John F. Richards

The causes of land-use and land-cover change: moving beyond the myths

Common understanding of the causes of land-use and land-cover change is dominated by simplifications which, in turn, underlie many environment-development policies. This article tracks some of the major myths on driving forces of land-cover change and proposes alternative pathways of change that are better supported by case study evidence. Cases reviewed support the conclusion that neither population nor poverty alone constitute the sole and major underlying causes of land-cover change worldwide. Rather, peoples’ responses to economic opportunities, as mediated by institutional factors, drive land-cover changes. Opportunities and

Trends in Carbon Content of Vegetation in South and Southeast Asia Associated with Changes in Land Use

The land-use data set of Richards and Flint described in Chapter 2 was used to derive a set of estimates of the total carbon content of live vegetation in 13 South and Southeast Asia nations in 1880, 1920, 1950, and 1980. A bookkeeping model was developed to produce estimates of the magnitude of the live-phytomass carbon pool for 93 discrete geographic units for those same dates. These data were then aggregated at the national and supranational levels to allow estimation of net changes in carbon stock of vegetation with time for those regions by simple subtraction.

Early Modern India and World History

The early modern period in world history, roughly 1500-1800, was marked by several worldwide processes of change unprecedented in their scope and intensity. The term early modern—which is not Eurocentric—should be applied to this period in South Asian history. The society of the Indian subcontinent shared directly in the massive processes of change that influenced societies throughout the world.

A century of land-use change in South and Southeast Asia

Compilation of published reports on land use in South and Southeast Asia betwen 1880 and 1980 produced time-series land-use data in a uniform format for the countries of India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, Indonesia, and the Philippines. To make use of this data, we developed a procedure to systematically document changes in land use and vegetative cover. The objective of this compilation and analysis is to produce data that can be used to test geographically referenced models of carbon dynamics and other greenhouse gas emissions so global climatic modeling can be improved.

Long-term transformations in the Sundarbans wetlands forests of Bengal.

The landscape of the Sundarbans today is a product of two countervailing forces: conversion of wetland forests to cropland vs. sequestration of the forests in reserves to be managed for long-term sustained yield of wood products. For two centures, land-hungry peasants strove to transform the native tidal forest vegetation into an agroecosystem dominated by paddy rice and fish culture. During the colonial period, their reclamation efforts were encouraged by landlords and speculators, who were themselves encouraged by increasingly favorable state policies (land grants, tax incentives, cadastral surveys, and eventually colonization projects and subsidized irrigation) designed by revenue officials to maximize the rate of transformation of wetland forest to taxable agricultural land.In the late nineteenth century, as the rate of agricultural conversion increased, the colonial Forest Department succcessfully sought to preserve large areas of the remaining Sundarbans tidal forest by giving them legal status as Reserved or Protected Forests. These forests were intensively managed to provide a sustainable supply of timber and firewood for the increasing population of southern Bengal. Institutionalization of conflicting policies by the Revenue and Forest Departments reflected the escalating needs for both food and forest products as the colony grew. Today, supplies of some economically valuable trees have been depleted, and some mammals are locally extinct (although the Bengal tiger remains), but government policy in both Bangladesh and India now favors use of the Sundarbans as forest rather than its transformation to agricultural land. Further expansion of cropland to meet the grain demands of the burgeoning Bengali population in both nations has largely taken place outside the boundaries of the Sundarbans. Overexploitation of these forests for wood products remains a possibility, but large-scale clearing for rice paddies is unlikely under present policies.

An investigation of the effects of external acidification on sodium transport, internal pH and membrane potential in barnacle muscle fibers

SummaryRadiosodium efflux from barnacle muscle fibers is a function of pHe, the threshold pHe for stimulation of Na efflux into HCO3−-artificial sea water (ASW) being 6.8 and the ‘fixed’ thresholdpCO2 (in an open CO2 system) being approximately 30 mm Hg. Acidification of ASW containing non-HCO3− buffer is without effect on the Na efflux. The Na efflux following stimulation by reducing the pH of 10mM HCO3−-ASW from 7.8 to 6.3 is reduced by 17.3% as the result of microinjecting 100mM EGTA, and increased by 32.6% as the result of microinjecting 0.5M ATP. The Na efflux into K-free HCO3−-ASW is markedly stimulated by external acidification. Ouabain-poisoned fibers are more responsive to a low pHe than unpoisoned fibers. Applying the 2-14C-DMO technique, it is found that fibers bathed in 10mM HCO3−-ASW at pH 7.8 have an internal pH of 7.09±0.106 (mean±SD), whereas fibers bathed in 25mM TRIS-ASW at pH 7.8 have a pHi of 7.28±0.112. The relationship between pHi and pHe as external pH is varied by adding H+ is linear. Measurements of the resting membrane potential indicate that external acidification in the presence of HCO3− as buffer is accompanied by a fall inEm, the threshold pHe being 7.3 both at 24 and 0°C. This sensitivity amounts to 8.2 mV per pH unit (at 24°C) over a wide range of pHe. Membrane resistance following external acidification remains unchanged. Microinjection of the protein inhibitor of Walsh before external acidification fails to stop depolarization from occurring. Cooling to 0°C also fails to abolish depolarization following acidification. Whereas external ouabain and ethacrynic acid reduceEm in the absence or presence of acidification, DPH hyperpolarizes the membrane or arrests depolarization both at 24 and 0°C. This effect of DPH at 0°C is seen in the absence or presence of acidification. It is suggested that depolarization following acidification of a HCO3−-containing medium is due to activation of a Cl−-and/or HCO3−-pump and that ouabain and ethacrynic acid reducesEm by abolishing uncoupled Na transport.

