1. Human-Environment Interaction notes
IREL 204
World Geography

2. Human Environment Interaction
Human beings adapt to the environment
Human beings modify the environment
Human beings depend on the environment

3. The most prevalent theoretical perspectives in Human-Environment Interaction are the schools of
Environmental Determinism
Environmental Possibilism
Cultural Ecology

4. Environmental Determinism
Mirrored developments in evolutionary biology –
(late 19th early 20th century)
Like every “determinism” it speaks of a cause-effect relationship –
a strict link that connects one thing as a DIRECT result of something else.
In the early part of the 20th century the idea was that the environment strictly determined – in a tight cause-effect relationship – the development of human culture.
The environment alone has this causal effect - not even social factors determine the development of culture
This effect was inescapable

5. From the 5 Humors to the Tempers, to Environmental Determinism
Environmental Determinism (ED) did not really innovate;
Based on a cumulative tradition going back to the ancient Greeks, handed down to the Romans, inherited by the Byzantines, exchanged with the Arabs, and built upon by medieval Christian philosophers
From the time of Hippocrates, in the 5th century BCE, came the idea that the human body is made up of four fluids – or juices - χυμοί (humors)
These four juices – black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood – determined an individual’s health.
If they were well balanced, a person was healthy, but if one of these fluids prevailed, then the person would take on the qualities of that fluid

6. Black bile had ‘melancholic’ qualities
yellow bile had ‘choleric’ qualities
phlegm had ‘phlegmatic’ qualities and
blood had ‘sanguine’ qualities
Each of these characteristics were also associated with the dominant idea of the four elements – earth, air, fire, water, such that the Humors became associated with ‘environmental’ traits –

7. Black bile – cold & dry – like Earth
Yellow bile – warm and dry – like Fire
Phlegm – cold and moist – like Water
Blood – warm and moist – like Air
By the end of the 1st century BCE, the geographer, historian STRABO noted that climate had a great deal of influence on the psychological temper of people;
Already the notion of internal body fluids influencing human disposition was circulating, so that almost 200 years later, the physician GALEN would systematize this knowledge on his treatise on the Tempers
In it, he examined common factors between the Juices – or Humors – and the mental and emotional characteristics of human beings…

8. Medieval natural philosophers – who had inherited this “medical” tradition –
believed that certain parts of the world could be more or less ideal for balancing out one’s humors – balancing out one’s fluids in the body.
This notion of a perfectly balanced clime – that would give its inhabitants perfectly balanced humors – and therefore temperament - was heavily filtered through the religious standpoint of the times.

9. This theory was so strong it prevailed even to the 18th century, when the Swiss taxonomist Linnaeus came up with his classification of the four races of humankind:
EUROPEAUS sanguineus
ASIATICUS melancholicus
AMERICANUS cholericus
AFER phlegmaticus
Linnaeus applied a ‘regional’ perspective to his approach, by dividing the world into 4 broad geographic regions, that represented four broad categories of humanity, with 4 broad psychological characteristics

10. So for example,
Europeans had more of a blood humor – with the associated characteristics, also owing to the climate of the ‘continent’ as warm and moist, (thus sanguine)
Asia was perceived as cold and dry, thus melancholic;
America was warm and dry, therefore choleric;
Africa was cold and moist, thus phlegmatic.

11. Linnaeus’ student – BLUMENBACH added to the ‘races’ of the world by focusing on the shapes of human skulls unearthed in the Caucasus region
These skulls were perfectly shaped, the BLUMENBACH noted they must be the most “perfect” skulls in the world – indicative of perfect humans.
He was convinced they were related to the original humans – Adam and Eve – and for this reason, surmised that Eden originally must have been located somewhere in the Caucasus.
As a result, the descendents of the ‘perfect’ humans, who were perfectly ‘balanced’ in humor and temper because they had originally lived in the most ‘perfect’(balanced) place on Earth – EDEN – were called Caucasians.

12. Environmental Determinism Bias
Now the idea began to prevail that the further away people were located to this imaginary point for Eden - the more they had progressed away, or even degenerated from – the ideal.
It won’t surprise anyone that Europeans consolidated these views to buttress their colonial practices as they subjugated peoples and used the emergent mix of Darwinism and (geographical) environmental determinism to justify their socio-economic and socio-political exploitation of peoples they thought “lesser” than themselves based on arbitrary biological and geographical factors that suited their practices.

13. Environmental Possibilism
Environmental Possibilism: an almost hysterical reaction to the earlier Determinism.
By the 1930s, ED was seen as too rigid, too unyielding & inflexible in the claim that only the environment can determine the development of human culture
The more studies that took the view that environmental determinism was biased, unscientific, and unabashedly racist – the more the need to devise a different stance that would separate itself from this school of thought that met with such disapproval

14. Environmental Possibilism stated that the environment can only limit or constrain the amounts of choices available to a human culture
but that culture itself – is the result of human actions alone and is only determined by human agency.
Where Determinism ignored everything else in the factors that determine culture – saying only the environment causes culture – Possibilism went the other extreme – denying any significant role to the environment in the development of human culture;
Such extreme positions could not stand without obvious problems. Soon it became clear that a middle way needed to bridge the influences of the environment, upon which all life depends – and the importance of human actions – in the development of human culture.

