5 Key excerpts on "Human-Environmental Interaction"

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  The Global Casino

  An Introduction to Environmental Issues

  • Nick Middleton(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Knowledge of the physical environment only illuminates one-half of any environmental issue, since an appreciation of factors in the human environment is also required before an issue can be fully understood. Relationships between human activity and the natural world have changed greatly in the relatively short time that people have been present on the Earth. A very large increase in human population, along with widespread urbanization associated with advances in technology and related developments of economic, political and social structures, have all combined to make the interaction between humankind and nature very different from the situation just a few thousand years ago. This chapter is concerned with these aspects of humanity, which together provide the human dimensions of environmental issues.

  Human Perspectives on the Physical Environment

  Nobody knows what prehistoric human inhabitants thought about the natural world, but fossil and other archaeological evidence can be marshalled to give us some idea of how they interacted with it. The fact that humans have always interacted with the physical environment is obvious, since all living things do so by definition, but the ability of humans to conceptualize has allowed us to formalize our view of these interactions. One such framework, which must have been around in one form or another for as long as people have inhabited the planet, is the idea of resources. We call anything in the natural environment that may be useful to us a natural resource. Aspects of the human environment, such as people and institutions, can also be thought of as resources, while anything that we perceive as detrimental to us is sometimes called a negative resource. Since resources are simply a cultural appraisal of the material world, individual aspects of the environment can vary at different times and in different places between being resources and negative resources. A tiger, for example, can be viewed as a resource (for its skin) or a negative resource (as a dangerous animal). Similarly, different cultures recognize resources in different ways (the Aztecs, for example, were mystified by the Spaniards’ insatiable demand for gold, thinking that perhaps they ate it or used it for medical purposes), and some groups see resources where others do not (a grub is a food resource to an Aboriginal Australian, but not to most Europeans). However, resources in the physical environment are not restricted to direct material inputs to society. They also include a wide range of ecosystem services (see Chapter 3 ) that are not directly consumed, but which are necessary for the maintenance of life and for economies and societies to function (such as water purification and the maintenance of biodiversity). In summary, resources vary in character. The classification shown in Table 2.1

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  Understanding Human Ecology

  Knowledge, Ethics and Politics

  • Geetha Devi T. V.(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge India

    (Publisher)

  any part of nature, including biosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere and lithosphere, that forms the living and non-living surroundings of all living beings, where human (or social) agents come to interact with, directly or indirectly, and transform it for human purposes, in the process of which human beings themselves or other living beings can be adversely affected. Another term that needs elucidation is ‘environmental problem’ (environmental issue), which is a concept that directs the study; hence, the question of how to perceive it is of much importance here. In the context of human agency–environment interaction, an ‘environmental problem’ is conceived as any disturbance created in the living and non-living environment of human beings by the harmful activities of human (or social) agents that will have repercussions in the lives of beings such as plants, animals and human beings themselves and also in those parts of nature such as mountains, rocks, rivers, wetlands, lakes and so on. With this background, the author presumes that all instances of human action that can have an adverse impact on the habitat of other living beings and on the environment will be addressed by the domain of human ecology. This conversely means that instances of any natural calamity, which are not traceable to human actions, will not fall within the purview of human ecology.

  Situating the book

  In this section, only literature that either claims to take an integrated approach to the domain of human ecology or focuses particularly on the human–environment interacting sphere is included. Works that undertake a theoretical endeavour on the human–environment interacting sphere are very limited in number, and the available works do not adequately address this domain. Though many researchers have placed emphasis on understanding the domain in an interdisciplinary manner, these attempts end up in identifying it as science or social science discipline; the actual point of establishing linkage of human agency with environment is not evident in these works. Moreover, although many researchers begin their inquiry with environmental problems as the reference point, most of them fail to make a proper theorisation of the domain.

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  On Environmental Governance

  Sustainability, Efficiency, and Equity

  • Oran R Young(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Introduction Governing Human-Environment Relations

  DOI: 10.4324/9781315633176-1

  Humans use natural resources and interact with the environment sustainably in some settings but not in others. Some groups are able to harvest fish on a basis that is sustainable over time, whereas others deplete stocks rapidly. Some groups enjoy clean air and clear water, whereas others suffer from severe pollution produced as a side effect of industrial activities. What explains these differences in the outcomes arising from human-environment relations? Those seeking answers to this question have pointed to a variety of factors, including population, affluence, and technology. But what stands out in every case is the role of governance. Where effective governance systems are in place, humans can interact with nature in such a way as to avoid problems like land degradation, the depletion of fish stocks, and climate change. Where such systems are underdeveloped or dysfunctional, the costs both to individuals and to society at large can become severe. In today's globalized world these costs can range all the way from the impacts of air pollution on the health of single individuals to the impacts of rising atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases on the planet's climate system.

