Robert Costanza

Lisa Graumlich

William L. Steffen

Human history, as written traditionally, leaves out the important ecological and climate context of historical events. But the capability to integrate the history of human beings with the natural history of the Earth now exists, and we are finding that human-environmental systems are intimately linked in ways we are only beginning to appreciate. In Sustainability or Collapse?, researchers from a range of scholarly disciplines develop an integrated human and environmental history over millennial, centennial, and decadal time scales and make projections for the future. The contributors focus on the human-environment interactions that have shaped historical forces since ancient times and discuss such key methodological issues as data quality. Topics highlighted include the political ecology of the Mayans; the effect of climate on the Roman Empire; the "revolutionary weather" of El Niño from 1788 to 1795; twentieth-century social, economic, and political forces in environmental change; scenarios for the future; and the accuracy of such past forecasts as The Limits to Growth.

An Integrated History and Future of People on Earth

Sustainability Or Collapse?

Owen T. Denmead

This volume arises from an International Symposium on Flow and Transport in the Natural Environment held in Canberra, Australia, in September 1987. The meeting was hosted by the CSIRO Division of Environmental Mechanics (now the Centre for Environmental Mechanics) to mark the opening of the second stage of its headquarters, the F.C. Pye Field Environment Laboratory, twenty-one years after the opening of the first stage. Those twenty-one years have seen much progress in our understanding of the physics of the natural environment and the occasion provided an ideal opportunity to review advances in our knowledge of flow and transport phenomena, particularly with regard to flow and transport in soils, plants and the atmosphere. The contents of this volume are based very closely on the Symposium's program. Undoubtedly, our choices of topics were idiosyncratic, but we believe that those we have selected exhibit progress, innovation, and much scope for practical application. Rather than being encyclopaedic, we have sought to deal with thirteen selected topics in depth.

William L. Steffen

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