Land Degradation Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Geographers Douglas Johnson and Laurence Lewis define land degradation as a significant decrease in either the biological productivity or the usefulness of a region for humankind. This definition initially appears quite straightforward, but since land degradation has both biophysical and social components, characterizing land degradation soon becomes much more complicated. The biophysical components are wide-ranging, including: soil erosion, soil fertility, vegetation diversity and coverage, and hydrological functions. The social components draw attention to the notion that “usefulness” has multiple definitions. Land degradation is a perceptual term that has different meanings to different people at various times and places.

Conventional definitions of land degradation classify land as degraded only when the decreased productivity is the result of human activities rather than natural events. Natural catastrophes-such as earthquakes or floods-often result in the decreased productivity of a region, and fall outside the conventional definition of land degradation unless they are exacerbated by human activities.

Additionally there is the growing awareness that the term land degradation has become part of a dominant environmental and resource governance discourse that often points to the most marginal peoples as the drivers of land degradation rather than seeking to understand the external political and economic factors that influence the land use practices of marginalized people. These multiple layers of complexity associated with land degradation make it a difficult concept to assess and measure. It is even more complex to design appropriate policies that reach even the most marginal farmers and that can mitigate the degradation.

Biophysically, a decline in the productivity of land cannot be determined by any single ecological measure. Therefore, when trying to address land degradation, land managers usually use soil, water, and vegetation as the primary indicators of overall land productivity.

Soil degradation includes erosion from wind and water and a decline in soil fertility. There are many elements to consider in assessing soil fertility, including a loss of organic matter; degradation of soil properties (such as structure, aeration, and water-holding properties); changes in key soil nutrients; and the build up of toxic substances such as pesticides, salts, and heavy metals.

The most frequently cited causes of land degradation as the result of human activity include: overcultivation of agricultural lands, overgrazing of pastures, desertification, deforestation, water logging-or salinization-of irrigated land, and pollution or industrial causes.

Associated with the biophysical definition of degradation is the assumption that land degradation is an undesirable and avoidable process that can be mitigated with appropriate land management techniques.

The American Dust Bowl

The creation of the Dust Bowl in the 1930s in the American Great Plains is a dramatic example of land degradation resulting from inadequate land management practices. The semiarid areas of the Great Plains are known to experience cyclic droughts. Normally, if the sod cover is undisturbed, vegetation protects the soils from wind and water erosion. This relatively undisturbed prairie ecosystem was radically impacted when thousands of farmers were lured to the southern Great Plains by the promise of rich and plentiful soil.

Using farming techniques that had been successful in the northeastern United States, farmers plowed millions of acres of grassland. By breaking up the sod cover for agriculture, they exposed the underlying soil to severe desiccation during the droughts in the 1930s. As a result great windstorms swept up the dusty soil, blowing it as far as Washington, D.C., and out over the Atlantic Ocean. While the average soil erosion rates in the region are estimated to be around a few centimeters per thousand years, during the 1930s wind erosion removed up to one meter of soil in certain areas.

Given examples like the American Dust Bowl, where local farming practices were completely at odds with the environmental conditions, it is not surprising that land degradation is often perceived as the result of ignorant farmers implementing inappropriate management practices on fragile landscapes.

Placing the Blame

The belief that land degradation is the result of land management decisions by irrational, wasteful, or lazy farmers living in marginal ecosystems gained a great deal of momentum in the 20th century. Growing concerns over the perceived crisis surrounding population growth and environmental change resulted in a burgeoning neo-Malthusian conviction that people in the developing world were destroying ecosystems out of ignorance, selfishness, and out-of-control population growth. The general thrust of this argument is that growing population pressure will result in exhausting the soil as people strive to produce more food, causing yields to decline and leading to hunger or starvation.

A globalized discourse emerged that placed the blame for land degradation on smallholders throughout the developing world. Despite a scarcity of scientific evidence to support these conclusions, economists and technocrats introduced environmental policies based on this orthodoxy, taking for granted certain stereotyped narratives about irrational and wasteful smallholders. For instance, shifting cultivators throughout the developing world are often labeled as “voracious forest eaters” since they cut a section of forest for their rice gardens, and then after a few years leave the field to fallow, moving on to clear a new section of forest. Ideally after 10-15 years they can return to the original plot of land, beginning the process anew.

Policies implemented throughout the developing world have made shifting cultivation illegal and placed the blame for environmental degradation on these socially, politically, and economically marginalized peoples. Yet when a similar-sized plot of land is cleared for timber, oil palm or soy bean plantations-all much more intensive land use practices-similar concerns over land degradation are rarely expressed. In this case, the factors driving the assessment of land use strategies are not the ecological outcomes, but rather economic concerns. Following this logic the profits realized from large-scale land use justify environmental degradation while subsistence farming does not, making it easy to shift the criticism away from economically profitable (and ecologically unsustainable) land use practices onto the backs of the smallholders.

New Definitions

In the 1980s, several social scientists began to challenge the conventional wisdom that blamed smallholders for land degradation. Human geographers Piers Blaikie and Harold Brookfield developed a more inclusive definition of land degradation than the one provided earlier by Johnson and Lewis. Their definition of land degradation considers both natural and human effects on a landscape in order to develop an equation that captures “net gradation.” To Blaikie and Brookfield, net degradation equals (natural degrading processes plus human interferences) minus (natural reproduction plus restorative management practices).

This definition places more emphasis on the viewpoint of the land manager whose management practices include both natural and human influences on the landscape. This type of land manager makes appropriate management decisions based in a holistic approach, integrating the multiple social, economic, and ecological factors.

