Changing Environments

Are we humans destroying the environments in which we live, or is environmental change inevitable and natural? How has the relationship between human societies and environments changed since pre-history? Will human population growth outpace the available resources of land and water? Is global warming and climate change already out of control? What can economic and political models tell us about international development? Changing Environments takes a broad, interdisciplinary approach to such questions, drawing on ideas from science, technology, social science and humanities to examine how and why environments change as a result of natural and human-mediated processes. It draws on examples from around the world, and includes consideration of:

• the scales of time and space over which changes in our environments occur
• the effects on environments that arise from human use of the resources of energy, land, water and the atmosphere
• the role of technology and economics in shaping human actions on our environments
• the use and limitations of different models for thinking about environmental change

The book is par t of a series entitled Environment: Change, Contest and Response that forms a large part of an Open University course on environmental matters. The other books in the series are: