Alfred Thomas Grove

Alfred Thomas Grove (8 April 1924 – 9 July 2023), known more commonly as Dick Grove, was a British geographer and climatologist.

He was Emeritus Fellow of Downing College, Cambridge and a Director of the Centre of African Studies at the University of Cambridge.

Grove researched Environmental Issues and Policy and the landscape change in southern Europe and Climate change and desertification with a focus on Africa and southern Europe.

Grove married Jean Mary Clark (1927–2001), herself a renowned glaciologist and climate historian and sister of Margaret Spufford.

They had six children, among them Richard Grove.

Grove was among the trustees of the Jean Grove Trust in Cambridge, a small Roman Catholic charity which funds the education of children in Ethiopia through direct links with four schools in different parts of the country.

Alfred Thomas Grove died on 9 July 2023, at the age of 99.

From 1949 to 1982, Grove was a lecturer at the Department of Geography, University of Cambridge and from 1980-1986 Director of the Centre for African Studies.

His work in the 1950s and 60s established the framework for subsequent geomorphological investigations of long term environmental change in arid environments in Africa.

He systematically mapped and identified features, first in the Sahel belt, and later in the Kalahari.

Through his role as a doctoral supervisor at Cambridge, supervising doctoral students who went on to become influential researchers and teachers in their own right (notably Andrew Goudie, later Chair of Geography at Oxford and Master of St Cross College, Andrew Warren, later Professor of Geography at University College London, Nick Lancaster, Research Professor at the University of Nevada’s Desert Research Institute and Mike Meadows, Professor of Geography at the University of Cape Town), Grove created an important legacy in modern dryland science both in African environments and in dryland geomorphology more broadly.

While Grove supported increasing evidence of human activity was causing global warming, he saw definite and conclusive evidence in the field of climate change as almost an impossibility.

1963-1991 he was appointed fellow of the Downing College.

He has written a number of books, including "Africa South of the Sahara", and various books about the Little Ice Age in Europe.

He was awarded the Busk Medal in 1982 for his field work in Africa.

So together (with Jean Grove) 'Little Ice Ages Ancient and Modern', 2004 and The "Little Ice Age" and its geomorphological consequences in Mediterranean Europe' and together with Oliver Rackham', The Nature of Mediterranean Europe', an important contribution to environmental history.

With regard to the alleged tragedy of the commons and neomalthusian approaches e.g. of Garrett Hardin he denounced Hardin's interpretation of the failure of commons as the one of "an American with no notion at all how Commons actually work".

Grove made major contributions in the study of dryland geomorphology in the deserts of northern and southern Africa, by combining detailed mapping of geomorphological features through air photograph analysis with meticulous field verification.

Nevertheless, his consideration of the problem in his 2010 paper leads him to the conclusion that despite this inherent uncertainty, the evidence that human activity is causing global warming is substantial, and that it is therefore 'safer to act, to mitigate and adapt with the aim of slowing down change'.

In his work about Mediterranean Europe he doubts the common wisdom of a 'Lost Eden,' a formerly fertile region, that had been progressively degraded and desertified by human mismanagement.

The simplistic, environmental determinist notion of a Mediterranean Paradise on Earth in antiquity, which was destroyed by destructive later civilizations dates however back to at least the eighteenth century and was fashionable in archaeological and historical circles for centuries.

However the authors argue that this belief stems from the failure of the recent landscape to measure up to the imaginary past as idealized by artists, poets and scientists of the early modern Enlightenment.

Grove and Rackham tried to track the evolution of climate, vegetation and landscape in southern Europe from prehistoric times till present and point out that climate has usually been unstable and plant cover accommodated to various extremes and became resilient with regard to various patterns of human activity.

The authors assume that people had already transformed most parts of Mediterranean Europe 4,000 years ago and the “humanization of the landscape” overlapped with the appearance of the present Mediterranean climate, insofar as humanization was not the cause of climate change.

To the contrary, the wide ecological diversity typical of Mediterranean Europe was man made.

The greatest human induced changes came since World War II as rural populations throughout the region abandoned traditional subsistence economies and left the traditional agricultural patterns towards setting sceneries for travelers, which resulted in more monotonous, large-scale formations.

As real threats to Mediterranean landscapes they see the overdevelopment of coastal areas, abandonment of mountains and the already mentioned loss of traditional agricultural occupations.