Land Use Concepts and Classification
Human land use affects the environment in many ways
- Land uses that benefit humans
- Agriculture
- Housing
- Recreation
- Industry
- Mining
- Waste disposal
- These activities however are negative towards the environment
- Mudslides
- Deforestation
- Water runoff
- To counter these effects, communities have laws, norms, etc. to regulate the usage of land
Tragedy of the Commons
- The tendency of a shared limited resource to become depleted if its not regulated in some way
- Ex:
- Grazing sheep on communal pasture
- First not many farmers graze sheep, but as time goes on, so does the amount of farmers grazing cattle on this land. Over time, the land is degraded and unusable.
- No winners
- People have used “commons” as a public land to graze cattle. mine ores, etc.
- However overuse = bad in long term
- Humans seek benefit in short-term rather than long-term
- The tragedy of commons applies to any publicly available resource such as
Externalities
- Tragedy of the commons is a result of an economic phenomenon called “negative externality”
- Externality
- The cost/benefit of a good or service that is not included in the purchase price of that good or service or otherwise accounted for
- Key word: NOT ACCOUNTED FOR
- Ex:
- If a bakery moves next to your house, the smell of bread is positive externality. But the bakers coming at 3 AM and creating a lot of noise is a negative externality
- Negative externalities are really bad
- One solution that economists came up with is the idea of private land ownership
- May solve many environmental problems
Maximum Sustainable Yield
- The maximum amount of a renewable resource that can be harvested without compromising the future availability of that resource
- Maximum harvest that will be replace by population growth
- MSY varies case by case
- IMPORTANT:
- MSY IS THE AMOUNT OF HARVEST THAT ALLOWS THE RESOURCE POPULATION TO BE MAINTAINED AT ROUGHLY 1/2 THE CARRYING CAPACITY OF THE ENVIRONMENT
- It can be difficult to calculate MSY with certainty as it is difficult to get other info such as birth rates, death rates, carrying capacity, etc.
- On top of this, MSY calculations can only be verified long after damage is done
Public lands are classified according to their use
International Categories of Public lands
- National Parks
- Managed for scientific, educational, and recreational use
- Not used as land for extraction of resources
- Protect animal and plant species
- However control burns are common
- Managed Resource by Protected Areas
- Open for sustained use of
- Biological
- Mineral
- Recreational uses
- Mining, logging, etc. are allowed
- Example would be forests
- Habitat or Species Management Areas
- Habitat or species management areas are actively managed for a lot of reasons.
- May be in order to maintain biological communities