THE GEOMETRY OF WONDERLAND

We analyze Wonderland-a model of demographic, economic and environment al interactions-by combining numerical simulations with basic ideas of geometric singular perturbation theory. This theory dealing with slow -fast dynamical systems helps us to gain new insights into the behavio ur of the system. We give conditions for the occurrence of rapid envir onmental changes in Wonderland. Since the chosen approach is inherentl y geometric we also focus on the visualization of our results. Copyrig ht (C) 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd.