Angkur Pailiwal and Jyotika Sood tell an interesting story about the rapidly increasing demand for guar gum for use in the exploitation of shale gas (‘frackgas’) in Down to Earth . It shows the interconnectedness in the world: oil depletion and geopolitical tensions cause investments in exploiting marginal gas deposits in the USA, which increases the [...]
History of Kaibab plateau Numerous models of ecosystems have been made – but sometimes one wonders whether somewhere a reality can be found which more or less is described by such a model. The term empirical validation may be too strong, the aim is model-based story-telling. There are some interesting real-world stories to tell about [...]
Forests in Japan have been under pressure already for millennia (Totman 1989). More than 2000 years ago, rice culture caused the first dramatic modifications of woodlands and bronze and iron smelting started to put pressure on the forest due to the demand for high-quality charcoal. Metallurgy led to new, more powerful tools and the assault [...]
The firm house lingers, though averse to square with the new city street it has to wear A number in. But what about the brook that held the house as in an elbow-crook? I ask as one who knew the brook, its strength and impulse, having dipped a finger length and made it leap my [...]
Danish colonisation of Greenland started in 1721, but a Norse colony in west Greenland had already been an outpost of Europeans throughout the period 985–1500 AD. There had been contacts between North American hunters and European farmers. It seems that the Norse community managed quite well for the first 150 years, with a maritime-terrestrial economy [...]
Some 1500 km east of Papua New Guinea, in the Pacific, is the small island of Nauru. It is the smallest independent republic, with nowadays some 12.000 inhabitants on an area of less than 25 km2. The story of Nauru's ‘discovery’ in 1798 by a British captain who gave it the name Pleasant Island and [...]
October 2014. Latin America’s biggest metropolis may, again, run out of water. For some of the 20 million residents across Sao Paulo, taps are already running dry. Dilma Pena, chief executive officer of the state-run water utility Cia. de Saneamento Basico do Estado de Sao Paulo (Sabesp), told the city council that supplies are only [...]
The market has discovered scarcity as something to be desired. The Stock Fund Utilities department of the dutch bank ING announced in 2007:”…prospects remain good. In the states of California and New York energy shortages threaten and it drives the price up.” Similar advertisement are seen for water. Drinking water used to be a service [...]
Natural resources such as metal ores, coal and oil have been throughout history at the centre of power struggles and ideologies. The history of oil has been described by Yergin in his excellent book The Prize (1991). “The rapid rise of Russian production, the towering position of Standard Oil, the struggle for established and new [...]
‘For us, it has no sense or benefit because the industrial fishing boats don’t leave us any chance of survival. They fish right up to the coast without being stopped and the government doesn’t have the means to control their activities. If the government would listen to us, we wouldn’t sign an agreement with people [...]