Environment change, economy change and reducing conflict at source

At a time when fossil fuel burning, nationalism, ethnic and religious intolerance, and other retrograde steps are being promoted, the prospects for world peace and environmental systems stability may appear dim. Yet now is it the more important to continue to examine the sources of conflict. A major obstacle to general progress is the currently dominant economic practice and theory, which is here called the economy-as-usual, or economics-as-usual, as appropriate. A special obstacle to constructive change is the language in which economic matters are usually discussed. This language is narrow, conservative, technical and often obscure. The rapid changes in the environment (physical and living) are largely kept in a separate compartment. If, however, the partition is removed, economics -as-usual, with its dependence on growth and its widening inequality, is seen to be unsustainable. Radical economic change, for better or worse, is to be expected. Such change is here called economy change. The change could be for the better if it involved an expansion of the concept of economics itself, along the lines of oikonomia, a modern revival of a classical Greek term for management or household. In such an expanded view, not everything of economic value can be measured. It is argued that economics-as-usual is the source of much strife. Some features are indicated of a less conflictual economy - more just, cooperative and peaceful. These features include a dignified life available to all people as of right, the word 'wealth' being reconnected with weal, well and well-being, and 'work' being understood as including all useful activity

Supervised landform classification to enhance and replace photo-interpretation in semi-detailed soil survey

ABSTRACT of stereoscopic landscape analysis, and then determine A method to enhance manual landform delineation using photointerpretation to map a larger area is described. Conventional aerial photo-interpretation (API) maps using a geo-pedological legend of the soil types that occur in each map unit by field inspection of the soil at representative sites. A common inspec-tion density is one observation per one to four map 21 classes were prepared for six sample areas totaling 111 km2 in the centimeters squared (Western, 1978, Table 3.3), which Baranja region, eastern Croatia. Nine terrain parameters extracted at this scale represents 25 to 100 ha. Often, the surveyors from a digital elevation model (DEM) (ground water depth, slope, plan curvature, profile curvature, viewshed, accumulation flow, wetness index, sediment transport index, and the distance to nearest watercourse) were used to extrapolate photo-interpretation over the entire survey area (1062 km make sure that there is also at least one observatio