Human Footprints on the Global Environment

By Eugene A Rosa, Andreas Diekmann, Thomas Dietz, Carlo C. Jaeger

The colossal human ecological footprint now threatens the sustainability of the entire planet.  Scientists, policy makers, and other close observers know that any understanding of the causes of global environmental change is a function of understanding its human dimensions—the range of human choices and actions that affect the environment.  This book offers a state-of-the-art assessment of research on the human dimensions of global environmental change, describing how global threats to sustainability have come about, providing an interpretive framework for understanding environmental change, reviewing recent work in the social and ecological sciences, and discussing which paths for future advances in our knowledge may prove most promising.

The chapters, by prominent North American and European authors, offer perspectives on population, land cover and use, institutional actions, and culture.  They discuss such topics as risk, the new Structural Human Ecology approach to analyzing anthropogenic drivers of global environmental change, recent progress in understanding land use changes, international environmental regimes, the concept of the commons, and the comparative vulnerability of societies around the world.

Eugene A.  Rosa is the Boeing Professor of Environmental Sociology and the Edward R. Meyer Professor of Natural Resource and Environmental Policy in the Thomas S. Foley Institute for Public Policy and Public Service at Washington State University and a Visiting Scholar at the Woods Institute, Stanford University.  Andreas Diekmann is Chair of Sociology in the Department of Humanities and Social and Political Sciences at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.  Thomas Dietz is Professor of Sociology and Environmental Science and Policy
Assistant Vice President for Environmental Research at Michigan State University.  Carlo C. Jaeger is Head of the Social Systems Department at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK).

“This edited volume includes essays by the world’s most distinguished scholars in the social sciences and global change.  Anyone interested in the state-of-the-arts in the field should consult Human Footprints on the Global Environment.  The plea for adaptive preparation that the editors advocate reconciles the fruitless debate about allocating priorities between mitigation and adaptation and provides an intelligent and insightful solution for climate change research as well as policy making.”

—Ortwin Renn, Department of Technical and Environmental Sociology, University of Stuttgart.

“This book is a major addition to the social science literature dealing with the phenomenon of global environmental change.  Its sweep is large and the result is interesting and informative to specialists and students alike.  The editors are to be commended for blazing this trail with elegant conceptualization and style for an impassioned argument on a critical issue of our times.”

—Edward Miles, School of Marine Affairs, University of Washington, coauthor of Environmental Regime Effectiveness.