Impacts of Local Land-Use on the Global Ecological Crisis

Dear Colleagues,

We would like to invite you to submit papers for a Special Issue of the open access journal Land entitled “Impacts of Local Land-Use on the Global Ecological Crisis”.

The separation of ecology from land use is driven by external forces, such as corporate economics, financial markets, and global approaches to economic efficiency. These have led to considerable demonstrable declines in environmental quality. This detachment has generated significant challenges for long-term sustainability. These challenges include the large-scale degradation of ecological systems and the need for widespread restoration. Indeed, from urban centres to rural landscapes, the challenges for restoring ecological systems have grown enormously in recent decades. The processes associated with the underlying “cultural severance” occur at different scales, from individuals (micro-) and communities (meso-) to international (macro-) economies. Cultural severance is the breakdown of traditional and customary land uses associated with rural depopulation, globalization, and the replacement of local community-driven resource use by national and international capital-based or politically driven intensive exploitation. The latter may be intensive monoculture farming, farmland afforestation, or infrastructural and residential development—these are examples of land use decoupled from local ecology. Much of this change has occurred in the last two centuries, although the progression of this process has increased exponentially in recent decades. The long-term impacts on ecological systems at every scale are now a global challenge.

Russia’s war on Ukraine is undercutting highly globalized systems of food chains and networks of energy and fertilizer supply. The looming global crisis may become a bitter reality-check for the world’s globalized approach to land use and centralized conservation policies. Anxiety about food production and provision of economic staples may soon replace previous concerns of merely satisfying comfort and luxury. This demands serious debate about the rationality and feasibility of present global environmental ambitions. Will we still be ready to pursue the ambitious goals of climate and conservation policies developed in an era of optimistic belief in global concerted actions and programmes? Can mass tree planting outside existing forests still be used as a “flagship” tool for improving carbon sequestration? Furthermore, can we afford to sacrifice productive farmland for large “rewilding” projects?

In the context of the modern commodification of nature, in contrast to traditional land uses, land and landscapes have been exploited as ecologically and culturally “neutral spaces”. On the other hand, successful traditional, self-sustaining husbandry (without external subsidies) depends entirely on the wise adaptation of the farming activity to the local ecological and environmental context, including soil, hydrology, and terrain. In other words, traditional agriculture is directly dependent on local ecology. Such a dependence requires a continuous learning of the land and from the consequences of the interactions between man and the environment. This is the way of development of the “traditional ecological knowledge” to harness the landscape's ecological potential to rural economies. However, most of the modern conventional agriculture has moved from traditional knowledge to a dependence on the technological inputs of fertilizers, machinery, cheap petrochemical energy, and others, undermining its resilience in the times of global crisis.

With local community controls over ecological systems weakened or lost, and overtaken by top-down centralized mechanisms, the land’s ecological performance deteriorates. Therefore, it seems that economic and social initiatives to solve major global environmental challenges may be ineffective or counterproductive, unless approaches to development and land use are refocused. Simultaneously, failing globalized food production and supply systems imply a need for the revival of local land governance and the reconnection of local economies with local ecologies. Any initiatives of global countermeasures in responses to the present economic and political crises should be considered temporary emergency measures. These should not lead to ever-more globalised approaches to land stewardship and use.

We seek contributions representing a wide spectrum of studies documenting, firstly, the impacts of globalization on biocultural systems and, secondly, the benefits of ecological systems to human interests. The contributions should help to evidence the importance of local land use integration through ecological patterns and dynamics, both past and present. The research paradigms may be addressed through 1) examples of surviving, local, self-reliant, rural economies; 2) documented studies of ecological decline caused by cultural severance; and 3) transformations aimed to restore connectivity in economic land uses in the eco-cultural context. Documented examples of good practices are especially welcome, as are case studies of the early stages of environmental remediation and transformation.

This Special Issue will help to (1) identify factors responsible for the “cultural severance” of land use and evaluate its impacts on biocultural systems; (2) highlight the costs and risks associated with top-down “universal” policies and solutions to environmental problems; and (3) provide examples and concepts of sustainable and durable land use systems in harmony with local ecologies. The Special Issue will be of great interest and value to researchers, decision-makers, and educators across a wide range of fields, including farming, forestry, biology, ecology, conservation, planning, economy, sociology, and environmental history.

Dr. Andrzej Bobiec
Dr. Simay Kirca
Prof. Dr. Ian Rotherham
Prof. Dr. Peter Bridgewater
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Land is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.