This book explores the issues of resource use and depletion as well as the topic of population growth and contraction. The key interest is the impact that developments in one part of the world have upon people's lifestyles and the forms of inequality inscribed in the connections between rich and poor countries. The study of wilderness and the notion of empty space are used to introduce questions of national resources, sustainability, and ecology. Sustainability
provides the framework for discussion of population change, mortality and fertility and the questions of energy resources and environmental degradation. The issue of whether or not there is a global problem of resources is addressed head on.

The book is the third in a series of five books which offers a comprehensive, broad-based introduction to human geography. The building blocks of a `geographical imagination' are presented through some of the principal forces that are shaping the world as it approaches the twentieth-first century. Each book develops different aspects of the geographical imagination, using a mixture of text and readings. The issues which are explored are at the forefront of global and economic change and are
used to teach what it is to think geographically. In so doing they trace the impact of shifts in cultural and political geography.