Environmental Factors and Human Activity 

Choose one of the following options – all submissions must conform to the guidelines laid out in the essay instruction sheet. Respond to all parts of the question and support your statements with well-reasoned arguments and references to appropriate resources.  

Pastoral Nomads have been put under significant pressure as a result of major social and environmental change over the last several hundred years.  

i) Make a case for the effects of each of these changes on the Pastoral Nomad lifestyle. 

ii) Given constraints in semi-arid environments, to what extent has the pastoralist lifestyle become unsustainable? 

iii) Under the current as well as historical state of desertification, what is a plausible future for semi-arid and arid ecosystems?  

Possible Sources -  

Chaibva, S. 1996. Drought, famine, and environmental degradation in Africa. Ambio 25:212-213. Davis, D. 2005. Indigenous knowledge and the desertification debate: problematising expert knowledge in North Africa. Geoforum 36(4). 

Dodd, J.L. 1994. Desertification and degradation in sub-Saharan Africa: the role of livestock. BioScience, 44: 28-34. 

Lesorogol, C. 2005. Privatizing pastoral lands: economic and normative outcomes in Kenya. World Development 33(11): 1959-1978. 

Weber, K.T. and S. Horst. 2011. Desertification and livestock grazing: The roles of sedentarization, mobility and rest. Pastoralism: Research, Policy and Practice 1:19.