L. Alan Eyre is a British-born naturalised Jamaican geographer and environmentalist. He is also a member of the Christadelphian church.

L. Alan Eyre was co-founder of the Department of Geography of the University of the West Indies

University of the West Indies

The University of the West Indies , is an autonomous regional institution supported by and serving 17 English-speaking countries and territories in the Caribbean: Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, The Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, Dominica,...

, Mona, Jamaica

Mona, Jamaica

Mona is a neighbourhood in southeastern Saint Andrew Parish, approximately five miles from Kingston, Jamaica. A former sugar plantation, it is the site of a reservoir serving the city of Kingston and of the main campus of the University of the West Indies...

. Eyre's academic work has focused on the political geography of shanty town

Shanty town

A shanty town is a slum settlement of impoverished people who live in improvised dwellings made from scrap materials: often plywood, corrugated metal and sheets of plastic...

s and the degradation of the tropical rain forest.

Work on shanty towns

In 1972 Eyre published one of the first Caribbean studies on urban geography, showing that the inner city tenements and not the shanty town was the first destination of rural migrants, then when stable work is found and income saved outward to the peri-urban shanty towns. and noting income variance in the shanty towns. Eyre was one of the first urban geographers in Caribbean-Latin American context to clearly document the inner-city/peri-urban shanty distinction. In a later study (1984) Eyre found evidence of both marginality and self-improvement in the Jamaican shanty towns. Eyre's work (1984, 1986) also documented party political violence as a component of peri-urban geography., hurricane housing (1989) and self-help housing (1997)

Rainforest preservation

In Slow death of a tropical rainforest: The Cockpit Country of Jamaica, West Indies (1994) Eyre proposed that the Cockpit Country

Cockpit Country

Cockpit Country is an area in Jamaica which provided a natural defensive area used by Maroons to establish communities outside the control of Spanish or British colonialists....

, Jamaica's largest remaining contiguous rainforest be zoned a World Heritage Site

World Heritage Site

A UNESCO World Heritage Site is a place that is listed by the UNESCO as of special cultural or physical significance...

 in the face of continuing encroachment and degradation, despite proposals for protection having originated as early as Cotterell (1979) and Aiken (1986). Eyre's study was one of the main academic starting points for a petition sponsored by the Cockpit Country Stakeholders' Group and Jamaica Environmental Advocacy Network which was submitted to Prime Minister Bruce Golding

Bruce Golding

Orette Bruce Golding MP served as Prime Minister of Jamaica from 11 September 2007 to 23 October 2011. He is a member of the Jamaica Labour Party.-Biography:...

 in 2006.

Academic Publications

For a partial bibliography of Eyre's many papers on peri-urban geography see Self-help housing, the poor, and the state in the Caribbean by Robert B. Potter, Dennis Conway p. 101.

• Tidewater shorelines in Broward and Palm Beach counties, Florida: an analysis of characteristics and changes interpreted from color, color-infrared and thermal aerial imagery Remote Sensing and Interpretation Laboratory, 1971
• Geographic Aspects of Population Dynamics in Jamaica 1972
• The June 12th, 1979 flood disaster in Jamaica: a satellite view 1979
• Deforestation in Jamaica The journal of the Scientific Research Council of Jamaica, Volume 6, Issue 2, Scientific Research Council of Jamaica, 1987
• Slow death of a tropical rainforest: The Cockpit Country of Jamaica, West Indies 1994

Religious Publications

Eyre's religious publications primarily concern the Polish Brethren

Polish Brethren

The Polish Brethren were members of the Minor Reformed Church of Poland, a Nontrinitarian Protestant church that existed in Poland from 1565 to 1658...

 and other antecedents of Christadelphian and Biblical Unitarian views:

• Jakub Paleolog (i.e. the Greek Unitarian Jacobus Palaeologus) 1997, A Journal from the Radical Reformation, Spring 1997, Vol. 6, No. 3