title: Historian

text: Muslim historical writings first began to develop in the seventh century, with the reconstruction of the Prophet Muhammad's life in the centuries following his death. With numerous conflicting narratives regarding Muhammad and his companions from various sources, scholars had to verify which sources were more reliable. To evaluate these sources, they developed various methodologies, such as the "science of biography", "science of hadith" and "Isnad" (chain of transmission). They later applied these methodologies to other historical figures in the Islamic civilization. Famous historians in this tradition include Urwah (d. 712), Wahb ibn Munabbih (d. 728), Ibn Ishaq (d. 761), al-Waqidi (745–822), Ibn Hisham (d. 834), Muhammad al-Bukhari (810–870) and Ibn Hajar (1372–1449).


title: Historian

text: During the Age of Enlightenment, the modern development of historiography through the application of scrupulous methods began.


title: Historian

text: French "philosophe" Voltaire (1694–1778) had an enormous influence on the art of history writing. His best-known histories are "The Age of Louis XIV" (1751), and "Essay on the Customs and the Spirit of the Nations" (1756). "My chief object," he wrote in 1739, "is not political or military history, it is the history of the arts, of commerce, of civilization – in a word, – of the human mind." He broke from the tradition of narrating diplomatic and military events, and emphasized customs, social history, and achievements in the arts and sciences. He was the first scholar to make a serious attempt to write the history of the world, eliminating theological frameworks, and emphasizing economics, culture, and political history.


title: Historian

text: At the same time, philosopher David Hume was having a similar impact on history in Great Britain. In 1754, he published the "History of England", a six-volume work that extended from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688. Hume adopted a similar scope to Voltaire in his history; as well as the history of Kings, Parliaments, and armies, he examined the history of culture, including literature and science, as well. William Robertson, a Scottish historian, and the Historiographer Royal published the "History of Scotland 1542 – 1603", in 1759 and his most famous work, "The history of the reign of Charles V" in 1769. His scholarship was painstaking for the time and he was able to access a large number of documentary sources that had previously been unstudied. He was also one of the first historians who understood the importance of general and universally applicable ideas in the shaping of historical events.


title: Historian

text: The apex of Enlightenment history was reached with Edward Gibbon's, monumental six-volume work, "The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire", published on 17 February 1776. Because of its relative objectivity and heavy use of primary sources, at the time its methodology became a model for later historians. This has led to Gibbon being called the first "modern historian". The book sold impressively, earning its author a total of about £9000. Biographer Leslie Stephen wrote that thereafter, "His fame was as rapid as it has been lasting."


title: Historian

text: The tumultuous events surrounding the French Revolution inspired much of the historiography and analysis of the early 19th century. Interest in the 1688 Glorious Revolution was also rekindled by the Great Reform Act of 1832 in England.


title: Historian

text: Thomas Carlyle published his magnum opus, the three-volume "" in 1837. The resulting work had a passion new to historical writing. Thomas Macaulay produced his most famous work of history, "The History of England from the Accession of James the Second", in 1848. His writings are famous for their ringing prose and for their confident, sometimes dogmatic, emphasis on a progressive model of British history, according to which the country threw off superstition, autocracy and confusion to create a balanced constitution and a forward-looking culture combined with the freedom of belief and expression. This model of human progress has been called the Whig interpretation of history.


title: Historian

text: In his main work "Histoire de France", French historian Jules Michelet coined the term Renaissance (meaning "Re-birth" in French language), as a period in Europe's cultural history that represented a break from the Middle Ages, creating a modern understanding of humanity and its place in the world.


title: Historian

text: The nineteen-volume work covered French history from Charlemagne to the outbreak of the Revolution. Michelet was one of the first historians to shift the emphasis of history to the common people, rather than the leaders and institutions of the country. Another important French historian of the period was Hippolyte Taine. He was the chief theoretical influence of French naturalism, a major proponent of sociological positivism and one of the first practitioners of historicist criticism. Literary historicism as a critical movement has been said to originate with him.


title: Historian

text: One of the major progenitors of the history of culture and art, was the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt Burckhardt's best-known work is "The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy" (1860). According to John Lukacs, he was the first master of cultural history, which seeks to describe the spirit and the forms of expression of a particular age, a particular people, or a particular place. By the mid-19th century, scholars were beginning to analyse the history of institutional change, particularly the development of constitutional government. William Stubbs's "Constitutional History of England" (3 vols., 1874–78) was an important influence on this developing field. The work traced the development of the English constitution from the Teutonic invasions of Britain until 1485, and marked a distinct step in the advance of English historical learning.


title: Historian

text: Karl Marx introduced the concept of historical materialism into the study of world-historical development. In his conception, the economic conditions and dominant modes of production determined the structure of society at that point. Previous historians had focused on the cyclical events of the rise and decline of rulers and nations. Process of nationalization of history, as part of national revivals in the 19th century, resulted with separation of "one's own" history from common universal history by such way of perceiving, understanding and treating the past that constructed history as history of a nation. A new discipline, sociology, emerged in the late 19th century and analyzed and compared these perspectives on a larger scale.


title: Historian

text: The modern academic study of history and methods of historiography were pioneered in 19th-century German universities. Leopold von Ranke was a pivotal influence in this regard, and is considered as the founder of modern source-based history.


title: Historian

text: Specifically, he implemented the seminar teaching method in his classroom and focused on archival research and analysis of historical documents. Beginning with his first book in 1824, the "History of the Latin and Teutonic Peoples from 1494 to 1514", Ranke used an unusually wide variety of sources for a historian of the age, including "memoirs, diaries, personal and formal missives, government documents, diplomatic dispatches and first-hand accounts of eye-witnesses". Over a career that spanned much of the century, Ranke set the standards for much of later historical writing, introducing such ideas as reliance on primary sources (empiricism), an emphasis on narrative history and especially international politics ("aussenpolitik"). Sources had to be hard, not speculations and rationalizations. His credo was to write history the way it was. He insisted on primary sources with proven authenticity.


title: Historian

text: The term Whig history was coined by Herbert Butterfield in his short book "The Whig Interpretation of History" in 1931, (a reference to the British Whigs, advocates of the power of Parliament) to refer to the approach to historiography that presents the past as an inevitable progression towards ever greater liberty and enlightenment, culminating in modern forms of liberal democracy and constitutional monarchy. In general, Whig historians emphasized the rise of constitutional government, personal freedoms, and scientific progress. The term has been also applied widely in historical disciplines outside of British history (the history of science, for example) to criticize any teleological (or goal-directed), hero-based, and transhistorical narrative. Butterfield's antidote to Whig history was "...to evoke a certain sensibility towards the past, the sensibility which studies the past 'for the sake of the past', which delights in the concrete and the complex, which 'goes out to meet the past', which searches for 'unlikenesses between past and present'." Butterfield's formulation received much attention, and the kind of historical writing he argued against in generalised terms is no longer academically respectable.


title: Historian

text: The French Annales School radically changed the focus of historical research in France during the 20th century by stressing long-term social history, rather than political or diplomatic themes. The school emphasized the use of quantification and the paying of special attention to geography. An eminent member of this school, Georges Duby, described his approach to history as one that relegated the sensational to the sidelines and was reluctant to give a simple accounting of events, but strived on the contrary to pose and solve problems and, neglecting surface disturbances, to observe the long and medium-term evolution of economy, society, and civilisation.


title: Historian

text: Marxist historiography developed as a school of historiography influenced by the chief tenets of Marxism, including the centrality of social class and economic constraints in determining historical outcomes. Friedrich Engels wrote "The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844", which was salient in creating the socialist impetus in British politics from then on, e.g. the Fabian Society. R. H. Tawney's "The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century" (1912) and "Religion and the Rise of Capitalism" (1926), reflected his ethical concerns and preoccupations in economic history. A circle of historians inside the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) formed in 1946 and became a highly influential cluster of British Marxist historians, who contributed to history from below and class structure in early capitalist society. Members included Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm and E. P. Thompson.


title: Historian

text: World history, as a distinct field of historical study, emerged as an independent academic field in the 1980s. It focused on the examination of history from a global perspective and looked for common patterns that emerged across all cultures. Arnold J. Toynbee's ten-volume "A Study of History", written between 1933 and 1954, was an important influence on this developing field. He took a comparative topical approach to independent civilizations and demonstrated that they displayed striking parallels in their origin, growth, and decay. William H. McNeill wrote "The Rise of the West" (1965) to improve upon Toynbee by showing how the separate civilizations of Eurasia interacted from the very beginning of their history, borrowing critical skills from one another, and thus precipitating still further change as adjustment between traditional old and borrowed new knowledge and practice became necessary.


title: Historian

text: A new advanced specialty opened in the late 20th century: historical editing. Edmund Morgan reports on its emergence in the United States:It required, to begin with, large sums of money. But money has proved easier to recruit than talent. Historians who undertake these large editorial projects must leave the main channel of academic life. They do not teach; they do not write their own books; they do not enjoy long vacations for rumination, reflection, and research on whatever topic interests them at the moment. Instead they must live in unremitting daily pursuit of an individual whose company, whatever his genius, may ultimately begin to pall. Anyone who has edited historical manuscripts knows that it requires as much physical and intellectual labor to prepare a text for publication as it does to write a book of one's own. Indeed, the new editorial projects are far too large for one man. The editor-in-chief, having decided to forego a regular academic career, must entice other scholars to help him; and with the present [high] demand for college teachers, this is no easy task.


