Disclaimer:
These notes are my personal notes. The course instructor or TAs have
no responsibility for the contents or any discrepancies between the materials presented
in the classroom and these notes. You cannot use or refer to these notes to
support or defend your answers on your exams. I suggest you use these notes to
complement your own notes, and not to solely rely on. I would appreciate your
feedback on any part of these notes that I may be misunderstanding.
Ø Make sure you read at least Olsen (Chap
21) and Brown (Chap 22) of Maximum Power.
Human-dominated
Tropical Ecosystems (section 3)
·
A city in dry
tropics, Bolivia: Lots of people. There
are more people in Mexico City than in entire Bolivia. How can be such a
concentration of people? Ecological foot prints – what’s the area of the world
that supports the cities? – Probably larger than you seen in the background. People take far more room than the physical or
cultural space they occupy in their dwellings in terms of land required for
production of food, fuels, fiber, and assimilation of (?). What the tropics is in
large part about is crowding, very intense industrialization, and pollution.
People in higher mountains of Bolivia are moving down into the Amazon as part
of government program because the soil is gone. They are practicing shifting
cultivation in Bolivian Amazon.
·
Lake
Titicaca: High elevation, relatively dry tropics in Bolivia.
·
Bolivia: soil
is completely destroyed, especially in south. Used to be covered with trees in 1500s.
Spaniard discovered gold and silver and cut down the forest. Spaniards put cows
on this land.
·
Malaysia: Most of tropics are poor. Kualarunpur is a well-developed
city. What’s the secret? – gas and oil. Anna Calenina theory “Good marriages
are all alike. Bad marriages are each wrong in a wrong way. Good economy
requires resources, not too many people, and a government that works. Malaysia has
resources.
·
Malaysia: enormous
investments in public housing. The government is relatively benevolent. The
government may not be corrupted as seen in many tropical countries. So the government
can invest in the people.
·
Malaysia is
also rich because they have chopped down their original Dipterocarp natural forest
and made a very wise investment in oil pump.
·
Rivers tend
to be silty.
·
Rubber tree
plantation.
·
A shopping mall
in Malaysia: inside is a lake, which was a tin mine, and are pontoon boats
inside to move between shops.
Olsen’s paper about shrimp mariculture in Ecuador.
Is
shrimp farming good or bad? Economically good? Comparative advantage. David
Ricardo – a classical economist. Labor invested is what generates value. Comparative
advantage says each region should specialize whatever produces. The opposite is
self-sufficiency. According to Comparative Advantage, NYC gets its milk from
Wisconsin, not upstate NY because whatever Wisconsin has, soil, climatically,
ability to make milk cheap.
What’s
the obvious cost of shrimp farming?
(Discussion
will be continued on next Tuesday)
Costa Rica
·
Genesis II:
South Cortado(?), Costa Rica. Large quantity of water, wet thin soil, red thin
soil, high diversity.
·
(Graph) Yield
of crop (maize, rice, and wheat) vs. fertilizer use: Crop yield increases
following saturation curve as fertilizer use increases.
·
Landscape: Now
Costa Rica is mostly pastures, 2nd most agricultural, and then comes undisturbed
forest. Land area is about the size West Virginia. 3.5 million people. Can Costa
Rica sustain 3.5 mil. People? Can it sustain the people on interest rather than
capital, and at what standard of living?
Sustainability is tougher to achieve than
many people would think. When people use the word “sustainability”, they use it
in different meanings.
1. For anthropologist and sociologist, it means sustainability of culture – indigenous, native American, Quakers, etc. Perspective of evil vast forces (?) against them.
2. To many people, sustainability of
economy. Sustainability of growth in the economy is of paramount importance.
3. Sustainability of the environment - 1)
resources that allow the other sustainability to happen, 2) protecting natural
areas.
·
For most
social scientist, the question, whether there are enough resources, is simply not
an agenda. Although economics is treated as social science is focused on humans,
cities are just as much an ecosystem. They are highly heterotrophic system, in
that primary production doesn’t necessarily take place there. We can view human-dominated
ecosystems as ecosystems we can use ecosystem science to address them.
