On May 2, 2008 the cyclone Nargis crashed into Myanmar, killing an estimated 78,000 people and inundating countless acres of land. A week later, an earthquake measuring 7.9 on the Richter scale struck Wenchuan County in southwest China’s Sichuan Province. These two events brought the world’s attention to South and Central Asia for a brief moment, shinning for an instant the world’s attention on the plight of the indigenous peoples of this area. Although the media’s focus on the condition more...

The environment forms the basis of all global social and economic systems, and the substrate for all development activities. This paper reviews the current state of the global environment. Whilst debates about the limits to growth continue, several inter-related indicators suggest that limits do exist, and are being dangerously exceeded. While all of earth’s inhabitants depend on the environment for survival, poor people often depend very directly on the natural resource base for their livelih more...