ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the discussion of the environmental monitoring and training needed to promote interdisciplinary perspectives on environmental change. Societal concern regarding human impacts on natural resources tends to be concentrated at two main scales: that of the global commons and the scale of major ecosystems such as the topical rainforest. Gainers and losers in environmental change frequently are spatially discontinuous, thus resulting in a variety of unassessed costs. Disruption of the traditional grazing regime and an export of environmental costs onto adjacent rangeland went uncalculated in a project economy that appeared gloomy enough without conjuring up additional negative information. Assessment by geographers of the human impacts on resources has been based on an interactive people-environment model. Environmental changes due to human activity are seldom wanton acts of needless destruction. Major environmental changes have followed from each type of initiative, and many of these changes have been counterintuitive in nature.
