Soil erosion in developing countries: A politicoeconomic explanation

Soil erosion is accelerating in developing countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. It has threatened the livelihood of millions of peasants, for agriculture is their economic mainstay. A probe into the forces causing erosion reveals that the elite’s resolve to accumulate ever more wealth and to maintain, consolidate, or expand their sociopolitical power and the necessity of the poor to fulfill their requirements of food, fuelwood, and fodder are the two major factors accelerating soil erosion. Unless the vast masses of poor people are integrated into the national mainstream through the implementation of equitable and redistributive development policies, it is impossible to control the accelerating rate of soil erosion and thus to achieve the objective of sustainable development. In this article, the phenomenon “soil erosion” is studied with the sol e focus on causation through anthropogenic factors.     

Salt enrichment of municipal sewage: New prevention approaches in Israel

Wastewater irrigation is an environmentally sound wastewater disposal practice, but sewage is more saline than the supplied fresh water and the salts are recycled together with the water. Salts have negative environmental effects on crops, soils, and groundwater. There are no inexpensive ways to remove the salts once they enter sewage, and the prevention of sewage salt enrichment is the most immediately available solution. The body of initiatives presently structured by the Ministry of the Environment of Israel are herein described, with the aim to contribute to the search for a long-term solution of salinity problems in arid countries. The new initiatives are based on: (1) search for new technologies to reduce salt consumption and discharge into sewage; (2) different technologies to cope with different situations; (3) raising the awareness of the public and industry on the environmental implications of salinity pollution; and (4) an elastic legal approach expressed through new state-of-the-art regulations. The main contributor to the salinity of sewage in Israel is the watersoftening process followed by the meat koshering process. Some of the adopted technical solutions are: the discharge of the brine into the sea, the substitution of sodium by potassium salts in the ion-exchangers, the construction of centralized systems for the supply of soft water in industrial areas, the precipitation of Ca and Mg in the effluents from ion-exchangers and recycling of the NaCI solution, a reduction of the discharge of salts by the meat koshering process, and new membrane technology for salt recovery.     

An Expert System for Waste Management

Management of hazardous waste is an increasing problem for both the companies that generate the waste and for the communities that eventually experience the consequences of the management decisions. Thus, both social and political aspects must be considered when solving these problems. It is thus important that waste management technologies are evaluated by a panel of experts with various backgrounds. The methodology for developing an expert system for waste treatment technology evaluation was discussed. An expert system was developed to select the “best” waste treatment alternatives. This expert system includes two different knowledge bases: one for the economic and technical parts of the problem and another for the social and political aspects. This expert system was developed on an IBM personal computer using Turbo Prolog™. The pulp and paper industry was selected as an example problem for developing this expert system, which system was tested using two example waste streams from the pulp and paper industry. The results agree with the current treatment facilities the companies are using.     

USING A GIS FOR ESTIMATING INPUT PARAMETERS IN URBAN STORMWATER QUALITY MODELING1

ABSTRACT: Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are being used increasingly as a method of preparing, analyzing, and displaying data for watershed analysis and modeling. Although GIS technology is a powerful tool for integrating and analyzing watershed characteristics, the initial preparation of the necessary database is often a time consuming and costly endeavor. This demonstration project assesses the viability of creating a cost-effective spatial database for urban stormwater modeling from existing digital and hard-copy data sources. The GIS was used to provide input parameters to the Source Loading and Management Model (SLANM), an empirical urban stormwater quality model. Land use characteristics, drainage boundaries, and soils information were geocoded and referenced to a base data layer consisting of transportation features. GIS overlay and data manipulation capabilities were utilized to preprocess the input data for the model. Model output was analyzed through postprocessing by GIS, and results were compared to a similar recent modeling study of the same watershed. The project, undertaken for a small urban watershed located in Plymouth, Minnesota, successfully demonstrates that the use of GIS in stormwater management can allow even small communities to reap the benefits of stormwater quality modeling.     

Managing resources and resolving conflicts: national parks and local people

One of the major management problems in protected areas of developing nations is the ever more intensifying land use disputes with local, often native, people. The customary rights oflocal people over natural resources, if curtailed by the establishment of national parks, and their disregard by decision-makers, have given rise to open conflicts, thus jeopardizing conservation goals. These conflicts have tremendous impact on the management of natural resources, not only within the park ecosystem but also in its surroundings. To attain the interdependent goals of conservation and sustainable development, such disputes must be promptly and consensually settled. This paper briefly discusses the paradigm of national park establishment and its impact on local livelihood. It then highlights major sources of conflict which have occurred in national parks in developing countries. Some theoretical approaches to conflict resolution as relevant to national parks are summarized, and several strategies, as employed in particular situations, are discussed. It is concluded that an in-depth understanding of human ecology beyond the boundaries of parks and the conceptualization of strategies to resolve the innate problems are imperative. The integration of several strategies is deemed essential in order to address issues comprehensively and on a larger scale.