15. Cultural Ecology (the middle ground)
Cultural Ecology was the “alternative” to both ED and EP by saying that cultures interact with their environmental settings through a process of adaptation
It didn’t state that the environment determines culture – running the risk of making claims that similar environments will necessarily produce similar cultures – even though that is clearly untrue –
And it didn’t say the converse – that only human actions – give rise to cultures – ignoring completely the role of the environment –
Cultural Ecology distanced itself from the previous two schools of thought in the following way:
1) The environment presents adaptive problems & opportunities, not just constraints or simple determinants
2) These adaptive processes shape cultures to achieve patterns that are best suited to given environment, not just any possible pattern of survival
3) The effect of environment on culture depends on existing features that any particular human population brings with it, and indeed that cultural change is driven not so much by environmental change as by “techno-economic” change

16. One of the greatest proponents of Cultural Ecology was Carl Sauer, of the University of California at Berkeley who was instrumental in shaping the direction of this theory.
He was more concerned to look at how cultural ‘forms’ were superimposed on the “physical landscape” - studying the impact of human activity on a landscape over time, and the reason for this was to document the synergy – the collaborative efforts – of humans-and the environment – in shaping human culture.
In his own words:
“The cultural landscape is fashioned from a natural landscape by a cultural group. Culture is the agent, the natural are the medium, the cultural landscape is the result"

17. Thus we see that the emerging standpoint in cultural – or world geography with regard to the Human-Environment Interaction points to a dominant idea of Cultural Ecology
yes, we depend on the natural environment…
but humans are seen as either modifying or adapting to their natural environment in ways that reflect their cultural beliefs, their economic, political conditions and their technological expertise.

18. Put another way, the ways in which people interact with their environment can generally be said to depend on three issues:
The nature of the environment
Culture and values of the group
Level of technology

19. Human-Environment Interaction & Adaptive Ecological Models
To see how important these three factors are we are going to ‘borrow’ from Anthropology, from the ecological anthropologist, Roy Rappaport.
His original work was on ritual and religious meaning, but he devised an ecological model that will help us put in perspective these three factors we just looked at: the physical environment, cultural beliefs, and technology.
Human beings are obviously part of the ecosystems they inhabit – their physical landscapes – or environment. But the way people VIEW their environment – is often quite distorted, and quite different – from the actual, “independent” or “real” structure of the environment we are a part of.

20. In Rappaport’s own words:
Nature is seen by humans through a screen of beliefs, knowledge, and purposes, and it is in terms of their images of nature, rather than of the actual structure of nature that they act. Yet, it is upon nature itself that they do act, and it is nature itself that acts upon them, nurturing or destroying them (Rappaport, 1979:97).

21. According to Rappaport
the actual world – the physical environment as it truly IS – is the operational model of the world; the “ready for use” or “existing” environment
Our views of that actual world are filtered through our perspectival lens – remember – our inherent biases inform the way we view the world;
How we describe what we know about our environment – and our beliefs concerning that knowledge – are called our cognized model of the world
Our ‘knowing’ or ‘having knowledge of’ model
We all form “cognized models” of our environments that are “more or less” similar to an operational model of the same environment.

22. For Rappaport, it isn’t important whether these two models fit well with each other – how similar or ‘true’ to each other they are –
but rather how good a job the “cognized model” does of SUSTAINING THAT PHYSICAL ENVIRONMENT, as IT ACTUALLY IS.
What does this mean?
What truly matters is how our “view” of the world actually helps to “sustain” or “keep” that world – or that ecosystem, functioning, going, living.
Rappaport argues that trouble begins when the Reference Values (our cultural model of how the world and relationships SHOULD WORK – our culturally determined notions of how things SHOULD BE) of a culture fall “outside the adaptive ‘limits’ or ‘goal range’ of an ecosystem.

23. What does this mean?? The Adaptive Limits – or Goal Range of an ecosystem:
How far an ecosystem can go and continue to be sustainable - how far it can adapt before it is limited by its very own structure –
Our view of the world may be considered rational – thinking of the world in scientific terms – or as irrational – thinking of the world as being populated by sprites, spirits, pixies, and fairies… it doesn’t matter. What matters is which viewpoint – which cognized model – is better suited to SUSTAIN THAT PARTICULAR ENVIRONMENT.
In this sense, cognized models and reference values can be “adaptive” or “maladaptive”; they can either allow growth and development – or they can retard or impede growth and development by advancing incompatible views of our conception of the world – and the actual environment of which we are a part.

24. Conclusion Bear in mind:
“humanity is dependent upon an earth incapable of supporting infinite demands, and capable both of being improved and of being damaged by the way in which it is used” (Meyer, W.B., Turner, B.L., 1996:139)