![]() ![]() "Increasing interest has been shown in recent decades in matters relating to ecology, especially under the influence of the debate on climate change. Volume 36 in the Tulika Books, New Delhi series, A People’s History of India, Man and Environment: The Ecological History of India by Irfan Habib has just been published. Nature has a range of ways to be, but there is a limit to those ways, and, therefore, human changes must be within those limits. Human-generated changes must be constrained because nature has functional, historical, and evolutionary limits. Examples include the emergence of increasingly severe wildfire activity in the western United States and the role of extreme drought in triggering forest dieback and accelerated soil erosion in the American Southwest. In fact, twentieth-century trends suggest that disregarding history can be perilous. Multiple, comparative histories from many locations can help evaluate both cultural and natural causes of variability and characterize the overall dynamic properties of ecosystems (Swetnam et al. Historical ecology encompasses all of the data, techniques, and perspectives from paleoecology land-use history from archival and documentary research and long-term ecological research and monitoring extended over decades. As Aldo Leopold (1941) observed, "A science of land health needs, first of all, a base datum of normality, a picture of how healthy land maintains itself as an organism." ![]() Historical timeframes range from decades to millennia. Historical perspectives increase our understanding of the dynamic nature of landscapes and provide a frame of reference for assessing modern patterns and processes. Applied historical ecology is the use of historical knowledge in the management of ecosystems. ![]()
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