title: Historian

text: An undergraduate history degree is often used as a stepping stone to graduate studies in business or law. Many historians are employed at universities and other facilities for post-secondary education. In addition, it is normal for colleges and universities to require the PhD degree for new full-time hires. A scholarly thesis, such as a PhD, is now regarded as the baseline qualification for a professional historian. However, some historians still gain recognition based on published (academic) works and the award of fellowships by academic bodies like the Royal Historical Society. Publication is increasingly required by smaller schools, so graduate papers become journal articles and PhD dissertations become published monographs. The graduate student experience is difficult—those who finish their doctorate in the United States take on average 8 or more years; funding is scarce except at a few very rich universities. Being a teaching assistant in a course is required in some programs; in others it is a paid opportunity awarded a fraction of the students. Until the 1970s it was rare for graduate programs to teach how to teach; the assumption was that teaching was easy and that learning how to do research was the main mission. A critical experience for graduate students is having a mentor who will provide psychological, social, intellectual and professional support, while directing scholarship and providing an introduction to the profession.


title: Historian

text: Professional historians typically work in colleges and universities, archival centers, government agencies, museums, and as freelance writers and consultants. The job market for new PhDs in history is poor and getting worse, with many relegated to part-time "adjunct" teaching jobs with low pay and no benefits.


title: Historian

text: C. Vann Woodward (1908–1999), Sterling Professor of History at Yale University, cautioned that the academicians had themselves abdicated their role as storytellers:Professionals do well to apply the term "amateur" with caution to the historian outside their ranks. The word does have deprecatory and patronizing connotations that occasionally backfire. This is especially true of narrative history, which nonprofessionals have all but taken over. The gradual withering of the narrative impulse in favor of the analytical urge among professional academic historians has resulted in a virtual abdication of the oldest and most honored role of the historian, that of storyteller. Having abdicated... the professional is in a poor position to patronize amateurs who fulfill the needed function he has abandoned.


title: Ari Behn

text: Ari Mikael Behn (; , ; 30 September 1972 – 25 December 2019) was a Norwegian author, playwright, and visual artist.


title: Ari Behn

text: Known as Mikael Bjørshol until 1996, Behn achieved early literary success with his 1999 short story collection "Trist som faen" ("Sad as hell"), which sold about 100,000 copies. Following his 2002 marriage to Princess Märtha Louise, he wrote four novels, two short story collections, one play and a book about his wedding, and took part in other creative and artistic endeavours such as the design of a china set named "Peacock". In the 2000s and 2010s his public activity and art were met with mixed reactions in Norway, and Behn acknowledged that many people regarded him as a "fool". From 2013 until his death he was active as a visual artist, painting in a neo-expressionist tradition inspired by Jean-Michel Basquiat. Behn's artwork, described as "highly narrative", was widely exhibited internationally in 2017–18.


title: Ari Behn

text: From 2002 to 2017 he was married to Princess Märtha Louise, the elder child of King Harald V. Behn held no title or special status during the marriage, and remained a private citizen.


title: Ari Behn

text: Behn was born as Ari Mikael Bjørshol in 1972 in Aarhus, Denmark, to Olav Bjørshol (b. 1952) and Marianne Rafaela Solberg (b. 1953), Norwegians who were both Waldorf teachers and who married in 1973. The family lived in Aarhus, then in Plymouth, England, where his father trained as a photographer, and then in Tennevoll in Northern Norway where his mother worked as a teacher at the local school from 1977 to 1978. In 1978 the family settled in Moss in South Norway. Bjørshol was baptized and confirmed in The Christian Community and attended the Waldorf School in Moss from 1979.


title: Ari Behn

text: In 1983, his parents divorced and married a couple who had been among their friends, Jan Pahle and Tone Bjerke, who had previously been married to each other. Tone Bjerke had family connections to several prominent cultural figures; she was the daughter of the well-known poet André Bjerke, and her extended family included people like writer Jens Bjørneboe (father's cousin), actress Henny Moan (stepmother) and singer Ole Paus (stepmother's new partner). In the 2000s his parents divorced Pahle and Bjerke, and they married each other for the second time in 2007.


title: Ari Behn

text: In the 1990s, he studied history and religion at the University of Oslo, from which he received a bachelor's degree.


title: Ari Behn

text: Behn's original surname was "Bjørshol" and he was known by family and during his childhood and youth under the given name Mikael. In 1996, he changed his name to Ari Behn when he took his maternal grandmother's maiden name. The name Behn has German origin. He had two younger siblings, Anja Sabrina and Espen, neither of whom use the name Behn. In 2009, it was made public that Behn's "de jure" paternal grandfather, the Tromsø lawyer Bjarne Nikolai Bjørshol, was not his biological grandfather. Behn's father met his biological father, Terje Erling Ingebrigtsen (1933–2009), a retired car mechanic from Tromsø, for the first time, but Ingebrigtsen died before Behn had a chance to meet him.


title: Ari Behn

text: Behn was a founding member of "Den Nye Vinen" ("The New Wine"), an anarchist artist collective announced in Oslo in 1993 that included Bertrand Bisigye, Henning Braathen, and Per Heimly.


title: Ari Behn

text: Behn achieved literary success in Norway with his first collection of short stories, titled "Trist som faen" ("Sad as hell"), in 1999. His work received several good reviews and sold more than 100,000 copies. As an author he is best known for his first book; he subsequently published four other novels to more mixed reviews.


title: Ari Behn

text: Together with his wife, Princess Märtha, Behn wrote a book about their wedding in 2002. He also participated in various creative projects, for example, the design of a china set named "Peacock" for Magnor Glassverk, and he was a model for a clothing chain.


title: Ari Behn

text: He also made TV documentaries, including a critical documentary on the Afghanistan War in 2002, titled "Øst for krigen – invitert av Taliban".


title: Ari Behn

text: He was a freelance writer for several newspapers and magazines. In 2011 he co-hosted the award-winning TV series "Ari og Per" on NRK with his friend Per Heimly. The appeal of one episode of the show was attributed, in part, to the willingness of Behn and Heimly to be authentic and vulnerable participants on camera at an Ängsbacka festival. Behn and Heimly appeared together on a later TV program, "Ari and Per Solve World Problems" on TVNorge in 2013.


title: Ari Behn

text: Behn was also a playwright; His first play, "Treningstimen" ("The Training Hour") debuted in 2011. Although the play was reported to have received a standing ovation from the audience on opening night, reviews overall were mixed.


title: Ari Behn

text: From 2013, until his death, Behn was active as a painter in a neo-expressionist tradition; he cited Jean-Michel Basquiat as his most important inspiration. As a painter he achieved commercial success by Norwegian standards, and sold paintings for 5.7 million NOK in 2018. Behn exhibited his work internationally, including at Gabba Gallery's exhibit "Borderless: Scandinavia" in Los Angeles in 2018. Behn was paired with the Scandinavian painters Mikael Persbrandt and Espen Eiborg and artwork from the trio has been shown in over 60 international galleries since 2017.


title: Ari Behn

text: Behn published "Inferno" in 2018 which detailed the aftermath of his divorce and included some of his struggles with mental health.


title: Ari Behn

text: On 24 May 2002, Behn married Princess Märtha Louise, the eldest child of Harald V of Norway. Märtha Louise is a self-described clairvoyant who led her own alternative therapy center named Astarte Education/Soulspring, commonly known in Norway as the "angel school" (), which provided training in communication with angels and communication with the dead.


title: Ari Behn

text: At the time of their wedding his wife was second in the line of succession to the Norwegian throne after her younger brother; from her birth in 1971 to 1990 she was not in the line of succession at all due to Norway's agnatic primogeniture succession. She was however 26th in the line of succession to the British throne at the time of her birth, being descended from Edward VII. Behn remained a private citizen and held no title, royal status or special privileges during the marriage; since 1814 Norway has no nobility and no concept of commoners, only citizens. They had three daughters, all of whom are also private citizens: Maud Angelica Behn (born 2003), Leah Isadora Behn (born 2005), and Emma Tallulah Behn (born 2008).


title: Ari Behn

text: The family lived for a time in Islington, north London, in New York, and then in the Lommedalen valley outside Oslo.


title: Ari Behn

text: On 5 August 2016, the Royal Court announced that Princess Märtha Louise and Behn had started divorce proceedings and intended to share custody of their three daughters. They were divorced in 2017.


title: Ari Behn

text: Around the turn of the century Behn and some of his friends, among them photographer Per Heimly, declared themselves to be "The New Wine." During the early 2000s Behn was often portrayed in Norwegian media as a pretentious poseur. He was known for "harsh public feuds" with critics and artists and was often the subject of ridicule in the media. In 2001 he famously challenged critic Kjetil Rolness to a duel with pistol or sword. Even his relative Ole Paus called him "Prins Kvaps von und zu Quasi" [roughly: Prince Fool von und zu Fake] in 2002. In later years Behn was reconciled with many of his critics from this period, and public reception became less critical in the late 2010s after he became active as a visual artist. In his final novel "Inferno" Behn commented on how he was viewed in Norway: "I also design tableware and wine glasses, I joke with my own position as a public figure in the media. I am a clown, in worst case. In best case, I am a debater and public figure. To many people I am a fool." Art historian Øivind Lorentz Storm Bjerke said that Behn "is sometimes portrayed as a merry amateur who suddenly decided to try his hand at art, but this is not correct [...] he is part of a group of visual artists who lack formal training, but who are active in different art forms."


title: Ari Behn

text: Behn made headlines in Norwegian newspapers in the autumn of 2006, when he revealed that he voted for the Norwegian Labour Party. His friendship with the former Minister of Culture and Labour leader Trond Giske attracted criticism from newspapers and politicians.


title: Ari Behn

text: In January 2009, Behn received massive media coverage in the Norwegian press after going on a "personal vendetta" against former palace official Carl-Erik Grimstad, accusing him of spreading tabloid nonsense regarding Behn and his family.


title: Ari Behn

text: Following his death Behn was widely praised for his personal qualities, and described as a caring, colourful personality.


