With over 80 percent of Americans now living in cities and suburbs, getting our communities right has never been more important, more complicated, or more fascinating. Longtime sustainability leader Kaid Benfield shares 25 enlightening and entertaining essays about the wondrous ecology of human settlement, and how to make it better for both people and the planet. People Habitat explores topics as diverse as “green” housing developments that are no such thing, the tricky matter of gentrifying inner cities, why people don’t walk much anymore, and the relationship between cities and religion. Written with intellect, insight, and from-the-heart candor, each real-world story in People Habitat will make you see our communities in a new light.

A leading anthropologist studies the science behind "feeling at home" to show us how home made us human Home is where the heart is. Security, comfort, even love, are all feelings that are centered on the humble abode. But what if there is more to the feeling of being at home? Neuroanthropologist John S. Allen believes that the human habitat is one of the most important products of human cognitive, technological, and cultural evolution over the past two million years. In Home, Allen argues that to "feel at home" is more than just an expression, but reflects a deep-seated cognitive basis for the human desire to have, use, and enjoy a place of one's own. Allen addresses the very basic question: How did a place to sleep become a home? Within human evolution, he ranks house and home as a signature development of our species, as it emerged alongside cooperative hunting, language, and other critical aspects of humanity. Many animals burrow, making permanent home bases, but primates, generally speaking, do not: most wander, making nests at night wherever they might find themselves. This is often in home territory, but it isn't quite home. Our hominid ancestors were wanderers, too -- so how did we, over the past several million years, find our way home? To tell that story Allen will take us through evolutionary anthropology, neuroscience, the study of emotion, and modern sociology. He examines the home from the inside (of our heads) out: homes are built with our brains as much as with our hands and tools. Allen argues that the thing that may have been most critical in our evolution is not the physical aspect of a home, but developing a feeling of defining, creating, and being in a home, whatever its physical form. The result was an environment, relatively secure against whatever horrors lurked outside, that enabled the expensive but creative human mind to reach its full flowering. Today, with the threat of homelessness, child foster-care, and foreclosure, this idea of having a home is more powerful than ever. In a clear and accessible writing style, Allen sheds light on the deep, cognitive sources of the pleasures of having a home, the evolution of those behaviors, and why the deep reasons why they matter. Home is the story about how humans evolved to create a space not only for shelter, but also for nurturing creativity, innovation, and culture -- and why "feeling at home" is a fundamental aspect of the human condition.

You are born in this world believing everything to be accurate, reliable, and unique, just as you learn in school, and then as you grow up, this world shows itself in its true meaning. Parents have secrets at home and politicians lie and cheat throughout the media, while these might be the first inconsistencies that you notice in your perfect world. The rich become richer not exactly through their true abilities, but through their lies and illegalities, and this might be the first injustice that you ever notice in this world. Authorities replace authorities endlessly only to do the same, this harms you throughout life while authorities never admit it, yet you can see it well, everybody knows it, and this is your true, actual environment. But can you pinpoint exactly what goes on in this world and what goes wrong in your environment? Because lies, inconsistencies, and illegalities are everywhere, and there is nothing significant enough offering you an accurate point of reference, an accurate perspective defining this altering environment, helping you understand this world as it is. Because the knowledge found at the base of your understanding of this world is missing, as it is erroneous, or it is misleading on purpose, since this is how authorities strive to offer it to you. This alters your reasoning now, and consequently, it alters your inner, outer, and social behavior. Coincidentally, your entire behavior is altered in this manner, determining you now to be part of these lies and illegalities yourself, directly or implicitly, determining you to create in this manner on your own this Consensual Matrix found all around, affecting and harming everybody, just as everybody’s altered behavior creates the same Consensual Matrix affecting you and the entire world. Because the rich and the politicians never force you in any manner, but they only expect and accept your behavior to fall in this exact consensual pattern, coincidentally having all favorable outcomes turn in their favor. Because this enforced consensual environment that you create through your consensual behavior might be unfavorable and harmful to you and to those around, but it is certainly profitable for those controlling this world. Because you must consider all environments when you study this world, as your natural, consensual, constructed, social, inner, cognitive, informational, higher, and spiritual human environments, forming your actual world. This defines your surroundings, it patterns your behavior and it gives meanings to your existence, it gives you a place and role in society and it challenges your existence, it constrains you to act and develop, to help and harm those around, it is there when you are born, and it always kills you in the end. And if you fail understanding your real and consensual environments for what they truly are, you end up missing a significant part of your existence, of what life truly represents to you and to everyone around, of what you should have always experienced, and of what you should have always been. Throughout this book, we study the human environment in its entirety, natural, social, cognitive, spiritual, and consensual, since only through an accurate research of your entire environment you may find the accurate knowledge helping you structure and define your meaning and place in life and in this world.

People and the Environment: Approaches for Linking Household and Community Surveys to Remote Sensing and GIS appeals to a wide range of natural, social, and spatial scientists with interests in conducting population and environment research and thereby characterizing (a) land use and land cover dynamics through remote sensing, (b) demographic and socio-economic variables through household and community surveys, and (c) local site and situation through resource endowments, geographical accessibility, and connections of people to place through GIS. Case studies are used to examine theories and practices useful in linking people and the environment. We also describe land use and land cover dynamics and the associated social, biophysical, and geographical drivers of change articulated through human-environment interactions. People and the Environment: Approaches for Linking Household and Community Surveys to Remote Sensing and GIS addresses a need for a comprehensive and rigorous treatment of linking across thematic domains (e.g., social, biophysical, and geographical) and across space and time scales for research and study within the context of human-environment interactions. The human dimensions research community, LULCC program, and human and landscape ecology communities are collectively viewing the landscape within a spatially-explicit perspective, where people are viewed as agents of landscape change that shape and are shaped by the landscape, and where landscape form and function are assessed within a space-time context. Current researchers and those following this early group of integrative scientists face challenges in conducting this type of research, but the potential rewards for insight are substantial.

People and the Environment: Approaches for Linking Household and Community Surveys to Remote Sensing and GIS appeals to a wide range of natural, social, and spatial scientists with interests in conducting population and environment research and thereby characterizing (a) land use and land cover dynamics through remote sensing, (b) demographic and socio-economic variables through household and community surveys, and (c) local site and situation through resource endowments, geographical accessibility, and connections of people to place through GIS. Case studies are used to examine theories and practices useful in linking people and the environment. We also describe land use and land cover dynamics and the associated social, biophysical, and geographical drivers of change articulated through human-environment interactions.

People and Physical Environment, A Global Approach provides an introduction to the main areas of environmental concern for geographers, environmental scientists and planners at the beginning of the twenty-first century. These include: Pollution of the atmosphere and its impact on our climate; The exploitation of the oceans; Management and supply of fresh water; Degradation of the land, and Biodiversity, and the need to maintain genetic diversity. The book argues that our knowledge and understanding of the environment is now so great that we can predict with considerable accuracy where the skills of science and technology need to be focussed in order to prevent severe environmental damage from occurring. Achieving successful management of the environment has become dependent upon active participation of a society prepared to pay for a high quality of life and the willingness of our elected politicians to legislate and enforce the very highest standards of environmental management. This book will be essential reading for students of geography, environmental studies/science and land use planners and will also contribute valuable information for climatology, biogeography, hydrology, land economy and forestry students.