Geography lecture 24

• Humans can change the environment

  • In ways that will improve human life (increase food supply)
  • In ways that will harm human life (poison water)
• The environment can influence humans

  • Floods
  • Forest fires
  • Avalanches
  • Droughts
  • Earthquakes
  • Heat waves
  • Whiteouts
• Geographical element of human-environment interactions

  • Take place at different spatial scales: with individual creatures, with populations of a particular species, with the community of species, with the ecosystem in which the community lives
• Changing one area


  May influence a larger area (biome – rainforest) or the entire biosphere (planet) e.g. global warming
• Worldview


  A set of beliefs or values or attitudes that direct our behavior
• Worldview determines


  • What's we see as "good" or "bad"
  • What has value and what does not
  • What we should do or should not do
• How we gain our worldview

  1. From our parents

  2. From the schools we attend

  3. From our friends or peer group

  4. From observing the actions of others
• There are over 8,000 different cultures on the planet each with its own set of beliefs
• Worldview perspectives


  • Seeing oneself as part of the natural environment
  • Seeing oneself as separate from the environment
• The closer one feels to the environment the more likely they are to consider the effects of their actions on the elements of that environment
• Not every person in a western society fails to see the value of nature, although their rationale may be different
• People who live in one society may have different views about different aspects of nature (e.g. should they recycle or not, should they worry about waste by-products of their actions, should they eat animals or not?)
• A small society (several hundred people) are likely to share most beliefs and values whereas a large society will likely have a wider range of beliefs and values
• Contact with other societies may also lead to changes in beliefs and values ... (but not always)
• We have tended to contrast the views of the dominant western (European/north American) worldview with that of various indigenous groups
• Indigenous groups


  • Found on every continent
  • Tend to have societies with more traditional beliefs and values than western society where "new" is stressed
  • Tend to survive either by hunting, gathering, trapping, fishing or by subsistence agriculture, or nomadic herding
  • May supplement income via sale of traditional arts or crafts to tourists
  • May occasionally work in the paid employment sector (often as farm labor or guides)
• Governments have forced indigenous groups to settle

  So that health care and education can be provided
• Settling indigenous groups


  Causes problems with hunting and fishing because their knowledge tends to be place specific – they are not successful in new locations
• Indigenous groups


  • Tend to try and imitate nature in the way they plant crops, tend animals and hunt
• Western groups


  • Try to overcome nature or impose temperate climate practices on other types of climates
• Territoriality


  Both animals and humans try to defend a territory within which they find the necessities of life
• Western societies create government boundaries, indigenous groups create land use boundaries
• The belief in the ultimate victory of western science and that all cultures would merge into one "correct" way of thinking
• Western development ideas have been imposed upon Africa and other developing areas...but many have not worked
• The economic law of supply and demand have run into the barrier of biophysical limits in the environment