title: Ari Behn

text: In December 2017, Behn said that the actor Kevin Spacey had groped his genitals in 2007, at a nightclub during the afterparty for the Nobel Peace Prize concert; however he said he didn't feel violated by the incident and that he "had a wonderful time" at the party; Behn said on the talkshow "Skavlan": "I didn't experience it as sexual harassment [...] for me it was a compliment." Following his death American media portrayed him as a "Spacey accuser", although he had not accused Spacey of wrongdoing or been involved in any legal cases against Spacey, and conspiracy theories focusing on the incident circulated on the Internet; Norwegian commentators pointed out that Behn had regarded the incident as a minor, entertaining anecdote, and accused American media of fostering conspiracy theories by blowing the incident out of proportion. Media studies scholar Gunn Enli described American coverage of Behn's death and its focus on the Spacey incident "taken out of context" as a "distorted version of reality."


title: Ari Behn

text: Behn was the subject of a documentary series that followed him during a difficult period around the time of his divorce. The three-episode series, titled "Ari Behn og halve kongeriket" ("Ari and the Half Kingdom"), was produced for TV3. Prior to the release of the series, Behn and members of his family made clear that they did not support the final content and withheld their approval. TV3 aired the docuseries in 2018 despite the objections of Behn, his family, and his legal representatives. After Behn's death, TV3 withdrew web access to the series on the day preceding his funeral.


title: Ari Behn

text: Behn died at his home in Lommedalen on 25 December 2019. A statement from his family said Behn had died by suicide. He had struggled with alcoholism and mental health problems. In a 2009 interview he said he was chronically depressed and lonely.


title: Ari Behn

text: The swift public announcement by the Norwegian royal family following his death was noted as unusually open and forthright; King Harald V, Queen Sonja, and other members of his former wife's family as well as his own family expressed their sorrow at his death in statements released to the public. His funeral was held at Oslo Cathedral on 3 January 2020.


title: Ari Behn

text: Ari Behn's publisher said that Behn left behind a completed manuscript for a children's book which he had written with his eldest daughter Maud Angelica. It is uncertain whether the book will be published.


title: Kashmir Valley

text: The Kashmir Valley, also known as the "Vale of Kashmir", is an intermontane valley concentrated in the Kashmir Division of the Indian-union territory of Jammu and Kashmir. The valley is bounded on the southwest by the Pir Panjal Range and on the northeast by the main Himalayas range. It is approximately long and wide, and drained by the Jhelum River.


title: Kashmir Valley

text: The Kashmir Valley lies between latitude 33° and 35°N, and longitude 73° and 76°E. The valley is wide and covers in area. It is bounded by sub-ranges of the Western Himalayas: the Great Himalayas bound it in the northeast and separate it from the Tibetan plateau, whereas the Pir Panjal Range in the Lesser Himalayas bounds it on the west and the south, and separates it from the Punjab Plain. The valley has an average elevation of above sea-level, but the surrounding Pir Panjal range has an average elevation of . The Jhelum River is the main river of the Valley. It originates at Verinag; its most important tributaries are the Lidder and Sind rivers. Unlike other areas of Kashmir region, the Kashmir valley is densely populated owing to the availability of a large expanse of fertile flat land.


title: Kashmir Valley

text: The Kashmir Valley has a moderate climate, which is largely defined by its geographic location, with the towering Karakoram Range in the north, Pir Panjal Range in the south and west, and Zanskar Range in the east. It can be generally described as cool in the spring and autumn, mild in the summer and cold in the winter. As a large valley with significant differences in geo-location among various districts, the weather is often cooler in the hilly areas compared to the flat lower parts.


title: Kashmir Valley

text: Summer is usually mild and fairly dry, but relative humidity is generally high and the nights are cool. Precipitation occurs throughout the year and no month is particularly dry. The hottest month is July (mean minimum temperature 16 °C, mean maximum temperature 32 °C) and the coldest are December–January (mean minimum temperature −15 °C, mean maximum temperature 0 °C).


title: Kashmir Valley

text: The Kashmir Valley enjoys a moderate climate but weather conditions are unpredictable. The record high temperature is 37.8°C and the record low is −18 °C. On 5 and 6 January 2012, after years of relatively little snow, a wave of heavy snow and low temperatures (winter storm) shocked the valley covering it in a thick layer of snow and ice.


title: Kashmir Valley

text: The Valley has seen an increase in relative humidity and annual precipitation in the last few years. This is most likely because of the commercial afforestation projects which also include expanding parks and green cover.


title: Carrying capacity

text: The carrying capacity of an environment is the maximum population size of a biological species that can be sustained by that specific environment, given the food, habitat, water, and other resources available. The carrying capacity is defined as the environment's maximal load, which in population ecology corresponds to the population equilibrium, when the number of deaths in a population equals the number of births (as well as immigration and emigration). The effect of carrying capacity on population dynamics is modelled with a logistic function. Carrying capacity is applied to the maximum population an environment can support in ecology, agriculture and fisheries. The term carrying capacity has been applied to a few different processes in the past before finally being applied to population limits in the 1950s. The notion of carrying capacity for humans is covered by the notion of sustainable population.


title: Carrying capacity

text: At the global scale, scientific data indicates that humans are living beyond the carrying capacity of planet Earth and that this cannot continue indefinitely. This scientific evidence comes from many sources. It was presented in detail in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment of 2005, a collaborative effort involving more than 1,360 experts worldwide. More recent, detailed accounts are provided by ecological footprint accounting, and interdisciplinary research on planetary boundaries to safe human use of the biosphere. The Sixth Assessment Report on Climate Change from the IPCC and the First Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services by the IPBES, large international summaries of the state of scientific knowledge regarding climate disruption and biodiversity loss, also support this view.


title: Carrying capacity

text: An early detailed examination of global limits was published in the 1972 book "Limits to Growth", which has prompted follow-up commentary and analysis. A 2012 review in "Nature" by 22 international researchers expressed concerns that the Earth may be "approaching a state shift" in which the biosphere may become less hospitable to human life and in which human carrying capacity may diminish. This concern that humanity may be passing beyond "tipping points" for safe use of the biosphere has increased in subsequent years. Recent estimates of Earth's carrying capacity run between two to four billion people, depending on how optimistic researchers are about international cooperation to solve wicked collective action problems. These estimates affirm that the more people we seek to sustain, the more modest their average standard of living needs to be.


title: Carrying capacity

text: In terms of population dynamics, the term 'carrying capacity' was not explicitly used in 1838 by the Belgian mathematician Pierre François Verhulst when he first published his equations based on research on modelling population growth.


title: Carrying capacity

text: The origins of the term "carrying capacity" are uncertain, with sources variously stating that it was originally used "in the context of international shipping" in the 1840s, or that it was first used during 19th-century laboratory experiments with micro-organisms. A 2008 review finds the first use of the term in English was an 1845 report by the US Secretary of State to the US Senate. It then became a term used generally in biology in the 1870s, being most developed in wildlife and livestock management in the early 1900s. It had become a staple term in ecology used to define the biological limits of a natural system related to population size in the 1950s.


title: Carrying capacity

text: Neo-Malthusians and eugenicists popularised the use of the words to describe the number of people the Earth can support in the 1950s, although American biostatisticians Raymond Pearl and Lowell Reed had already applied it in these terms to human populations in the 1920s.


title: Carrying capacity

text: Hadwen and Palmer (1923) defined carrying capacity as the density of stock that could be grazed for a definite period without damage to the range.


title: Carrying capacity

text: It was first used in the context of wildlife management by the American Aldo Leopold in 1933, and a year later by the American Paul Lester Errington, a wetlands specialist. They used the term in different ways, Leopold largely in the sense of grazing animals (differentiating between a 'saturation level', an intrinsic level of density a species would live in, and carrying capacity, the most animals which could be in the field) and Errington defining 'carrying capacity' as the number of animals above which predation would become 'heavy' (this definition has largely been rejected, including by Errington himself). The important and popular 1953 textbook on ecology by Eugene Odum, "Fundamentals of Ecology", popularised the term in its modern meaning as the equilibrium value of the logistic model of population growth.


title: Carrying capacity

text: The difference between the birth rate and the death rate is the natural increase. If the population of a given organism is below the carrying capacity of a given environment, this environment could support a positive natural increase; should it find itself above that threshold the population typically decreases. Thus, the carrying capacity is the maximum number of individuals of a species that an environment can support.


title: Carrying capacity

text: Population size decreases above carrying capacity due to a range of factors depending on the species concerned, but can include insufficient space, food supply, or sunlight. The carrying capacity of an environment varies for different species.


title: Carrying capacity

text: In the standard ecological algebra as illustrated in the simplified of population dynamics, carrying capacity is represented by the constant K:


title: Carrying capacity

text: Thus, the equation relates the growth rate of the population to the current population size, incorporating the effect of the two constant parameters and . (Note that decrease is negative growth.) The choice of the letter came from the German "Kapazitätsgrenze" (capacity limit).


title: Carrying capacity

text: When the Verhulst model is plotted into a graph, the population change over time takes the form of a sigmoid curve, reaching its highest level at . This is the logistic growth curve and it is calculated with:


title: Carrying capacity

text: The logistic growth curve depicts how population growth rate and carrying capacity are inter-connected. As illustrated in the logistic growth curve model, when the population size is small, the population increases exponentially. However, as population size nears carrying capacity, the growth decreases and reaches zero at .


title: Carrying capacity

text: What determines a specific system's carrying capacity involves a limiting factor; this may be available supplies of food or water, nesting areas, space, or the amount of waste that can be absorbed without degrading the environment and decreasing carrying capacity. Where resources are finite, such as for a population of "Osedax" on a whale fall or bacteria in a petridish, the population will curve back down to zero after the resources have been exhausted, with the curve reaching its apogee at . In systems in which resources are constantly replenished, the population will reach its equilibrium at .


