On July 17, 2003, the National Bureau of Economic Research announced that the United States economy had troughed in November 2001 following the peak in March 2001. This makes the 2001 recession one of the shortest in U.S. history being only eight months in length. Whereas business cycles are defined in terms of the overall economies the authors of this paper investigate whether this national re...

Many cities in arid regions with limited renewable surface or ground water supplies will need to consider reusing treated municipal wastewater for long-term sustainability. On the U.S. Mexican border, a lowtech treatment train composed of aerated lagoons, constructed treatment wetlands, and a soil aquifer treatment system was evaluated as a method to treat and store wastewater for later use. Li...

Desertification is a global problem, costly to national economies and human societies. Restoration of biological soil crusts (BSCs) may have an important role to play in the reversal of desertification due to their ability to decrease erosion and enhance soil fertility. To determine if there is evidence that lower fertility may hinder BSC recolonization, we investigated the hypothesis that BSC ...

Introduction The ability to forecast the onset, duration and severity of droughts, floods, and disease outbreaks with reasonable accuracy, especially in terms of their prospective human welfare effects, is critical to the design of timely and cost-effective early warnings and emergency response systems that can minimize the suffering of populations adversely affected by such relatively slow-ons...

The Phoenix metropolitan area (Arizona, USA) provides an excellent case study for examining the sustainability of a rapidly growing urban ecosystem in an arid region, having grown six-fold in population in 50 years (to 3 million in 2000). The example is important, because the world’s urban population will nearly double in 30 years, and most of this growth will occur in warm, arid regions. Urban...