The Global Land Use - Essay Example

The main theories, which describe the human treatment of the environment, include environmental determinism, possibilism, and probabilism.
The central idea of environmental determinism is that the main factors, which have a prevalent impact on people’s activities, are physical surroundings while social conditions have less influential power. Particularly, Amanda Briney described that the theory states that human behavior and mode of thoughts are essentially affected and to some extend even determined by climate and general environmental characteristics. Environmental determinism was a prominent theory at the end of the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th century but further, it was replaced with environmental possibilism. Physical determinism was heavily criticized and it was stated that the theory favored imperialism and racism. Therefore, it was recognized as an inappropriate base for ethical considerations on how interactions between people and nature, particularly, global land use, should be built.
Environmental possibilism is not as strict as determinism and states that physical conditions determine human culture only to a certain extent. In other words, people take to account their physical environment while building society but are not defined by it.
Environmental probabilism extends the previous theory and argues that physical conditions allow for numerous variations in ways how people could interfere with nature. Particularly, the concept describes that there could develop a lot of probable human behaviors within one region. In such a way, environmental probabilism explains such phenomena as different cultures existing in the same areas and is one of the least controversial and most powerful geographical theories, which provide explanations what the relationship between humanity and surrounding is, how people are supposed to exploit natural resources and specifically could be used as a valid guide for global land use considerations.
2. What is the most important human land use? What land use is the least important?
The main spheres, which are associated with human land use, include agriculture, mine-working, development of urban areas, deforestation in the process of wood harvesting in order to use it for further household use and construction, using land for animal husbandry. Such heavy exploitation of land resources has led to various negative consequences like deforestation and irrigation of land.
According to IPCC Special Report on Climate Change (2000), there are seven spheres of human land-use activities, which essentially influence the environment: “conversion of natural ecosystems to permanent croplands, conversion of natural ecosystems for shifting of cultivation, conversion of natural ecosystems to pasture, abandonment of croplands, abandonment of pastures, the harvest of timber, and establishment of tree plantations” (Sutton, 2004).
On contrary the following categories are supposed to be less exploited in human land use: Land under Residential/Industrial/Transportation Facilities, Land under Protective Cover (greenhouses and other urban use; vegetable growing, home gardening, residential parks, golf courses, etc.), Land under Temporary Crops Requiring Wetland Conditions (wet-foot crops such as irrigated rice and jute), Land under Temporary Crops (annuals; cultivated with crops with a growing cycle of under 1 year) (IPCC Special Report on Climate Change 2000)

According to An Overview of Key Environmental Issue, “land use refers to the purposes to which humans commit land covers such as forests and grasslands”.
According to World Meteorological Organization (1997), “changes resulting from extensive land use are responsible for 15 to 20% of current carbon dioxide emission”. This demonstrates clearly the need to change the human traditional exhaustive way of land resources usage to sustainable exploitation.
Considering the increase of greenhouse gases concentration in the atmosphere, the level of deforestation and irrigation, and overall climate changes it becomes clear that people should use land resources in a more sustainable way.
An Overview of Key Environmental Issue states that “human activities have modified the original vegetation cover and landscape of North America in ways that have important implications for the environment” (An Overview of Key Environmental Issue). It was estimated that in 2001 about 55% of grassland species in the US were threatened or in danger of extinction.
However, the research showed that the area of forests in the US has increased by circa 1.5 percent compared to 1990, which demonstrates that the American government has taken active actions to prevent environmental damages from human land use. At the same time, such sustainable policy seems not to meet stated requirements if considering the tendency of American forests to become fragmented, which affects negatively forest habitats. Read More