title: Carrying capacity

text: Carrying capacity is a commonly used concept for biologists when trying to better understand biological populations and the factors which affect them. When addressing biological populations, carrying capacity can be seen as a stable dynamic equilibrium, taking into account extinction and colonization rates. In population biology, logistic growth assumes that population size fluctuates above and below an equilibrium value.


title: Carrying capacity

text: Numerous authors have questioned the usefulness of the term when applied to actual wild populations. Although useful in theory and in laboratory experiments, carrying capacity as a method of measuring population limits in the environment is less useful as it sometimes oversimplifies the interactions between species.


title: Carrying capacity

text: It is important for farmers to calculate the carrying capacity of their land so they can establish a sustainable stocking rate. For example, calculating the carrying capacity of a paddock in Australia is done in Dry Sheep Equivalents (DSEs). A single DSE is 50 kg Merino wether, dry ewe or non-pregnant ewe, which is maintained in a stable condition. Not only sheep are calculated in DSEs, the carrying capacity for other livestock is also calculated using this measure. A 200 kg weaned calf of a British style breed gaining 0.25 kg/day is 5.5DSE, but if the same weight of the same type of calf were gaining 0.75 kg/day, it would be measure at 8DSE. Cattle are not all the same, their DSEs can vary depending on breed, growth rates, weights, if it is a cow ('dam'), steer or ox ('bullock' in Australia), and if it weaning, pregnant or 'wet' (i.e. lactating).


title: Carrying capacity

text: In other parts of the world different units are used for calculating carrying capacities. In the United Kingdom the paddock is measured in LU, livestock units, although different schemes exist for this. New Zealand uses either LU, EE (ewe equivalents) or SU (stock units). In the USA and Canada the traditional system uses animal units (AU). A French/Swiss unit is "Unité de Gros Bétail" (UGB).


title: Carrying capacity

text: In some European countries such as Switzerland the pasture ("alm" or "alp") is traditionally measured in "Stoß", with one "Stoß" equaling four "Füße" (feet). A more modern European system is (GV or GVE), corresponding to 500 kg in liveweight of cattle. In extensive agriculture 2 GV/ha is a common stocking rate, in intensive agriculture, when grazing is supplemented with extra fodder, rates can be 5 to 10 GV/ha. In Europe average stocking rates vary depending on the country, in 2000 the Netherlands and Belgium had a very high rate of 3.82 GV/ha and 3.19 GV/ha respectively, surrounding countries have rates of around 1 to 1.5 GV/ha, and more southern European countries have lower rates, with Spain having the lowest rate of 0.44 GV/ha.


title: Carrying capacity

text: This system can also be applied to natural areas. Grazing megaherbivores at roughly 1 GV/ha is considered sustainable in central European grasslands, although this varies widely depending on many factors. In ecology it is theoretically (i.e. cyclic succession, patch dynamics, "Megaherbivorenhypothese") taken that a grazing pressure of 0.3 GV/ha by wildlife is enough to hinder afforestation in a natural area. Because different species have different ecological niches, with horses for example grazing short grass, cattle longer grass, and goats or deer preferring to browse shrubs, niche differentiation allows a terrain to have slightly higher carrying capacity for a mixed group of species, than it would if there were only one species involved.


title: Carrying capacity

text: Some niche market schemes mandate lower stocking rates than can maximally be grazed on a pasture. In order to market ones' meat products as 'biodynamic', a lower "Großvieheinheit" of 1 to 1.5 (2.0) GV/ha is mandated, with some farms having an operating structure using only 0.5 to 0.8 GV/ha.


title: Carrying capacity

text: The Food and Agriculture Organization has introduced three international units to measure carrying capacity: FAO Livestock Units for North America, FAO Livestock Units for sub-Saharan Africa, and Tropical Livestock Units.


title: Carrying capacity

text: Another rougher and less precise method of determining the carrying capacity of a paddock is simply by looking objectively at the condition of the herd. In Australia, the national standardized system for rating livestock conditions is done by body condition scoring (BCS). An animal in a very poor condition is scored with a BCS of 0, and an animal which is extremely healthy is scored at 5: animals may be scored between these two numbers in increments of 0.25. At least 25 animals of the same type must be scored to provide a statistically representative number, and scoring must take place monthly -if the average falls, this may be due to a stocking rate above the paddock's carrying capacity or too little fodder. This method is less direct for determining stocking rates than looking at the pasture itself, because the changes in the condition of the stock may lag behind changes in the condition of the pasture.


title: Carrying capacity

text: In fisheries, carrying capacity is used in the formulae to calculate sustainable yields for fisheries management. The maximum sustainable yield (MSY) is defined as "the highest average catch that can be continuously taken from an exploited population (=stock) under average environmental conditions". MSY was originally calculated as half of the carrying capacity, but has been refined over the years, now being seen as roughly 30% of the population, depending on the species or population. Because the population of a species which is brought below its carrying capacity due to fishing will find itself in the exponential phase of growth, as seen in the Verhulst model, the harvesting of an amount of fish at or below MSY is a surplus yield which can be sustainably harvested without reducing population size at equilibrium, keeping the population at its maximum recruitment. However, annual fishing can be seen as a modification of "r" in the equation -i.e. the environment has been modified, which means that the population size at equilibrium with annual fishing is slightly below what "K" would be without it.


title: Carrying capacity

text: Note that mathematically and in practical terms, MSY is problematic. If mistakes are made and even a tiny amount of fish are harvested each year above the MSY, populations dynamics imply that the total population will eventually decrease to zero. The actual carrying capacity of the environment may fluctuate in the real world, which means that practically, MSY may actually vary from year to year (annual sustainable yields and maximum average yield attempt to take this into account). Other similar concepts are optimum sustainable yield and maximum economic yield; these are both harvest rates below MSY.


title: Carrying capacity

text: As climate change becomes a bigger issue, it has moved from social and natural sciences to political debates. Carrying capacity currently tends to be thought of as a natural and normal balance between nature and humans. Carrying capacity depends on the amount of natural resources available to a population and how much of the resource is needed. When it began to be used, it looked at human impacts on the environment or specific species. Anthropological criticisms of the concept of carrying capacity are that it does not successfully capture the nuances of how multilayered human and environment relationships are. Discussions of carrying capacity often utilize a framework that places undue blame on populations that often experience the worse effects of climate change and environmental degradation. The Gwembe Tonga Research Project (GTRP) is a long term study in Africa, that uses the building of the Kariba Dam on the Zambezi River as a case study to explore the effects of large scale development on populations. The building of this dam and the subsequent flooding in the area displaced 57,000 people. Increasing drought cycles along with displaced people joining land that was already populated caused a great deal of precarity for the displaced population, and kinship networks and famine foods were utilized to deal with scarcity. The study was started in 1956. It originally wrapped up in 1962, but the researchers chose to continue indefinitely to better understand the community and how it changes over time. The population was resettled from development on Lake Kariba. Some of the villages were forced to settle below the new dam. Six thousand people settled in Lusitu, with very ethnically different people with around one thousand people and a new environment. Droughts in the area are becoming more frequent, and there are definitely some environmental costs. However, with GTRP, it has been found that there is no inevitable permanent damage to the ecology. In Lusitu, there was a terrible drought between 1994 and 1995, which resulted in no harvest. However, the next year, the people saw a good harvest. It was not enough for the whole population, but it was better than other years. The drought allowed the soil to rest, and lead to a bigger harvest than in recent years. The economy has been struggling since the copper industry collapsed in the 1970s.


title: Carrying capacity

text: For years, researchers have attempted to measure human carrying capacity with numbers, but there is not a model that works for every town, city, or country. Some of the issues that cause this are as follows


title: Carrying capacity

text: When applying carrying capacity to human populations, these eight issues should be considered. Carrying capacity assumes equilibrium, as well as it’s difficult to measure food sources. Not all foods are available all the time, and there is a lot of variation in what is enough, as calories might be privileged over nutritional value, and it’s not possible to account for human preferences. It also assumes that there is full use of food resources, which doesn’t account for those aforementioned preferences or perhaps cultural taboos or lack of knowledge. There are also choices of when and where labor is invested, and these may differ generationally or across subsets of a population, as needs and goals affect priorities in different ways. Carrying capacity also assumes homogeneity across a landscape, and that regions don’t have a huge degree of variation and microcosms. It also assumes populations and groups are isolated, and ignores the utilization of practices like support from kinship networks or migration. Other problems with carrying capacity are that it takes a historical view and ignores natural fluctuations, as well as it doesn’t address issues specifically relevant to human populations, like a standard of living. The balance between populations that carrying capacity intends to reflect is more variable and complex than can be analyzed simply by this concept. Some recent scientists believe that humans are constantly adaptable, so there is no limitation that would completely wipe them out. Others think that humans overusing resources will decrease the carrying capacity overall.


title: Anthony Johnson (colonist)

text: Anthony Johnson ( 1600 – 1670) was a black Angolan known for achieving wealth in the early 17th-century Colony of Virginia. He was one of the first African Americans whose right to own a slave for life was recognized by the Virginia courts. Held as an indentured servant in 1621, he earned his freedom after several years, and was granted land by the colony.


title: Anthony Johnson (colonist)

text: He later became a tobacco farmer in Maryland. He attained great wealth after completing his term as an indentured servant, and has been referred to as "'the black patriarch' of the first community of Negro property owners in America".


title: Anthony Johnson (colonist)

text: In the early 1620s, slave traders captured the man who would later be known as Anthony Johnson in Portuguese Angola, named him Antonio, and sold him into the Atlantic slave trade. António was bought by a colonist in Virginia. As an indentured servant, António worked for a merchant at the Virginia Company. He was also Catholic.


