The Geographers

Some common reasons of deforestation are: • To make more land available for housing and urbanisation • To harvest timber to create commercial items such as paper, furniture and homes  • To create ingredients that are highly prizes consumer items, such as the oil from palm trees • To create room for cattle ranching  Common methods of deforestation are burning trees and clear cutting. These tactics leave the land completely barren and are controversial practices.  Clear cutting is when large swaths of land are cut down all at once. A forestry expert quoted by the Natural Resources Defence Council describes clear cutting as "an ecological trauma that has no precedent in nature except for a major volcanic eruption." Burning can be done quickly, in vast swaths of land, or more slowly with the slash-and-burn technique. Slash and burn agriculture entails cutting down a patch of trees, burning them and growing crops on the land. The ash from the burned tree

INTRODUCTION  Urbanisation is a process, rather than a product by which a people or a group of people, instead of living in predominantly dispersed agricultural village, start living in towns and cities dominated by industrial and service functions. It involves multiplication of urban places or increase in the size of existing cities. Sociologists look at it, as a process as well as instrument of modernisation and social change – a break from traditional past. Geographers look at urbanisation as a process by which human beings and their activities congregate spatially to give rise to towns and cities of various sizes. Economists lay emphasis on urbanisation as an engine of economic growth.         Urbanisation is the process under which population migrates from rural areas to towns and cities which are the major commercial and industrial centres in the economy. Thus urbanisation can be defined as a process by which man transforms his agriculture based rural habitat in to an ess