文档介绍：Key Issues in
Environmental Change
Series Editors:
Co-ordinating Editor
John A. Matthews
Department of Geography, University of Wales Swansea, UK
Editors
Raymond S. Bradley
Department of Geosciences, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA
Neil Roberts
Department of Geography, University of Plymouth, UK
Martin A. J. Williams
Mawson Graduate Centre for Environmental Studies, University of Adelaide, Australia
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Preface to the series
The study of environmental change is a major growth area of interdisciplinary science. Indeed,
the intensity of current scientific activity in the field of environmental change may be viewed as
the emergence of a new area of 'big science' alongside such recognized fields as nuclear physics,
astronomy and biotechnology. The science of environmental change is fundamental science on a
grand scale: rather different from nuclear physics but nevertheless no less important as a field of
knowledge, and probably of more significance in terms of the continuing ess of human
societies in their occupation of the Earth's surface.
The need to establish the pattern and causes of recent climatic changes, to which human
activities have contributed, is the main force behind the increasing scientific interest in environ-
mental change. Only during the past few decades have the scale, intensity and permanence of
human impacts on the environment been recognized and begun to be understood. A mere 5000
years ago, in the mid-Holocene, non-local human impacts were more or less negligible even on
vegetation and soils. Today, however, pollutants have been detected in the Earth's most remote
regions, and environmental processes, including those of the atmosphere and oceans, are being
affected at a global scale.
Natural environmental change has, however, occurred throughout Earth's history. Large-scale
natural events as abrupt as those associated with human environmental impacts are known to