title: Anthony Johnson (colonist)

text: He sailed to Virginia in 1621 aboard the "James." The Virginia Muster (census) of 1624 lists his name as "Antonio not given," recorded as "a Negro" in the "notes" column. Historians have some dispute as to whether this was the Antonio later known as Anthony Johnson, as the census lists several "Antonios." This one is considered the most likely.


title: Anthony Johnson (colonist)

text: Johnson was sold as an indentured servant to a white planter named Bennet to work on his Virginia tobacco farm. (Slave laws were not passed until 1661 in Virginia; prior to that date, Africans were not officially considered to be slaves). Such workers typically worked under a limited indenture contract for four to seven years to pay off their passage, room, board, lodging, and freedom dues. In the early colonial years, most Africans in the Thirteen Colonies were held under such contracts of limited indentured servitude. With the exception of those indentured for life, they were released after a contracted period. Those who managed to survive their period of indenture would receive land and equipment after their contracts expired or were bought out. Most white laborers in this period also came to the colony as indentured servants.


title: Anthony Johnson (colonist)

text: António almost lost his life in the Indian massacre of 1622, when Bennet's plantation was attacked. The Powhatan, who were the indigenous people dominant at that time in the Tidewater region of Virginia, were attempting to evict the colonists. They raided the settlement where Johnson worked on Good Friday and killed 52 of the 57 men present.


title: Anthony Johnson (colonist)

text: In 1623, a black woman named Mary arrived aboard the ship "Margaret". She was brought to work on the same plantation as António, where she was the only woman present. António and Mary married and lived together for more than forty years.


title: Anthony Johnson (colonist)

text: Sometime after 1635, Antonio and Mary concluded the terms of their indentured servitude. Antonio changed his name to Anthony Johnson. He first entered the legal record as an unindentured man when he purchased a calf in 1647.


title: Anthony Johnson (colonist)

text: Johnson was granted a large plot of farmland by the colonial government after he paid off his indentured contract by his labor. On July 24, 1651, he acquired of land under the headright system by buying the contracts of five indentured servants, one of whom was his son Richard Johnson. The headright system worked in such a way that if a man were to bring indentured servants over to the colonies (in this particular case, Johnson brought the five servants), he was owed 50 acres a "head", or servant. The land was located on the Great Naswattock Creek, which flowed into the Pungoteague River in Northampton County, Virginia. With his own indentured servants, Johnson ran his own tobacco farm. In fact, one of those servants, John Casor, would later become one of the first African men to be declared indentured for life.


title: Anthony Johnson (colonist)

text: In 1652, "an unfortunate fire" caused "great losses" for the family, and Johnson applied to the courts for tax relief. The court reduced the family's taxes and on February 28, 1652, exempted his wife Mary and their two daughters from paying taxes at all "during their natural lives." At that time, taxes were levied on people, not property. Under the 1645 Virginia taxation act, "all negro men and women and all other men from the age of 16 to 60 shall be judged tithable." It is unclear from the records why the Johnson women were exempted, but the change gave them the same social standing as white women, who were not taxed. During the case, the justices noted that Anthony and Mary "have lived Inhabitants in Virginia (above thirty years)" and had been respected for their "hard labor and known service".


title: Anthony Johnson (colonist)

text: By the 1650s, Anthony and Mary Johnson were farming 250 acres in Northampton County while their two sons owned a total of 550 acres.


title: Anthony Johnson (colonist)

text: When Anthony Johnson was released from slavery, he was legally recognized as a "free Negro." He became a successful farmer. In 1651, he owned , and the services of five indentured servants (four white and one black). In 1653, John Casor, a black indentured servant whose contract Johnson appeared to have bought in the early 1640s, approached Captain Goldsmith, claiming his indenture had expired seven years earlier and that he was being held illegally by Johnson. A neighbor, Robert Parker, intervened and persuaded Johnson to free Casor.


title: Anthony Johnson (colonist)

text: Parker offered Casor work, and he signed a term of indenture to the planter. Johnson sued Parker in the Northampton Court in 1654 for the return of Casor. The court initially found in favor of Parker, but Johnson appealed. In 1655, the court reversed its ruling. Finding that Anthony Johnson still "owned" John Casor, the court ordered that he be returned with the court dues paid by Robert Parker.


title: Anthony Johnson (colonist)

text: This was the first instance of a judicial determination in the Thirteen Colonies holding that a person who had committed no crime could be held in servitude for life.


title: Anthony Johnson (colonist)

text: Though Casor was the first person who was declared a slave in a civil case, there were both black and white indentured servants sentenced to lifetime servitude before him. Many historians describe indentured servant John Punch as the first documented slave (or slave for life) in America, as punishment for escaping his captors in 1640. It is considered one of the first legal cases to make a racial distinction between black and white indentured servants.


title: Anthony Johnson (colonist)

text: The Casor lawsuit demonstrates the culture and mentality of planters in the mid-17th century. Individuals made assumptions about the society of Northampton County and their place in it. According to historians T.H. Breen and Stephen Innes, Casor believed he could form a stronger relationship with his patron Robert Parker than Anthony Johnson had formed over the years with his patrons. Casor considered the dispute to be a matter of patron-client relationship, and this wrongful assumption resulted in his losing his case in court and having the ruling against him. Johnson knew that the local justices shared his basic belief in the sanctity of property. The judge sided with Johnson, although in future legal issues, race played a larger role.


title: Anthony Johnson (colonist)

text: The Casor lawsuit was an example of how difficult it was for Africans who were indentured servants to prevent being reduced to slavery. Most Africans could not read and had almost no knowledge of the English language. Planters found it easy to force them into slavery by refusing to acknowledge the completion of their indentured contracts. This is what happened in "Johnson v. Parker." Although two white planters confirmed that Casor had completed his indentured contract with Johnson, the court still ruled in Johnson's favor.


title: Anthony Johnson (colonist)

text: In 1657, Johnson's neighbor, Edmund Scarborough, allegedly forged a letter in which Johnson acknowledged a debt, whether this debt was real or not is unknown. Johnson did not contest the case. Johnson was illiterate and could not have written the letter; nevertheless, the court awarded Scarborough of Johnson's land to pay off his alleged "debt".


title: Anthony Johnson (colonist)

text: In this early period, free blacks enjoyed "relative equality" with the white community. About 20% of free black Virginians owned their own homes. In 1662 the Virginia Colony passed a law that children in the colony were born with the social status of their mother, according to the Roman principle of "partus sequitur ventrem". This meant that the children of slave women were born into slavery, even if their fathers were free, European, Christian, and white. This was a reversal of English common law, which held that the children of English subjects took the status of their father. The Virginian colonial government expressed the opinion that since Africans were not Christians, common law could not and did not apply to them.


title: Anthony Johnson (colonist)

text: Anthony Johnson moved his family to Somerset County, Maryland, where he negotiated a lease on a plot of land for ninety-nine years. He developed the property as a tobacco farm, which he named Tories Vineyards.


title: Anthony Johnson (colonist)

text: Research indicates that when Johnson died in 1670, his plantation was given to a white colonist, not to Johnson's children. A judge had ruled that he was "not a citizen of the colony" because he was black.


title: Black sheep

text: In the English language, black sheep is an idiom that describes a member of a group who is different from the rest, especially a family member who does not fit in. The term stems from sheep whose fleece is colored black rather than the more common white; these sheep stand out in the flock and their wool is worth less as it will not dye.


title: Black sheep

text: In psychology, "black sheep effect" refers to the tendency of group members to judge likeable ingroup members more positively and deviant ingroup members more negatively than comparable outgroup members.


title: Black sheep

text: In most sheep, a white fleece is not caused by albinism but by a common dominant gene that switches color production off, thus obscuring any other color that may be present. A black fleece is caused by a recessive gene, so if a white ram and a white ewe are each heterozygous for black, about one in four of their lambs will be black. In most white sheep breeds, only a few white sheep are heterozygous for black, so black lambs are usually much rarer than this.


title: Black sheep

text: The term originated from the occasional black sheep which are born into a flock of white sheep. Black wool is considered commercially undesirable because it cannot be dyed. In 18th and 19th century England, the black color of the sheep was seen as the mark of the devil. In modern usage, the expression has lost some of its negative connotations, though the term is usually given to the member of a group who has certain characteristics or lack thereof deemed undesirable by that group. Jessica Mitford described herself as "the red sheep of the family", a communist in a family of aristocratic fascists.


title: Black sheep

text: The idiom is also found in other languages, e.g. German, French, Italian, Serbo-Croatian, Bulgarian, Hebrew, Portuguese, Greek, Turkish, Hungarian, Dutch, Afrikaans, Swedish, Danish, Spanish, Catalan, Czech, Slovak, Romanian and Polish. During the Second Spanish Republic a weekly magazine named "El Be Negre", meaning 'The Black Sheep', was published in Barcelona.


title: Black sheep

text: The same concept is illustrated in some other languages by the phrase "white crow": for example, "belaya vorona" () in Russian and "kalāg-e sefīd" () in Persian.


title: Black sheep

text: In 1988, Marques, Yzerbyt and Leyens conducted an experiment where Belgian students rated the following groups according to trait-descriptors (e.g. sociable, polite, violent, cold): unlikeable Belgian students, unlikeable North African students, likeable Belgian students, and likeable North African students. The results indicated that favorability is considered highest for likeable ingroup members and lowest for unlikeable ingroup members, with the favorability of unlikeable and likeable outgroup members lying between the two ingroup members. These extreme judgements of likeable and unlikeable (i.e., deviant) ingroup members, relatively to comparable outgroup members is called "black sheep effect". This effect has been shown in various intergroup contexts and under a variety of conditions, and in many experiments manipulating likeability and norm deviance.


