Demographic Change in Australia's Rural Landscapes: Implications for Society and the Environment edited by Gary W Luck, Digby Race and Rosemary Black

The distribution and re-distribution of people across the landscape has significant implications for ecological, economic and social dynamics.

The movement of people to urban centres (mostly from rural landscapes, especially in the developing world) is a major global phenomenon. This can result in the de-population of rural landscapes. Conversely, population growth and a changing demographic profile have been identified for particular rural landscapes with notable examples from North America, Europe and Australia.

Yet we know little of the factors that drive demographic changes in rural landscapes and even less about the implications of these changes.

This book examines broad and local-scale patterns of demographic change in rural landscapes and identifies some of the drivers of these changes using Australian case studies or comparisons between Australian and international contexts and outlines the implications of changes for society and the environment.

This book makes a valuable contribution to the literature because it adopts an integrated and interdisciplinary approach by explicitly linking demographic change with environmental, land-use, social and economic factors. This integrated approach was achieved by encouraging interaction among authors writing on similar topics to ensure coherency and complementarity among chapters, and cross-pollination of ideas and perspectives. (publisher blurb)