·
Tropical
agriculture is increasingly industrial agriculture = fertilizer use. Fertilizer
is energy-intensive. With fertilizer, in general in tropics, you get 0.5 to 1
ton /ha/yr of yield of major grains.
- Fact #1: The curves indicate saturation, i.e., you add more fertilizer, you get less response per unit fertilizer.
- (Overhead) Fact #2: mostly in the
tropics, the yields are very low. The yields of tropical countries are normally
around 0.5 to 1.5 ton/ha/yr in almost all the tropics. In temperate region,
yields are much higher. One reason is the night is never less than 11 hours, Poor
soil may be another. These are average yields for tropical countries including those
rich countries that use a lot of fertilizer. These are two biophysical facts.
These are two biophysical fats about the Tropics.
·
(Graph)
Maize yield as a function of latitude.
·
(Graph)
Energy inputs vs. Site Quality of crop land: You can get high yields either from
a field of high site quality or by addition of energy (fertilizer). For
example, Citrus County, Florida is only sand. They get high yield by adding
fertilizer. Putting a lot of energy in fertilizer, irrigation, or pesticides,
you can get high yield. Most agriculture is some combination of moderate site
quality and moderate energy inputs. But over time, if started with a moderate
site quality, any time you farm, you degrade the soil – exposing to the rain, washed
it away, heavy tractors compacting the soil, etc. People put more and more
energy. Yield may go up. But people don’t see the site quality is degrading. So
as long as the energy is cheap, you can generate high energy. Agriculture
everywhere depends upon continual input of fossil fuel. To feed each of us one
calorie takes about 10 calories of oil, or for one day, 1 gallon of oil in
agro-industrial systems. Basic fact of Costa Rica is that population has grown
so much you cannot support them with non-industrial agriculture.
·
(Graph) Crude Oil and NPK fertilizer price: In
1973, the first oil price increase, price of fertilizer went to the roof. 2nd
oil price increase, fertilizer increased again, or remained high. Costa Rica
was more impacted by increase of oil price than in U.S. Costa Rica has become
more energy-dependent than the U.S. Many tropical countries, the principal economic
problem is that they haven’t recovered from the oil price increased in 1970s. They
went into debt to pay for the agro-input, then they haven’t gotten out the debt
since. Pope John Paul II is calling for canceling Third World debt.
·
Forest
burning in Brazil.
·
Mahogany
logging road.
·
Shifting
cultivation: Slashing.
·
Drying the
slash.
·
Burning.
·
Forest burned
down to ash.
·
Crop field:
good yield of corn, squash, beans (N-fixer). Only one or two years. Farmers
move to next place. Nutrients are gone.
·
Patch of
field in the forest: People cycle this cultivation method. These systems are
solar-powered. This is sustainable as long as population is low.
·
Shifting cultivation
in Costa Rica is rare.
·
Costa Rica’s
agricultural landscape: they replaced the function of shifting cultivation with
the addition of nutrients. This piece of tropical landscape is intimately
connected with industrial world.
·
Coffee
plantation: nutrients are gone, but they put fertilizer.
·
Crop field
on a steep slope: People took the best (= flat) land. Small farmers have only
steep mountainsides to cultivate.
·
Typical
small farmers: Costa Rica has better democracy than the U.S., less corruption, higher
standard of health care, people live longer, higher standard of literacy. But
they are facing these problems.
·
Diverse
landscape. Banana trees, coffee, pasture.
·
Human
habitation: Started with one family, generation over generation, the valley was
occupied with more people.
·
Pesticide
applicators
·
Fertilizers
·
German
agro-chemical firm: every types of -cides.
·
Typical pasture
on drier area: no cows. No production at all.
·
Monte
Verde: biological site.
·
New pasture
in Atlantic side.
·
Cotton field:
sprayed with DDT.
·
Edge of the
deforestation going up the mountain.
·
Model of
deforestation and simulation: modeled 1949, and simulated 1983.
·
Flow
diagram of the system: to produce a dollar worth of banana, you’ve got to pay300
dollars for agro-chemicals. Pollution there is horrible.
·
About a
quarter of the money they get from coffee and bananas go to the bank as
interest. The estimate of the amount to for the input that allows export to
occur.
Last modified:
April 23, 2001.
Any comments?
E-mail to akogawa@syr.edu