title: Black sheep

text: A prominent explanation of the black sheep effect derives from the social identity approach (social identity theory and self-categorization theory). Group members are motivated to sustain a positive and distinctive social identity and, as a consequence, group members emphasize likeable members and evaluate them more positive than outgroup members, bolstering the positive image of their ingroup (ingroup bias). Furthermore, the positive social identity may be threatened by group members who deviate from a relevant group norm. To protect the positive group image, ingroup members derogate ingroup deviants more harshly than deviants of an outgroup (Marques, Abrams, Páez, & Hogg, 2001).


title: Black sheep

text: Eidelman and Biernat wrote in 2003 that personal identities are also threatened through deviant ingroup members. They argue that devaluation of deviant members is an individual response of interpersonal differentiation. Khan and Lambert suggested in 1998 that cognitive processes such as assimilation and contrast, which may underline the effect, should be examined.


title: Black sheep

text: Even though there is wide support for the black sheep effect, the opposite pattern has been found, for example, that White participants judge unqualified Black targets more negatively than comparable White targets (e.g. Feldman, 1972; Linville & Jones, 1980). Consequently, there are several factors which influence the black sheep effect. For instance, the higher the identification with the ingroup, and the higher the entitativity of the ingroup, the more the black sheep effect emerges. Even situational factors explaining the deviance have an influence whether the black sheep effect occurs.


title: Land

text: Land, also called dry land, ground, or earth, is the solid terrestrial surface of planet Earth that is not submerged by the ocean or another body of water. Land makes up 29 percent of Earth's surface and includes the continents and a variety of islands. Earth's land surface is almost entirely covered by regolith, a surface layer of rock, soil and minerals that forms the outer part of Earth's crust. The land is a vital part of Earth's climate system and plays important roles in the carbon cycle, nitrogen cycle, and water cycle. One-third of land is covered in trees, 15 percent in crops, and a tenth in permanent snow and glaciers.


title: Land

text: Land terrain varies greatly and consists of mountains, deserts, plains, plateaus, glaciers, and other landforms. In physical geology, the land is divided into two major categories: mountain ranges and relatively flat interiors called cratons. Both are formed over millions of years through plate tectonics. A major part of Earth's water cycle, streams shape the landscape, carved rocks, transport sediments, and replenish groundwater. At high elevations or latitudes, snow is compacted and recrystallized over hundreds or thousands of years to form glaciers, which can be so heavy that they warp the Earth's crust. About 30 percent of land has a dry climate, due to losing more water through evaporation than it gains from precipitation. Since warm air rises, this generates winds, though the Earth's rotation and uneven sun distribution also play a part.


title: Land

text: Land is commonly defined as the solid, dry surface of Earth. The word "land" may also collectively refer to land cover, rivers, shallow lakes, natural resources, non-marine fauna and flora (biosphere), the lower portions of the atmosphere (troposphere), groundwater reserves, and the physical results of human activity on land, such as architecture and agriculture. Even though saturated land, or mud, is common away from the ocean, to anyone in a body of water the shoreline is referred to as where dry land begins.


title: Land

text: Though modern terrestrial plants and animals evolved from aquatic creatures, Earth's first cellular life likely originated on land. Survival on land depends on fresh water from rivers, streams, lakes, and glaciers, which constitutes only three percent of the water on Earth. The vast majority of human activity throughout history has occurred in land areas that are habitable and support agriculture and various natural resources. In recent decades, scientists and policymakers have emphasized the need to manage land and its biosphere more sustainably, notably by restoring degraded soil, preserving biodiversity, protecting endangered species, and addressing climate change.


title: Land

text: The word "land" is derived from the Old English , meaning 'ground, soil', and 'definite portion of the earth's surface, home region of a person or a people, territory marked by political boundaries'. It evolved from the Proto-Germanic and from the Proto-Indo-European 'land, open land, heath'. The word has many cognates in other languages, such as , , , , , 'an open space', 'enclosure, church', 'heath', 'wasteland, heath', and 'fallow land'. Etymological evidence within Gothic usage suggests that the original meaning of "land" was 'a definite portion of the earth's surface owned by an individual or home of a nation.' The meaning was extended to 'solid surface of the earth'. The original meaning is now associated with "country".


title: Land

text: A country or nation may be referred to as the motherland, fatherland, or homeland of its people. Many countries and other places have names incorporating the suffix -land (e.g. England, Greenland, and New Zealand). The equivalent suffix "-stan" from Indo-Iranian, ultimately derived from the Proto-Indo-Iranian , is also present in many country and location names, such as Pakistan, Afghanistan and others throughout Central Asia. The suffix is also used more generally, as in Persian () "place of sand, desert", () "place of flowers, garden", () "graveyard, cemetery", and "Hindustân" () "land of the Indo people".


title: Land

text: The study of land and its history in general is called geography. Mineralogy is the study of minerals, and petrology is the study of rocks. Soil science is the study of soils, encompassing the sub-disciplines of pedology, which focuses on soil formation, and edaphology, which focuses on the relationship between soil and life.


title: Land

text: The earliest material found in the Solar System is dated to (billion years ago); therefore, the Earth itself must have been formed by accretion around this time. The formation and evolution of the Solar System bodies occurred in tandem with the Sun. In theory, a solar nebula partitions a volume out of a molecular cloud by gravitational collapse, which begins to spin and flatten into a circumstellar disc, out of which the planets then grow (in tandem with the star). A nebula contains gas, ice grains and dust (including primordial nuclides). In nebular theory, planetesimals commence forming as particulate matter accrues by cohesive clumping and then by gravity. The assembly of the primordial Earth proceeded for 10–. By , the primordial Earth had formed.


title: Land

text: Earth's atmosphere and oceans were formed by volcanic activity and outgassing that included water vapour. The origin of the world's oceans was condensation augmented by water and ice delivered by asteroids, proto-planets, and comets. In this model, atmospheric "greenhouse gases" kept the oceans from freezing while the newly forming Sun was only at 70% luminosity. By , the Earth's magnetic field was established, which helped prevent the atmosphere from being stripped away by the solar wind. The atmosphere and oceans of the Earth continuously shape the land by eroding and transporting solids on the surface.


title: Land

text: Earth's crust formed when molten outer layer of the planet Earth cooled to form a solid mass as the accumulated water vapour began to act in the atmosphere. Once land became capable of supporting life, biodiversity evolved over hundreds of million years, expanding continually except when punctuated by mass extinctions.


title: Land

text: The two models that explain land mass propose either a steady growth to the present-day forms or, more likely, a rapid growth early in Earth history followed by a long-term steady continental area. Continents are formed by plate tectonics, a process ultimately driven by the continuous loss of heat from the Earth's interior. On time scales lasting hundreds of millions of years, the supercontinents have formed and broken apart three times. Roughly (million years ago), one of the earliest known supercontinents, Rodinia, began to break apart. The continents later recombined to form Pannotia, 600–, then finally Pangaea, which also broke apart .


title: Land

text: A continuous area of land surrounded by an ocean is called a landmass. Although it is most often written as one word to distinguish it from the usage "land mass"—the measure of land area—it may also be written as two words. There are four major continuous landmasses on Earth: Afro-Eurasia, the Americas, Antarctica, and Australia, which are then divided into continents. Up to seven geographical regions are commonly regarded as continents. Ordered from largest in area to smallest, these continents are Asia, Africa, North America, South America, Antarctica, Europe, and Australia.


title: Land

text: Terrain refers to an area of land and its features, or landforms. It affects travel, mapmaking, ecosystems, and surface water flow and distribution. Over a large area, it can influence climate and weather patterns. The terrain of a region largely determines its suitability for human settlement: flatter alluvial plains tend to have better farming soils than steeper, rockier uplands.


title: Land

text: Elevation is defined as the vertical distance between an object and sea level, while altitude is defined as the vertical distance from an object to Earth's surface. The elevation of Earth's land surface varies from the low point of −418 m (−1,371 ft) at the Dead Sea, to a maximum altitude of 8,848 m (29,029 ft) at the top of Mount Everest. The mean height of land above sea level is about 797 m (2,615 ft), with 98.9% of dry land situated above sea level.


title: Land

text: Relief refers to the difference in elevation within a landscape; for example, flat terrain would have "low relief", while terrain with a large elevation difference between the highest and lowest points would be deemed "high relief". Most land has relatively low relief. The change in elevation between two points of the terrain is called a slope or gradient. A topographic map is a form of terrain cartography which depicts terrain in terms of its elevation, slope, and the orientation of its landforms. It has prominent contour lines, which connect points of similar elevation, while perpendicular slope lines point in the direction of the steepest slope. Hypsometric tints are colors placed between contour lines to indicate elevation relative to sea level.


title: Land

text: A difference between uplands, or highlands, and lowlands is drawn in several earth science fields. In river ecology, "upland" rivers are fast-moving and colder than "lowland" rivers, encouraging different species of fish and other aquatic wildlife to live in these habitats. For example, nutrients are more present in slow-moving lowland rivers, encouraging different species of macrophytes to grow there. The term "upland" is also used in wetland ecology, where "upland" plants indicate an area that is not a wetland. In addition, the term moorland refers to upland shrubland biomes with acidic soils, while heathlands are lowland shrublands with acidic soils.


title: Land

text: Geomorphology refers to the study of the natural processes that shape land's surface, creating landforms. Erosion and tectonics, volcanic eruptions, flooding, weathering, glaciation, the growth of coral reefs, and meteorite impacts are among the processes that constantly reshape Earth's surface over geological time.


