Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Venetian
occupation
Turkish
occupation
600
Neolithic
Minoan civilization
500
400
300
200
100
0
-6000
-5000
-4000
-3000
-2000
Date
-1000
0
1000
2000
Figure 8.1
Evolution of Crete's population through the centuries. Reproduced from Lyrintzis
and Papanastasis (1995), with permission
in exchange. Historically, the latter development occurred in the eighteenth and
especially in the nineteenth century, when modern technology helped to improve
transport from mountains to markets in the lowlands leading to massive deforesta-
tion (McNeill, 1992). A case study is the destruction of the Taurus mountain forests
at the end of the nineteenth century in order to produce construction materials for
the Suez Canal (Regato and Salman, 2008).
Technology is another economic factor that forces land use changes. In the past,
farming with the Hesiod's plough or cutting timber with an axe or moving grazing
animals on foot did not have a great impact on mountain natural resources. With
mechanization after the Second World War, such as the introduction of the tractor
for farming, the chainsaw for logging and vehicles for transporting animals from
the lowlands to uplands and vice versa, the impact on natural resources was much
stronger and more widespread. In Greece, a dense network of access roads has been
built in several mountain rangelands in the last few decades in order to facilitate
the movement of shepherds and their pick-up vehicles from villages to the livestock
farms (Papanastasis, 2004). Such a network has had a considerable impact on the
