Agroforestry Land Use: The Concept and Practice

In Australia, the term ‘agroforestry’ is understood in a variety of ways. Although it has often been used to describe land use characterised by productive trees over pasture this is only one form of agroforestry. Recently, more expansive interpretations have arisen in which the term is seen as synomonous with ‘trees-on-farms’, and in some instances, rural forestation in general. This paper attempts to clarify the nature of agroforestry and stimulate interest in a potentially important rural land use.     

Discourse and Argument in Bureau of Land Management Wilderness Environmental Impact Statements

This study examines argument as a link between technical information and policy recommendations in wilderness environmental impact statements (EISs) produced by the Bureau of Land Management. As the EISs went from draft to final form, their structure and content changed. The changes reflect a shift to incorporate wilderness protection into the policy agenda for public lands. The analysis suggests that EISs can be understood as a form of argumentative discourse in which agency personnel frame issues and make normative arguments through technical analyses.     

Pine Nut Use in the Early Holocene and Beyond: The Danger Cave Archaeobotanical Record

Nuts of limber pine (Pinus flexilis) from Early Holocene strata in Danger Cave, Utah, are distinguishable by seed-coat sculpturing from pine nuts of single-needled pinyon (Pinus monophylla), which occur in strata dating <7000 years . Owls and other taphonomic agents may deposit pine nuts in archaeological sites, but the morphology of the pine nuts in Danger Cave strongly indicate they were deposited by human foragers who brought small quantities with them for food for at least the last 7500 years. Large-scale transport of pine nuts to Danger Cave from distant hinterlands is unlikely, however. The seamless transition from limber pine to pinyon pine nuts in the Danger Cave record suggests that foragers who had utilized limber pine as a food resource easily switched to using pinyon pine nuts when pinyon pine migrated into the region at the close of the Early Holocene.     

Laws,People and Land Use: A Sociological Perspective on the Relation Between Laws and Land Use

Public policy is often implemented through formal laws. In contrast to the typically optimistic ex-ante analyses of the impact of a set of laws, in retrospect it may be hard to determine what the laws concretely produced. Particularly complicated to measure are the unintended and indirect effects on actors or values that were not the prime focus of the law. Despite the literature on these matters in other fields of research, among planners the theory of law implementation receives relatively little attention. This attitude may stem from the means-ends rationality that has been common to planning for so many years. This paper makes a plea for focusing on the interaction between people and laws so as to understand the outcomes. We do this by drawing insights from sociological perspectives on laws.     

《水浒传》的叙事结构所反映的民族文化心理

《水浒传》的循环式叙事结构,反映了中国人特殊的出世—入世—出世的生死轮回的民族文化心理,反映了一种积极入世的人生观、价值观,也是中国人特有的思想境界。     

Land Use in Western Australia: the Need for Change

The need for changes in land use has become more evident from analysis of continued declining trends in land and water resource quality. Land use change in this sense refers to changing existing resource management techniques towards ecologically sustainable development. For example, planting cleared areas towards natural water balance, creating better microclimates and improving soil stability. This paper examines existing land and water legislation and the role and scope of government and the community in achieving changes to traditional resource management including reference to economic and biophysical aspects.     

The Scottish Parliament,Regulation and Land Use Planning

Constitutional reforms are taking place in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. These offer the opportunity to bring about a more effective policy framework for a range of policy areas including land use planning. In Scotland, the introduction of the Scottish Parliament in 1999 could allow the improvement of spatial planning policy and practice in a variety of ways, including bringing a more strategic approach at regional level, introducing a national plan and ensuring greater links with innovative community planning exercises. Such improvements could ensure a more sustainable environment as well as a more inclusive society and could offer lessons for similar practice in other contexts.     

Land Use Patterns in Central Asia. Step 1: The Musical Chairs Model

Herding and farming coexisted in Central Asia for several thousand years as main options of preindustrial economic production. The relationship between people practicing different variants of these modes of subsistence is known to have been dynamic. Among the many possible explanations, we explore this dynamic by modeling mechanisms that connect aggregate decisions to land use patterns. Within the framework of the SimulPast project, we show here the results from step 1 of our modeling program: the Musical Chairs Model. This abstract agent-based model describes a mechanism of competition for land use between farming and herding. The aim is the exploration of how mobility, intensity, and interdependence of activities can influence land use pattern. After performing a set of experiments within the framework of this model, we compare the implications of each condition for the corroboration of specific land use patterns. Some historical and archaeological implications are also discussed. We suggest that the overall extension of farming in oases can be explained by the competition for land use between farming and herding, assuming that it develops with little or no interference of climatic, geographical, and historical contingencies.