title: Land

text: Erosion transports one part of land to another via natural processes, such as wind, water, ice, and gravity. In contrast, weathering wears away rock and other solid land without transporting the land somewhere else. Natural erosional processes usually take a long time to cause noticeable changes in the landscape—for example, the Grand Canyon was created over the past 70 million years by the Colorado river, which scientists estimate continues to erode the canyon at a rate of 0.3 meters (1 foot) every 200 years. However, humans have caused erosion to be 10-40 times faster than normal, causing half the topsoil of the surface of Earth's land to be lost within the past 150 years.


title: Land

text: Plate tectonics refers to the theory that Earth's lithosphere is divided into "tectonic plates" that move over the mantle. This results in continental drift, with continents moving relative to each other. The scientist Alfred Wegener first hypothesized the theory of continental drift in 1912. More researchers gradually developed his idea throughout the 20th century into the widely accepted theory of plate tectonics of today.


title: Land

text: Several key characteristics define modern understanding of plate tectonics. The place where two tectonic plates meet is called a plate boundary, with different geological phenomena occurring across different kinds of boundaries. For example, at divergent plate boundaries, seafloor spreading is usually seen, in contrast with the subduction zones of convergent or transform plate boundaries.


title: Land

text: Earthquakes and volcanic activity are common in all types of boundaries. Volcanic activity refers to any rupture in Earth's surface where magma escapes, therefore becoming lava. The Ring of Fire, containing two-thirds of the world's volcanos, and over 70% of Earth's seismological activity, comprises plate boundaries surrounding the Pacific Ocean.


title: Land

text: Earth's land interacts with and influences its climate heavily, since the land's surface heats up and cools down faster than air or water. Latitude, elevation, topography, reflectivity, and land use all have varying effects on climate. The latitude of the land will influence how much solar radiation reaches its surface. High latitudes receive less solar radiation than low latitudes. The land's topography is important in creating and transforming airflow and precipitation. Large landforms, such as mountain ranges, can divert wind energy and make air parcels less dense and therefore able to hold less heat. As air rises, this cooling effect causes condensation and precipitation.


title: Land

text: Different types of land cover will influence the land's albedo, a measure of the solar radiation that is reflected, rather than absorbed and transferred to Earth. Vegetation has a relatively low albedo, meaning that vegetated surfaces are good absorbers of the sun's energy. Forests have an albedo of 10–15 percent while grasslands have an albedo of 15–20 percent. In comparison, sandy deserts have an albedo of 25–40 percent.


title: Land

text: Land use by humans also plays a role in the regional and global climate. Densely populated cities are warmer and create urban heat islands that have effects on the precipitation, cloud cover, and temperature of the region.


title: Land

text: A landform is a natural or manmade land feature. Landforms together make up a given terrain, and their arrangement in the landscape is known as topography. Landforms include hills, mountains, canyons, and valleys, as well as shoreline features such as bays and peninsulas.


title: Land

text: The area where land meets the ocean or another large body of water like a lake is called a coast or, alternatively, a "coastline". When land is in contact with bodies of water, the land is likely weathered and eroded. The weathering of a coastline may be impacted by the tides, caused by changes in gravitational forces on larger bodies of water. The precise length of Earth's coastline is indeterminable due to the coastline paradox.


title: Land

text: Coasts are important zones in natural ecosystems, often home to a wide range of biodiversity. On land, they harbour important ecosystems such as freshwater or estuarine wetlands, which are important for bird populations and other terrestrial animals. In wave-protected areas they harbor saltmarshes, mangroves or seagrasses, all of which can provide nursery habitat for finfish, shellfish, and other aquatic species. Rocky shores are usually found along exposed coasts and provide habitat for a wide range of sessile animals (e.g. mussels, starfish, barnacles) and various kinds of seaweeds. Along tropical coasts with clear, nutrient-poor water, coral reefs can often be found between depths of 1–50 meters (3.3–164.0 feet).


title: Land

text: According to a United Nations atlas, 44% of all people live within 150 km (93 mi) of the sea. Because of their importance in society and high concentration of population, the coast is important for major parts of the global food and economic system, and they provide many ecosystem services to humankind. For example, important human activities happen in port cities. Coastal fisheries (commercial, recreational, and subsistence) and aquaculture are major economic activities and create jobs, livelihoods, and protein for the majority of coastal human populations. Other coastal spaces like beaches and seaside resorts generate large revenues through tourism. Marine coastal ecosystems can also provide protection against sea level rise and tsunamis. In many countries, mangroves are the primary source of wood for fuel (e.g. charcoal) and building material. Coastal ecosystems like mangroves and seagrasses have a much higher capacity for carbon sequestration than many terrestrial ecosystems, and as such can play a critical role in the near future to help mitigate climate change effects by uptake of atmospheric anthropogenic carbon dioxide.


title: Land

text: An isolated land habitat surrounded by water is an island, while a chain of islands is an archipelago. The smaller the island, the larger the percentage of its land area will be adjacent to the water, and subsequently will be coast or beach. Islands can be formed by a variety of processes. The Hawaiian islands, for example, even though they are not near a plate boundary, formed from isolated volcanic activity. Atolls are ring-shaped islands made of coral, created when subsidence causes an island to sink beneath the ocean surface and leaves a ring of reefs around it.


title: Land

text: Any highly elevated part of Earth's crust may be called a mountain. Mountains are formed from a number of orogeny events; for example, where a plate at a convergent plate boundary pushes one plate above the other, mountains could be formed by either collisional events, such that Earth's crust is pushed upwards, or subductional events, where Earth's crust is pushed into the mantle, causing the crust to melt into diapirs that bubble back to the surface and re-mineralize as dome mountains. The line of mountains in a mountain range are usually formed from the same orogeny events, and their study is important to historical geology.


title: Land

text: A plateau, also called a high plain or a tableland, is an area of a highland consisting of flat terrain that is raised sharply above the surrounding area on at least one side, creating steep cliffs or escarpments. Both volcanic activity such as the upwelling of magma and extrusion of lava, or erosion of mountains caused from water, glaciers, or aeolian processes, can create plateaus. Plateaus are classified according to their surrounding environment as intermontane, piedmont, or continental. A few plateaus may have a small flat top while others have wide ones -- buttes are smaller ones with less extrusive and more intrusive igneous rock, while plateaus or highlands are the widest, and mesas are a general-sized plateau with horizontal bedrock strata.


title: Land

text: Wide, flat areas of land are called plains, which cover more than one-third of Earth's land area. When they occur as lowered areas between mountains, they can create valleys, canyons, gorges, and ravines. A plateau can be thought of as an elevated plain. Plains are known to have fertile soils and be important for agriculture due to their flatness supporting grasses suitable for livestock and facilitating the harvest of crops. Floodplains provided agricultural land for the some of the earliest civilizations. Erosion is often a main driver for the creation of plains and valleys, with rift valleys being a noticeable exception. Fjords are glacial valleys that can be thousands of meters deep, opening out to the sea.


title: Land

text: Any natural void in the ground which can be entered by a human can be considered a cave. They have been important to humans as a place of shelter since the dawn of humanity.


title: Land

text: Craters are depressions in the ground, but unlike caves, they do not provide shelter or extend underground. They are many kinds of craters, such as impact craters, volcanic calderas, and isostatic depressions, such as the one in Greenland. Karst processes can create both solution caves, the most frequent cave type, and craters, as seen in karst sinkholes.


title: Land

text: The pedosphere is the outermost layer of Earth's continental surface and is composed of soil and subject to soil formation processes. Below it, the lithosphere encompasses both Earth's crust and the uppermost layer of the mantle. The lithosphere rests, or "floats", on top of the mantle below it via isostasy. Above the solid ground, the troposphere and humans' use of land can be considered layers of the land.


title: Land

text: Land cover refers to the material physically present on the land surface, for example, woody crops, herbaceous crops, barren land, and shrub-covered areas. Artificial surfaces (including cities) account for about a third of a percent of all land. Land use refers to human allocation of land for various purposes, including farming, ranching, and recreation (e.g. national parks); worldwide, there are an estimated of cropland, and of pastureland.


title: Land

text: Land cover change detection using remote sensing and geospatial data provides baseline information for assessing the climate change impacts on habitats and biodiversity, as well as natural resources, in the target areas. Land cover change detection and mapping is a key component of interdisciplinary land change science, which uses it to determine the consequences of land change on climate. Land change modeling is used to predict and analyze changes in land cover and use.


title: Land

text: Soil is a mixture of organic matter, minerals, gases, liquids, and organisms that together support life. Soil consists of a solid phase of minerals and organic matter (the soil matrix), as well as a porous phase that holds gases (the soil atmosphere) and water (the soil solution). Accordingly, soil is a three-state system of solids, liquids, and gases. Soil is a product of several factors: the influence of climate, relief (elevation, orientation, and slope of terrain), organisms, and the soil's parent materials (original minerals) interacting over time. It continually undergoes development by way of numerous physical, chemical and biological processes, which include weathering and erosion.


title: Land

text: Given its complexity and strong internal connectedness, soil ecologists regard soil as an ecosystem. Soil acts as an engineering medium, a habitat for soil organisms, a recycling system for nutrients and organic wastes, a regulator of water quality, a modifier of atmospheric composition, and a medium for plant growth, making it a critically important provider of ecosystem services. Since soil has a tremendous range of available niches and habitats, it contains a prominent part of the Earth's genetic diversity. A gram of soil can contain billions of organisms, belonging to thousands of species, mostly microbial and largely still unexplored.


title: Land

text: Soil is a major component of the Earth's ecosystem. The world's ecosystems are impacted in far-reaching ways by the processes carried out in the soil, with effects ranging from ozone depletion and global warming to rainforest destruction and water pollution. With respect to Earth's carbon cycle, soil acts as an important carbon reservoir, and it is potentially one of the most reactive to human disturbance and climate change. As the planet warms, it has been predicted that soils will add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere due to increased biological activity at higher temperatures, a positive feedback (amplification). This prediction has, however, been questioned on consideration of more recent knowledge on soil carbon turnover.