Blaikie and Brookfield were at the forefront of a significant wave of scholars who sought to break apart the neo-Malthusian discourse regarding marginalized farmers and land degradation by emphasizing the ways in which their land use decisions are influenced by prevailing social, political, and economic conditions often outside of their control. In later works, Blaikie develops a strategy of inquiry urging researchers to follow “chains of explanation” in order to identify the range of variables that influence land degradation. According to Blaikie, studies of land degradation should begin with the landholder examining the “place-based” factors that influence land use. From there the researcher should seek to combine an understanding of these “place-based” factors that influence land use with “nonplace-based” factors that originate in the political and economic relations between land users and in regional landscape. Some of these factors include access to key resources such as land, labor, and capital, as well as technological and informational resources.

Other scholars, such as James Fairhead and Melissa Leach, have also broken down the myths that point to the supposedly ignorant natives as the perpetrators of land degradation. In their seminal book, Misreading the African Landscape, they challenge the contention long held by colonial and postcolonial scientists that the African savannarangeland is a region where extensive climax forest has been reduced to savanna as a result of human mismanagement.

Fairhead and Leach demonstrate that current islands of forest were in fact created by human settlement in a once vast savanna. Their analysis reverses the traditional understanding of the direction of environmental change in the African savanna and challenges long-held orthodoxies about the role of local farmers in the processes of land degradation. Fairhead and Leach show that colonial science, and years of subsequent forest and agricultural policies, were based on assumptions that could not be supported by existing evidence.

During this same period in environmental studies scholarship, many environmental historians, geographers, and anthropologists have drawn attention to the fact that all understanding of landscape is constructed through social systems of meaning and dominant categories of knowledge. They raised important questions such as: Who controls the language and normative assumptions of how a landscape should look? Who determines which landscape should be preserved and which ones are degraded?

Human geographer Paul Robbins describes walking through an orderly German forest engineered by some of the first commercial foresters. The evenaged, single-species plantings enhanced harvesting and improved the forest from the utilitarian perspective of the greatest (economic) benefit for the greatest number. But to Robbins, this forest also represents a degraded landscape where commercial interests have arrested natural processes and created a sterile environment in pursuit of the maximum economic potential. To many, this landscape could never be considered degraded given its huge potential for economic “usefulness.” To others, this landscape is the height of misguided state schemes aimed at systematically ordering the environment.

This discrepancy draws attention to the perceptual issues surrounding “usefulness.” What is considered useful to one person may not be useful to another. To an agriculturalist, the conversion of the forest to agricultural land would not be considered land degradation. Yet to a hunter, who relies on finding game in the forest, croplands might represent significant degradation of the landscape. Therefore, it is worthwhile to consider that economic value is not the only measure of land’s usefulness. Furthermore, even under the rubric of economics, productivity can be measured in a variety of ways.

While full-time, large-scale farmers with exclusive control over their land might measure usefulness based on an economic cost-benefit analysis, for subsistence farmers it is seldom a field-based cost-benefit analysis that influences their understanding of usefulness. Instead subsistence farmers need to balance risk associated with market orientated crop production with the security of sufficient food production.

Land-management decisions that have the potential for high financial gain in the markets may be considered too risky given past experiences with boom and bust market economies. Instead of taking such a risk, a subsistence farmer may choose to stay with a more reliable food crop with little market value, defying rational-actor-based theories. Factors such as: insecure land tenure, inefficient access to markets, limited or no access to capital for land improvements, and an inability to hire a labor force influence the range of alternative calculations of the “usefulness” of land.

Policy Implications

The policy implications of this line of thinking are tremendously powerful. In his book, The Political Economy of Soil Erosion in Developing Counties, Blaikie poses the question, “What level of soil erosion need occur before appropriate legislation is implemented and appropriate agricultural and pastoral technologies are induced?” Using the Green Revolution as an example, Blaikie argues that since farmers in developing countries have a limited ability to access the inputs needed for agricultural intensification, the diffusion of the Green Revolution technology was ultimately based on meeting the interests of large multinational companies.

To Blaikie, the political and economic centers have been blind to the signals from ecologically marginal areas and the farmers who depend on them, and as a result appropriate innovations for these areas are rarely a priority. But since agricultural policies and science are generally believed to be apolitical and an uncontested reality, the blame for land degradation is repeatedly placed on smallholders who refuse (or are unable) to adopt modern technologies that conform with the existing policies.

Improvements are being made in scientific techniques to accurately assess the biophysical characteristics of land degradation. The broader view, however, which includes the multiple dimensions of degradation based on the interactions between people, cultures, political-economic institutions, and a range of biophysical factors, is rarely adopted in the policy-making arena.

Social scientists agree that generic technological solutions to land degradation based on ecological conditions will rarely be successful. Continued research at a range of scales that can synthesize biophysical characteristics with historical transformations and existing social, political, and economic institutions is necessary for successful policies aimed at alleviating land degradation.

Bibliography:

Simon Batterbury, Timothy Forsyth, and Koy Thompson, “Environmental Transformations in Developing Countries: Hybrid Research and Democratic Policy,” The Geographical Journal (v.163, 1997);
Piers Blaikie, The Political Economy of Soil Erosion (Lonman Scientific and Technical, 1985);
Piers Blaikie and Harold Brookfield, Land Degradation and Society (Routledge, 1987);
James Fairhead and Melissa Leach, Misreading the African Landscape (Cambridge University Press, 1996);
Douglas Johnson and Laurence Lewis, Land Degradation: Creation and Destruction (Blackwell, 1995);
Paul Robbins, Political Ecology (Blackwell Publishing, 2004);
Donald Worster, The Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (Oxford University Press, 1982).