The Challenges of Managing Rural Environmental Change

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The Challenges of Managing Rural Environmental Change

Rural environments are modified by changes in economic activity. Most

rural land use is a result of farming, particularly in LEDC, where the

country is more primary based income.

Land use in rural areas is being exploited in many areas such as:

· Mining

· Quarrying

· Water supply

· Forestry

· Military activity

· Tourism

· Transport

· New settlements

Changes in farming have also affected rural environments, in a variety

of different places. They have altered what the landscape looks like.

Because of farming becoming uneconomic, many farmers have been forced

to leave their land. People such as recreation or forestry later use

the land. They also affect it and alter how it looks.

Examples of this happening are like in the Lake District or the

highlands of Scotland.

There are key areas where farming is creating problems for the rural

landscape. Such as, GM crops, hedgerow loss, eutrophication,

deforestation, salinisation and stubble burning.

These aspects are all affecting the way that the rural environment is

developing. And they are all of a bad aspect, it is important that

these points are focused on before the rural landscape is ruined.

Because of higher demand for food production in farms, the farmers

have turned to machinery instead of people; this resulted in a huge

drop in people employed in agriculture. Over the last 4 years the

amount of people evolved has fallen by 550, 000. This is in

replacement of manual labour. The machines were introduced into the

farming industry because they allow for much faster spread of

fertilizers and pesticides over large areas of land.

These machines have usually only been specialized to one crop. So

therefore, only one crop is made, increasing monocultures. The reason

farmers only make one type of crop is because of the vast amounts of

their money have been put into the machines which are specialized to

only one crop.

The problem with these new machines was that they needed large areas

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