title: Land

text: Continental crust is the layer of igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic rocks that forms the geological continents and the areas of shallow seabed close to their shores, known as continental shelves. This layer is sometimes called "sial" because its bulk composition is richer in aluminium silicate and has a lower density compared to the oceanic crust, called "sima" which is richer in magnesium silicate. Changes in seismic wave velocities have shown that at a certain depth (the Conrad discontinuity), there is a reasonably sharp contrast between the more felsic upper continental crust and the lower continental crust, which is more mafic in character.


title: Land

text: The composition of land is not uniform across the Earth, varying between locations and between strata within the same location. The most prominent components of upper continental crust include silicon dioxide, aluminium oxide, and magnesium. The continental crust consists of lower density material such as the igneous rocks granite and andesite. Less common is basalt, a denser volcanic rock that is the primary constituent of the ocean floors. Sedimentary rock is formed from the accumulation of sediment that becomes buried and compacted together. Nearly 75% of the continental surfaces are covered by sedimentary rocks, although they form about 5% of the crust.


title: Land

text: The most abundant silicate minerals on Earth's surface include quartz, feldspars, amphibole, mica, pyroxene and olivine. Common carbonate minerals include calcite (found in limestone) and dolomite. The rock that makes up land is thicker than oceanic crust, and it is far more varied in terms of composition. About 31% of this continental crust is submerged in shallow water, forming continental shelves.


title: Land

text: Land provides many ecosystem services, such as mitigating climate change, regulating water supply through drainage basins and river systems, and supporting food production. Land resources are finite, which has led to regulations intended to safeguard these ecosystem services, and a set of practices called sustainable land management.


title: Land

text: A biome is an area "characterized by its vegetation, soil, climate, and wildlife." There are five major types of biomes on land: grasslands, forests, deserts, tundras, and freshwater. Other types of biomes include shrublands, wetlands, and polar ice caps. An ecosystem refers to the interaction between organisms within a particular environment, and a habitat refers to the environment where a given species or population of organisms lives. Biomes may span more than one continent, and contain a variety of ecosystems and habitats.


title: Land

text: Land plants evolved from green algae, and are called embryophytes. They include trees, shrubs, grass, moss, and flowers. Most plants are vascular plants, meaning that their tissues distribute water and minerals throughout the plant. Through photosynthesis, most plants nourish themselves from sunlight and water, breathing in carbon dioxide and breathing out oxygen. Between 20 and 50% of oxygen is produced by land vegetation.


title: Land

text: Unlike plants, terrestrial animals are not a monophyletic group—that is, a group including all terrestrial animals does not encompass all lineages from a common ancestor. This is because there are organisms, such as the whale, that evolved from terrestrial mammals back to an aquatic lifestyle. Many megafauna of the past, such as the dinosaurs, have become extinct due to extinction events, e.g. the Quaternary extinction event.


title: Land

text: Land is "deeply intertwined with human development." Humans depend on land for subsistence, and can develop strong symbolic attachments to it. Access to land can determine "survival and wealth," particularly in developing countries, giving rise to complex power relationships in production and consumption. Most of the world's philosophies and religions recognize a human duty of stewardship towards land and nature.


title: Land

text: Many humans see land as a source of "spirituality, inspiration, and beauty." Many also derive a sense of belonging from land, especially if it also belonged to their ancestors. Various religions teach about a connection between humans and the land (such as veneration of Bhumi, a personification of the Earth in Hinduism, and the obligation to protect land as hima in Islam), and in almost every Indigenous group there are etiological stories about the land they live on. For Indigenous peoples, connection to the land is an important part of their identity and culture, and some religious groups consider a particular area of land to be sacred, such as the Holy Land in the Abrahamic religions.


title: Land

text: Creation myths in many religions involve stories of the creation of the world by a supernatural deity or deities, including accounts wherein the land is separated from the oceans and the air. The Earth itself has often been personified as a deity, in particular a goddess. In many cultures, the mother goddess is also portrayed as a fertility deity. To the Aztecs, Earth was called "Tonantzin"—"our mother"; to the Incas, Earth was called "Pachamama"—"mother earth". The Chinese Earth goddess Hou Tu is similar to Gaia, the Greek goddess personifying the Earth. In Norse mythology, the Earth giantess Jörð was the mother of Thor and the daughter of Annar. Ancient Egyptian mythology is different from that of other cultures because Earth (Geb) is male and the sky (Nut) is female.


title: Land

text: Ancient Near Eastern cultures conceived of the world as a flat disk of land surrounded by ocean. The Pyramid Texts and Coffin Texts reveal that the ancient Egyptians believed Nun (the ocean) was a circular body surrounding "nbwt" (a term meaning "dry lands" or "islands"). The Hebrew Bible, drawing on other Near Eastern ideas, depicts the Earth as a flat disc floating on water, with another expanse of water above it. A similar model is found in the Homeric account of the 8th century BC in which "Okeanos, the personified body of water surrounding the circular surface of the Earth, is the begetter of all life and possibly of all gods."


title: Land

text: The spherical form of the Earth was suggested by early Greek philosophers, a belief espoused by Pythagoras. Contrary to popular belief, most educated people in the Middle Ages did not believe the Earth was flat: this misconception is often called the "Myth of the Flat Earth". As evidenced by thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas, the European belief in a spherical Earth was widespread by this point in time. Prior to circumnavigation of the planet and the introduction of space flight, belief in a spherical Earth was based on observations of the secondary effects of the Earth's shape and parallels drawn with the shape of other planets.


title: Land

text: Humans have commonly traveled for business, pleasure, discovery, and adventure, all made easier in recent human history as a result of technologies like cars, trains, planes, and ships. Land navigation is an aspect of travel and refers to progressing through unfamiliar terrain using navigational tools like maps with references to terrain, a compass, or satellite navigation. Navigation on land is often facilitated by reference to landmarks – enduring and recognizable natural or artificial features that stand out from their nearby environment and are often visible from long distances. Natural landmarks can be characteristic features, such as mountains or plateaus, with examples including Table Mountain in South Africa, Mount Ararat in Turkey, the Grand Canyon in the United States, Uluru in Australia, and Mount Fuji in Japan.


title: Land

text: Two major eras of exploration occurred in human history: one of divergence, and one of convergence. The former saw humans moving out of Africa, settling in new lands, and developing distinct cultures in relative isolation. Early explorers settled in Europe and Asia; 14,000 years ago, some crossed the Ice Age land bridge from Siberia to Alaska and moved southbound to settle in the Americas. For the most part, these cultures were ignorant of each other's existence. The second period, occurring over roughly the last 10,000 years, saw increased cross-cultural exchange through trade and exploration, marking a new era of cultural intermingling.


title: Land

text: Human trade has occurred since the prehistoric era. Peter Watson dates the history of long-distance commerce from c. 150,000 years ago. Major trade routes throughout history have existed on land, such as the Silk Road which linked East Asia with Europe and the Amber Road which was used to transfer amber from Northern Europe to the Mediterranean Sea. The Dark Ages led trade to collapse in the West, but it continued to flourish among the kingdoms of Africa, the Middle East, India, China, and Southeast Asia. During the Middle Ages, Central Asia was the economic centre of the world, and luxury goods were commonly traded in Europe. Physical money (either barter or precious metals) was dangerous to carry over a long distance. To address this, a burgeoning banking industry enabled the shift to movable wealth or capital, making it far easier and safer to trade across long distances. After the Age of Sail, international trade mostly occurred along sea routes, notably to prevent intermediary countries from being able to control trade routes and the flow of goods.


title: Land

text: In economics, "land" refers to a factor of production. It can be leased in exchange for rent, and use of its various raw material resources (trees, oil, metals).


title: Land

text: For more than 10,000 years, humans have engaged in activities on land such as hunting, foraging, controlled burning, land clearing, and agriculture. Beginning with the Neolithic Revolution and the spread of agriculture around the world, human land use has significantly altered terrestrial ecosystems, with an essentially global transformation of Earth's landscape by 3000 years ago. From around 1750, human land use has increased at an accelerating rate due to the Industrial Revolution, which created a greater demand for natural resources and caused rapid population growth.


title: Land

text: Agriculture includes both crop farming and animal husbandry. A third of Earth's land surface is used for agriculture, with estimated of cropland and of pastureland. This has had significant impacts on Earth's ecosystems. When land is cleared to make way for agriculture, native flora and fauna are replaced with newly introduced crops and livestock. Excessively high agricultural land use is driven by poor management practices (which lead to lower food yields, necessitating more land use), food demand, food waste, and diets high in meat.


title: Land

text: Urbanization has led to greater population growth in urban areas in the last century. Although urban areas make up less than 3 percent of Earth's land area, the global population shifted from a majority living in rural areas to a majority living in urban areas in 2007. People living in urban areas depend on food produced in rural areas outside of their cities, which creates greater demand for agriculture and drives land use change well beyond city boundaries. Urbanization also displaces agricultural land because it mainly takes place on the most fertile land. Urban expansion in peri-urban areas fragments agricultural and natural lands, forcing agriculture to move to less fertile land elsewhere. Because this land is less fertile, more land is needed for the same output, which increases the total agricultural land use.


title: Land

text: Another form of land use is mining, whereby minerals are extracted from the ground using a variety of methods. Evidence of mining activity dates back to around 3000 BCE in Ancient Egypt. Important minerals include iron ore, mined for use as a raw material, coal, mined for energy production, and gemstones, mined for use in jewellery and currency.