We identify degradation of island environments resulting from human activities, as well as cases of human management of resources to enhance productivity and create more sustainable systems. We summarize the long history of human interactions with Polynesian, Mediterranean, Califor-nian and Caribbean island ecosystems, documenting the effects of various waves of human settlement and socioeconomic systems, from hunter–gatherer–fishers, to agriculturalists, to globalized colonial interests. Islands also stand at the forefront of scientific study for understanding the deep history of human ecodynamics and to build sustainable future systems. In the face of environmental uncertainty due to anthropogenic climate change, islands are at the front lines of global change, threatened by sea level rise, habitat alteration, extinctions and declining biodiversity. The results show that people in eastern Taiwan at 2200–2000 BC faced a crisis of limited suitable landforms for their particular mode of subsistence economy, thus instigating overseas migration to the northern Philippines as a means to expand into other territories, with continued effects through 1500 BC and thereafter. During the time range of interest, the region’s coastlines and habitat configurations were substantially different from today’s circumstances, prior to change in sea level, accelerated slope erosion, lowland sedimentary buildup, and some of the world’s most rapid recorded tectonic uplift. Toward illustrating this research potential, changing paleo-landscapes 2500–1500 BC reveal the ancient conditions of the places where people lived in both Taiwan and the northern Philippines, in this case exploring what transpired there during a critical time period that heralded deep transformation of the language history, cultural heritage, economic production, and population demography of Island Southeast Asia as known today.
Paleo-landscape investigations contextualize how people have inhabited and coevolved dynamically with their landforms, resource zones, and social-ecological niches during measured time intervals and through extended chronological sequences.
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