All sources of renewable energy require large land areas within which to gather relatively large collectors in order to produce meaningful amounts of energy.

By contrast, vast tracts of disputed land are at stake in the resource rich Himalayan region.

Infrastructure has been damaged and disrupted over vast, and now inaccessible, territories.

Brazil has cleared huge areas of its jungle in order to produce the bio ethanol that impressed the Secretary General.

And so it takes a very large footprint on the land, a very large footprint in terms of materials, five to 10 times what you'd use for nuclear, and typically to get one gigawatt of electricity is on the order of 250 square miles of wind farm.

The wall impeded freedom of movement in the Palestinian territory, swallowed up large areas of the territory and separated East Jerusalem from the West Bank.

Thousands of deaths and injuries had been caused by those landmines and other explosive remnants of war, which had also prevented the reclamation and cultivation of extensive areas of Libyan land.

It also left vast areas of farmland untended, making them available for pasture and putting more meat on the market.

It had a beautiful facility, giant atrium, valet parking, a piano that played itself, a concierge that took you around from here to there.

The clean up operation was seen by the then Deputy Prime Minister Michael Heseltine as an investment that would add a large area of useful land to the crowded capital.

Farms are generally the only places where large enough areas are available to construct large wind generators and large solar power voltaic cells and cultivate large areas of suitable biomass for energy.

The rise in food prices is leading to a land grab, as powerful politicians sell foreign investors massive tracts of farmland, brushing aside the traditional land rights of poor smallholders.

Rural hydraulic projects, which ensure access to water for these populations over large stretches of land, can prove to be efficient conflict prevention tools.

While coastal China and its major metropolises evince tremendous wealth, large swaths of Western China remain mired in poverty.

Where there are extensive areas of public forest, the focus has been on setting concession rents and royalty rates to reflect market prices.

Weather patterns are changing the rains, in certain areas, have been failing and great swaths of the continent have been suffering unusually severe drought.

This would put vast, often densely populated, coastal areas in all parts of the world in danger of permanent flooding.

Drug barons and local warlords control increasingly large swaths of territory from Guinea on the Atlantic coast through Senegal to Mali, Niger, and beyond.

Many people seem to think that the US experience is not generalizable, because the US has so much land relative to its population.

Last but not least, diverting vast tracts of agricultural land into fuel production has contributed to a doubling of prices for wheat and other grains.

Being in virtual control of large swathes of Central American territory and being able to act with relative impunity are ultimately very good for business.

A group of dedicated young men and women walk very slowly out across vast areas of Africa, looking for small fragments of bone, fossil bone, that may be on the surface.

If there is intelligent life, some parts of land could be covered in cities.

While there is only so much land in any one of the existing superstar cities, in every case, there are vast amounts of land where a new city could be started.

There are immense stretches of land like this land where hundreds of millions of people could live.

Bosnia and Herzegovina remains one of the last undiscovered natural regions of the southern area of the Alps, with vast tracts of wild and untouched nature attracting adventurers and nature lovers.

A combination of deep recession, global economic dislocations, and effective nationalization of large swathes of the financial sector in the world s advanced economies has deeply unsettled the balance between markets and states.

While there is only so much land in any one of the existing superstar cities, in every case, there are vast amounts of land where a new city could be started. And new cities are started, taking away from the uniqueness of existing cities.

In Asia, many countries report that they have vast stretches of rangeland where the communities practise traditional stock rearing, relying more on land tenure customs than on modern law.

Moreover, we require areas to absorb the waste emitted by our energy use.

They may extend over hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of the Earth's surface.

A state that is involved in three global regions (Europe, Central Asia, and the Far East, not to mention the Arctic) and borders several others cannot be considered regional.

In November, the Committee concluded that Germany had failed to police the Neumann Kaffee Gruppe regarding its complicity in the forced eviction of several villages in Uganda to make way for a large coffee plantation.

In a malaria infested country, mosquito eradication programs can boost production and even increase effective land usage, as acres that were almost uninhabitable become livable.

You have them in hunter gatherer societies, but then through technological evolution, new forms of technology arise that facilitate or encourage the playing of non zero sum games, involving more people over larger territory.

It was clear to many that Islamic fundamentalism was not comparable to communism, and, particularly in Iraq, military leaders saw the dangers in stretching American forces too thin.

But the gap between textbook solutions drawn up in universities and think tanks and the reality on the ground can be vast.

At the time, there was already overwhelming evidence of a serious problem that needed to be addressed, and data since then concerning, for example, the rapid melting of the polar ice cap have strongly reinforced this conclusion.

While war rages on the ground in Gaza and across Israeli skies, there s an all out information war unraveling in social networked spaces.

Three quarters of the world s poorest people get their food and income from farming small plots of land, and most of these smallholder farmers are women.

And across a whole range of fields from software, astronomy, natural sciences, vast areas of leisure and culture like kite surfing, so on and so forth you find people who want to do things because they love it, but they want to do these things to very high standards.

In fact, several small bombs exploded less than three months ago at the site of Burma s Myitsone Dam, whose construction by a Chinese company in insurgency torn Kachin State is displacing thousands of subsistence farmers and fishermen by flooding a wide swath of land.

Plantations in danger

Industry ministries oversee vertical swaths of firms.

I then find myself entertained by stories of gorgeous ocean sunsets seen from the porch, views onto expanses of colorful wildflowers on mountainsides, and happy family reunions in beautiful seclusion (as well as problems with the plumbing).