Shifting Ground

"In this book Peter Lindert evaluates environmental concerns about soil degradation in two very large countries - China and Indonesia - where anecdotal evidence has suggested serious problems. Lindert does what no scholar before him has done: using new archival data sets, he measures changes in soil productivity over long enough periods to reveal the influence of human activity.". "China and Indonesia are good test cases because of their geography and history. China has been at the center of global concerns about desertification and water erosion, which it may have accelerated with intense…