Land Use and Land Use Change

Humans carry out fundamental activities like agriculture, mineral extraction, and home building on land. Through these activities, they inscribe revealing patterns in landscapes, patterns that promote affluence, degrade habitats, and indicate growing inequalities among humans. For this reason, changes in land use provide an important window on changes in coupled human and natural systems (CHANS). This chapter describes the most important of these changes in land use over the past century. It presents a series of historical generalizations about land use changes. The chapter begins by describing how the spread of markets in land during the twentieth century shaped the human imprint on the earth’s surface. Two activities made a visible imprint on the earth’s surface: the expansion of agriculture around the globe and the growth in the size and geographical extent of cities. The spread of markets in land and the corresponding intensification of land use introduced dramatic changes in urban, suburban, and rural communities that advantaged elites, disadvantaged the poor, precipitated unprecedented losses of biodiversity, and destabilized the climate. The turmoil and environmental abuse from these changes spurred a countervailing set of changes aimed at protecting landscapes, both in remote frontier forests of the Global South and in peri-urban settings outside of cities in both the Global North and the Global South. What Polanyi (1944) referred to as a double movement had occurred, a movement followed by a counter movement, both in remote rural places and in rural-urban fringe places. The first stage in the double movement destroyed and degraded natural resources. In the second stage, people mobilize to restore or spur the recovery of the damaged natural resources. In this sense, the double movement represents a dynamic. The activities in the first stage shape a reaction that defines what happens in the second stage.