 1). 5), large quantities of inflammable materials accumulate, so that when a fire does break out it is of the hot, crown type. Such fires can be disastrous ecologically and there is now much debate about the wisdom of fire suppression given that, in many forests, fires under so-called ‘natural’ conditions appear, as we have seen, to have been a relatively frequent and regular phenomenon.