Opium and the British Indian Empire: The Royal Commission of 1895

The primary aim of this article is to take a fresh look at the massive report of the Royal Commission on Opium of 1895. This document is one of the great Victorian inquiries devoted to the Indian Empire. In it we see displayed the cultural tensions and conflicts negotiated between British colonizers and Indian colonized subjects. The author is indebted to Richard Newman for suggesting that the Royal Commission on Opium deserves reappraisal. Opium, like colonialism, is a sensitive and charged issue. The question of mood-altering drugs—opium, alcohol, tobacco, and cocaine, among others—is always fraught. Each society and culture is convinced that its own drugs of choice are normal and natural; and that those of other societies are depraved and unnatural. Generally each society and culture has drugs of choice that have been assimilated to its cultural practices. The pleasures of these familiar drugs are known; their dangers minimized by taboos and social rituals of consumption, and their damage contained and ignored. Similar adaptations in other cultures are invisible or, if seen, grotesque.

The Indian Empire and Peasant Production of Opium in the Nineteenth Century

IN the post-1857 decades of the nineteenth century, the British rulers of India controlled the vast territory and population of the Indian subcontinent (of the size and cultural diversity of Western Europe) under nearly ideal conditions of peace, stability and order. By this time as well, they could count on the active cooperation and loyalties of both old and new major indigenous elites in urban and rural India. The annual and decennial assessments of the ‘Moral and Material Progress of the Peoples of India’ recited to Parliament the areas in which appreciable progress had been made.On the material side, British policy makers in the latenineteenth century concentrated imperial or state resources in agricultural development. Their simultaneous, often conflicting, goals were soto improve the security and efficiency of food-crop production that they could eliminate or at the very least sharply diminish periodic drought-inspired dearth and famine mortality in the countryside. The other major goal was to develop substantial export crops—wheat, cotton,sugar, indigo, tea, coffee, opium, etc.—as income producers for thepeasant, the landlord and for the regime. To meet both objectives the Government of India directed its major resources into capital investment in public works: immense canal systems designed to improve andextend cultivation; railroads, to draw production from remote areas to the seacoast; breakwaters, warehousing, docks, navigational aids at the great port terminii to increase the speed and security and reduce the costof sea-borne exports. These public enterprises meshed with intricate structures of agency houses, export brokers, and commission agents,both British and Indian, who jointly penetrated to the most distant centers of cash crop production.

The Seventeenth-Century Crisis in South Asia

In several of the worlds regions a ‘general crisis’ seems to have occurred in the first half of the seventeenth century. At that time in each region, political instability and war, population decline and urban stagnation, economic crises marked by falling prices and depleted stocks of precious metals, and dramatic climatic shifts converged. These symptoms have been detected in western Europe, in the Ottoman lands, and even in China and Japan. Their causes have been attributed in part to the effects of the price revolution, partly to climate change, and in part to rising populations which begin to outstrip agricultural production. The latter tendency in particular seems to have caused a fiscal crisis for the absolutist agrarian states characteristic of Eurasia in this period. Other analyses stress the effects of a tightening linkage in the emerging capitalist world economy in which precious metal flows served to mark newly imposed interdependencies.

Mughal State Finance and the Premodern World Economy

In the April 1979 issue of CSSH , Karen Leonard has advanced a new explanation for the decline and eventual collapse of the Mughal empire in India. She argues that “indigenous banking firms were indispensable allies of the Mughal state” (p. 152), and that the great nobles and imperial officers “were more than likely to be directly dependent upon these banking firms.” (p. 165) Thus, when in the period 1650–1750 these banking firms began “the redirection of [their] economic and political support” (p. 164) toward nascent regional polities and rulers, including the British East India Company in Bengal, this led to bankruptcy, the ensuing series of political crises and the “downfall of the empire” (p. 152). On first consideration, this theory does offer a plausible means to explain some of the more puzzling aspects of the period of Mughal decline, circa 1690 to 1720. Certainly the faltering, after more than a century of steady increase, of the flow of resources toward the imperial center in the last decade of the seventeenth century, and the inability of the empire to pay its highest ranking cadre of officers, the amirs or nobles, and their followers are manifest. A coterminous erosion of authority, the loss of morale and confidence of badly isolated imperial officers stationed throughout the subcontinent, and the loss of fighting spirit amongst imperial armies bogged down in an interminable war against the Marathas in the Deccan are also well known.