Time-Scales and Environmental Change ebook is available to be downloaded here.
- Title: Time-Scales and Environmental Change
- Author: Thackwray S.Driver and Graham P.Chapman
- Publisher: Routledge
- Pages: 290
Sometime during the spring 1993 the two of us had a discussion about our respec tive research and found some unexpected similarities in what we were at that time involved in. This book is in a way the end product of that discussion. At that time one of us (G.P.C.) had just finished writing a paper on environmental myths and international politics in the Bengal delta and the other (T.S.D.) one on policies designed to prevent over-grazing in the mountain areas of Lesotho. What we discovered was that in both cases much confusion and ‘bad policy’ could be directly traced back to the protagonists’ unwillingness to look backwards before making a bold step forwards. Both papers also highlighted the problem of confusing short-term fluctuations with longer-term environmental change. On the pastures of Lesotho the impact of periodic drought is frequently referred to as range degradation by both government and international development agencies, whereas in the Bengal delta the finger of blame for flooding is pointed not at the monsoon but at Himalayan farmers.
The distances we respectively advocated that the protagonists needed to look back in the two cases were, however, very different. Over the issue of the international environmental politics of the Bengal delta G.P.C. argued that what understanding that the high erosion rates in the Himalayas, the high siltation levels in the Ganges and Brahmaputra, and the frequent flooding of the Bengal delta had very little to do with human agency and a lot to do with the physical geography of the region (see Chapman, Chapter 11). In the case of anti-erosion policy in Lesotho, on the other hand, T.S.D. argued that what was needed was a recognition of much more recent history—specifically the fact that current policies to prevent the perceived threat of over-grazing are almost identical to ones attempted and abandoned in abject failure in the 1940s and 1950s.