AFTERWORD

2000 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 127-130 ◽  
Author(s):  
SARA BERRY

The four papers in this collection bring a varied set of perspectives as well as examples to bear on several common themes. The authors describe continuities and changes in colonial policies toward Africans' access to and use of land and natural resources and discuss some of the sources of knowledge that informed colonial officials' thinking about African land use practices. Implicitly if not directly, each poses the question of whether colonial officials learned anything from their interactions with African farmers and/or herders? By bringing together evidence from different though overlapping periods of time (all of them cover the late 1940s and 1950s) and a variety of colonial contexts (colonies under French and British rule, with and without European settlers), as a group these papers invite reflection on the circumstances that led colonial officials to acknowledge, or deny, that Africans might know something about their environments and that such knowledge ought to inform the design of conservation and development schemes.

Author(s):  
Lawrance Ebenezeri Kileo ◽  
Nsajigwa Emmanuel Mbije

Saadani-Wami-Mbiki wildlife corridor has been facing conservation threats as a result of various land-use practices (LUP) carried out in and around the corridor. The understanding of changes happening in the corridor over time is important for establishing the management baseline data. This study aimed at identifying land use practices along the Saadani-Wami-Mbiki wildlife corridor and their implications to wildlife conservation. Specifically, the study sought to determine the rate of land cover changes in the corridor between 1975 and 2011 and the effects associated with land use practices on wildlife conservation. The land sat imageries of 1975, 1995, and 2011 were used to assess the rate of vegetation cover changes as a result of various land use practices carried out along. The household survey and Key informants' interview methods were used to obtain socio-economic data which were analyzed using SPSS while GIS data were analyzed using the ERDAS IMAGINE 9.1   and ArcGIS 9.3 programs. In the past 36 years (1975-2011), the cultivated land increased by 25%, settlement by 13%, open forest by 10% while closed forest and grassland decreased by 18% and 3% respectively. Shifting cultivation, overgrazing, charcoal burning, settlements, and poaching were identified as major land use practices threatening wildlife conservation within the corridor. Based on the results, it was recommended that, the Government should formulate a land use management plan and introduce a community-based natural resources management strategy to improve natural resources utilization and reduction of human stress to the corridor.


Author(s):  
Erin Stewart Mauldin

Emancipation proved to be a far-reaching ecological event. Whereas the ecological regime of slavery had reinforced extensive land-use practices, the end of slavery weakened them. Freedpeople dedicated less time to erosion control and ditching and used contract negotiations and sharecropping arrangements to avoid working in a centrally directed gang. Understandably, freedpeople preferred to direct their own labor on an individual plot of land. The eventual proliferation of share-based or tenant contracts encouraged the physical reorganization of plantations. The combination of these two progressive alterations to labor relations tragically undermined African Americans’ efforts to achieve economic independence by tightening natural limits on cotton production and reducing blacks’ access to the South’s internal provisioning economy. The cessation, or even reduced frequency, of land maintenance on farms exacerbated erosion, flooding, and crops’ susceptibility to drought.


Author(s):  
Erin Stewart Mauldin

This chapter explores the ecological regime of slavery and the land-use practices employed by farmers across the antebellum South. Despite the diverse ecologies and crop regimes of the region, most southern farmers employed a set of extensive agricultural techniques that kept the cost of farming down and helped circumvent natural limits on crop production and stock-raising. The use of shifting cultivation, free-range animal husbandry, and slaves to perform erosion control masked the environmental impacts of farmers’ actions, at least temporarily. Debates over westward expansion during the sectional crisis of the 1850s were not just about the extension of slavery, they also reflected practical concerns regarding access to new lands and fresh soil. Both were necessary for the continued profitability of farming in the South.


Agronomy ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 101
Author(s):  
Antonio J. Mendoza-Fernández ◽  
Araceli Peña-Fernández ◽  
Luis Molina ◽  
Pedro A. Aguilera

Campo de Dalías, located in southeastern Spain, is the greatest European exponent of greenhouse agriculture. The development of this type of agriculture has led to an exponential economic development of one of the poorest areas of Spain, in a short period of time. Simultaneously, it has brought about a serious alteration of natural resources. This article will study the temporal evolution of changes in land use, and the exploitation of groundwater. Likewise, this study will delve into the technological development in greenhouses (irrigation techniques, new water resources, greenhouse structures or improvement in cultivation techniques) seeking a sustainable intensification of agriculture under plastic. This sustainable intensification also implies the conservation of existing natural areas.


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