  Broadly speaking, environmental governance becomes a matter of public concern when human actions—individually or collectively—threaten the sustainability of ecosystems, degrade ecosystem services, generate side effects impacting human well-being, or violate societal standards regarding efficiency, equity, and good governance in the use of natural resources. From this vantage point it is easy to see that phrases like environmental management or ecosystem management are misleading. What we can aspire to manage or, more generally, govern are human actions. The resultant efforts may include the development of social practices guiding human uses of natural resources, the launching of initiatives aimed at bolstering the resilience of ecosystem services, and the conduct of research undertaken to enhance understanding of socioecological systems for the purpose of promoting informed choices on the part of human users. But none of this alters the fact that environmental governance is a matter of guiding or steering the behavior of human actors in the interests of avoiding socially undesirable outcomes (e.g., the tragedy of the commons) and enhancing the achievement of socially desirable ends (e.g., the conservation of ecosystem services). It follows that we need to bring the knowledge and the research methods of the social sciences to bear not only to enhance our understanding of environmental governance but also to expand our capacity to create and administer the governance systems needed to achieve desired ends in the realm of human-environment relations.

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  Introduction to the Environmental Humanities

  • J. Andrew Hubbell, John C. Ryan(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  the geohumanities. Whereas environmental anthropology and cultural geography are relatively established fields, the geohumanities is an emerging area that shares much common ground with the Environmental Humanities.

  To begin with, environmental (or ecological) anthropology has played a leading role in the evolution of the Environmental Humanities. A focus area within the broad field of anthropology, environmental anthropology foregrounds human–environment interactions of the past, the present and—particularly in response to climate change and the Anthropocene—the future (Shoreman-Ouimet and Kopnina 2011 , 1). Environmental anthropologists study a range of topics—from human behavior, ecological perception, community environmentalism, and societal collapse to natural disasters, biological diversity, urban gardening, and Indigenous knowledge. Although an academic specialization rife with theory (and the abstraction that necessarily comes along with it), environmental anthropology is also an applied, policy-driven field motivated by ecological concern and interested in presenting avenues for action. Environmental anthropologists hope to contribute to global conservation but generally focus on local solutions.

  Case Study 5.1 Easter Island and ecocultural collapse

  Easter Island is a classic case study of the relationship between environmental degradation and societal collapse. Also known as Rapa Nui, Easter Island is the most remote inhabited island on the planet. Located in the south-eastern Pacific Ocean, the Polynesian island is known for its colossal, large-headed statues, or moai, carved by the Rapa Nui people between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries (Figure 5.2 ). Venerated for their otherworldly powers, moai depict ancestors and are regarded as aringa ora, or “living faces,” rather than celestial deities (Arnold 2000 , 23–24). Despite the grandeur of the more than 900 moai

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  The Meanings of Landscape

  Essays on Place, Space, Environment and Justice

  • Kenneth R. Olwig(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The overpowering success of the natural sciences as a template for thought well beyond the boundaries of the study of the physical world does not mean that philology has disappeared, just that it has gone somewhat underground, not the least in Anglo-America. This means that philology no longer plays the unifying role that it once did in the humanities and in the understanding of landscape and the environment. This is a particularly notable problem with regard to the fate of geography, a discipline that along with the study of history and languages is vital to philology’s paradigm. Geography has thus gone from being a field incorporating a strong historical and humanistic element in a broad concern with landscape and environment, to becoming by the end of the twentieth century a field largely dominated by the natural sciences mindset of “spatial science,” as discussed in Chapters 8 and 9. There has, however, been an ongoing humanistic counterreaction to this development. It has been fostered by geographers linked often to the study of geography as a nexus of history, anthropology, and geography associated with the landscape geography of Carl Sauer at the University of California Berkeley and the writings of John B. Jackson. These included Yi-Fu Tuan, David Lowenthal, Clarence Glacken, and Edmunds Bunkse, and their work has been furthered by a following generation of geographers, not all of whom are humanistic, including Denis Cosgrove, Steve Daniels, Tim Cresswell, Mike Jones, Tomas Germundsson, Tom Mels, and Don Mitchell. It is from academic and personal contact with these geographers that much of the inspiration for this book has been derived. It is not only geographers, however, who have contributed to the historical, philological, and generally humanistic understanding of landscape that has inspired this book. This book also owes a personal and intellectual debt to, among the others, the anthropologists Tim Ingold, Werner Krauß, and Karen Fog Olwig, the landscape architects Anne Whiston Spirn and Shelley Egoz, the natural historian Graham Bathe, and the historians Bill Cronon and Andrew Humphries.

  The chapters in brief

  The first chapter is concerned with the relationship between the predominant modern meaning of landscape as spatial scenery and the historically original meaning of landscape as a polity and its places that ideally form a nexus of community, justice, nature, and environmental equity. It is this latter, originary meaning of landscape that I have termed the “substantive” landscape, in which substantive is used to mean “real rather than apparent,” “belonging to the substance of a thing,” also as used in the legal sense of “creating and defining rights and duties.” The scenic landscape, on the other hand, is something that is performed upon, like a stage, within a scaled, hierarchical, spatial structure of authority, as in a state’s territorial systems of governance or its property regimes in which state or private ownership are key to social position and power. Chapter 2 examines how history and progress, via the scenic landscape, came to be perceived as a linear, step-by-step march of time that left the historical past behind and often literally in ruins. Chapter 3 shows how the chorographic philological understanding of place and polity, as creatures of historical and geographical narrative understanding, became reduced to cartographic and perspectival pictorial representation in a timeless, abstract, and empty Euclidean space.

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