Drawing on research from eleven countries across four continents, the 16 chapters in the volume bring perspectives from various specialties in anthropology and human ecology, institutional analysis, historical and political ecology, geography, archaeology, and land change sciences. The four sections of the volume reflect complementary approaches to HEI: health and adaptation approaches, land change and landscape management approaches, institutional and political-ecology approaches, and historical and archaeological approaches.

Foreword by Elinor Ostrom.- Introduction.- Part I: Health and Adaptation Approaches.- 1. A Half-Century Portrait: Health Transition in the Xavante Indians from Central Brazil.- 2. Balancing People, Politics, and Resources in Rural Tibet.- 3. Human-Wildlife Contact and Emerging Infectious Diseases.- Part II: Land Change and Landscape Management Approaches.- 4. Change in Natural Resource Management: An Experiment with 'Participatory GIS'.- 5. Peopled Parks: Forest Change in India's Protected Landscapes.- 6. Public-Private Interactions in the Conservation of Private Forests in the United States.- 7. The Monitoring of Land-Cover Change and Management across Gradient Landscapes in Africa.- Part III: Institutional and Political Ecology Approaches.- 8. Between Cooperation and Conflict: The Implementation of Agro-Extractive Settlements in the Lower Amazonian Floodplain.- 9. Conservation of Natural Resources: Which Matters -Having a Regulation or the Size of the Penalty Imposed?- 10. Small-Scale Farmers and the Challenges of Environmental Conservation and Rural Development: Case Studies from the State of São Paulo and the Amazon Region.- 11. Institutional Evolution, Forest Conservation, and Rapid Change in Rural Honduras.- 12. Land-Use Institutions and Natural Resources in Fast-Growing Communities at the Urban-Rural Fringe.- Part IV: Historical and Archeological Approaches.- 13. Agroforestry in Tomé-Açu-An Alternative to Pasture in the Amazon.- 14. Changing Driving Forces, Imposed Tenure Regimes, and Tree-Cover Change on Village Landscapes in the West Mengo Region of Uganda, 1890 to 2002.- 15. Was Agriculture a Key Productive Activity in Precolonial Amazonia? The Stable Productive Basis for Social Equality in the Central Amazon.- Part V. Future Directions.- 16. Human-Environment Research: Past Trends, Current Challenges and Future Directions.- Index.