Transcript RedmanBookPPTx

PLA 4579
Introduction to Environmental
Planning
Peter J. Marcotullio
15 September 2016
Human Impact on Ancient
Environments
• Who is Charles L. Redman?
• What is the main argument(s)/question of the
study?
• What is the theoretical framework by which Prof.
Redman does the analysis?
• How does Redman attempt to answer the main
question? (method)
• What were the main findings/results of the
study?
• What are the caveats, if any?
Who is Charles Redman
Who is Charles Redman
Charles Redman received his BA from Harvard University,
and his MA and PhD in Anthropology from the University of
Chicago. He taught at New York University and at SUNYBinghamton before arriving at Arizona State University
(ASU) in 1983. Since then, he served nine years as Chair of
the Department of Anthropology, seven years as Director
of the Center for Environmental Studies and, in 2004, was
chosen to be the Julie Ann Wrigley Director of the newly
formed Global Institute of Sustainability. From 2007-2010,
Redman was the founding director of ASU's School of
Sustainability.
Who is Charles Redman
Redman's interests include human impacts on the
environment, sustainable landscapes, rapidly urbanizing
regions, urban ecology, environmental education, and
public outreach. He is the author or co-author of 14 books.
Redman believes in collaborative learning, transdisciplinary approaches, and problem-oriented training to
address the environmental, economic, and social
challenges of the 21st Century.
What are the main arguments in
Human Impact on Ancient Environments?
What are the main arguments in
Human Impact on Ancient Environments?
Overarching question(s) (in terms of humanenvironment interactions):
"Is humankind on a fast track to destruction? Is
there a realistic balance that can be reached? Or, in
fact, are the problems not as grave as some would
have us believe?”
What are the main arguments in
Human Impact on Ancient Environments?
•
Archeology, with its long time scale of study can
provide understanding to ecological processes and
the role of humans in ecological change, which
cannot be identified in other disciplines;
–
There is evidence suggesting that human impact on the
environment in antiquity has been underestimated. “The
archeological record is ‘strewn with the wrecks’ of
communities that obviously had not learned to cope with
their environment in a sustainable manner”
What are the main arguments in
Human Impact on Ancient Environments?
•
The forces that determine human-environment
relationships are multiple and cannot be reduced to
a single factor, such as increasing population, a fuelhungry technology or misguided leaders.
More likely understanding this complex issue lies in
the recognition of how productive strategies, social
institutions and natural environments have
“coevolved,” each helping to shape the
characteristics of the others.
What are the main arguments in
Human Impact on Ancient Environments?
The dominant question focuses
on the manner in which humans
have developed productive
strategies to extract sufficient
food, commodities and other
resources from the natural
environment.
Humans are distinctive because
they have developed institutions
to help regulate and direct
behavior
These institutions are based on
perceived benefits of cooperative
action and shared ideas, hence
perception is a fundamental
aspect of the humanenvironment relationship
What are the main arguments in
Human Impact on Ancient Environments?
•
Human-environmental relations cannot be modeled
in a strictly mechanistic way on some maximization
theory; one must account for the “human” factor.
Productive strategies, social institutions, and
virtually every human interaction with the
environment have been conditioned by the
existence of that very uniquely human
phenomenon – culture;
What are the main arguments in
Human Impact on Ancient Environments?
•
The organizing theme throughout the book is that
humans as individuals, communities and entire
societies are continually making decisions on land
use that profoundly affect the condition of the
surrounding environment and therefore determine
their own future
What is the theoretical framework by which
Prof. Redman does the analysis?
Human Impact on Ancient Environments?
What is the theoretical framework by which
Prof. Redman does the analysis?
Human Impact on Ancient Environments?
Seven elements to the framework:
1. Changes in land use take many forms and are
at the center of various human impacts on
the environment.
What is the theoretical framework by which
Prof. Redman does the analysis?
Human Impact on Ancient Environments?
Seven elements to the framework:
2. The forces that drive this process emanate
from a variety of sources, but it is easiest to
conceive of them as either from the human
environment, such as demand for food and
commodities, or from the natural
environment, such as climate change or
natural disasters.
What is the theoretical framework by which
Prof. Redman does the analysis?
Human Impact on Ancient Environments?
Seven elements to the framework:
3. Decision makers work within their own
context of knowledge of the environment
and potential productive strategies in order
to determine changes in the land use system
that both meet demands and are socially
appropriate.
What is the theoretical framework by which
Prof. Redman does the analysis?
Human Impact on Ancient Environments?
Seven elements to the framework:
4. These changes in land use will have impact
on the land cover and soil conditions.
What is the theoretical framework by which
Prof. Redman does the analysis?
Human Impact on Ancient Environments?
Seven elements to the framework:
5. Over time this land-use change will result in
more fundamental changes in the landscape
and the biogeochemical processes that
support it.
What is the theoretical framework by which
Prof. Redman does the analysis?
Human Impact on Ancient Environments?
Seven elements to the framework:
6. As the process continues humans will
respond based on a variety of inputs to
either expand the scope of the change,
intensify it, or abandon it altogether.
What is the theoretical framework by which
Prof. Redman does the analysis?
Human Impact on Ancient Environments?
Seven elements to the framework:
7. Results can be immediate, they may become
obvious in a few years or their true
implications may not be apparent for
centuries
What is the theoretical framework by which
Prof. Redman does the analysis?
Human Impact on Ancient Environments?
What are the tasks necessary to provide the
analysis?
Human Impact on Ancient Environments?
According to Redman there are 5 critical tasks to
this work including:
1. Debunk the widespread and important
misconception that the natural landscape,
untouched by human hands, exists and that
societies before European contact, lived in a
utopian paradise
What are the tasks necessary to provide the
analysis?
Human Impact on Ancient Environments?
According to Redman there are 5 critical tasks
including:
2. Demonstrate the human impacts in antiquity,
not just climate change, have lead to significant
environmental alterations; and relatedly
3. Demonstrate the importance of humanbiological-physical interactions over sufficient
time depth to allow meaningful conclusions
about the role of human in the environmental
change
What are the tasks necessary to provide the
analysis?
Human Impact on Ancient Environments?
According to Redman there are 5 critical tasks including:
4. Document the human activities and decisions that led
to sustainable situations or to environmental
degradation at various points in the past
5. Examine the decisions that conditions the humanenvironment interactions to better understand why
people frequently adopted strategies that may have
made sense in the short term, but had dire long-term
consequences
How does Redman attempt to answer his
questions?
How does Redman attempt to answer his
questions?
• Redman organizes the study (and his
argument) as follows:
– Introduction (overview and outline)
– 2 chapters of background/theory (attitudes and
concepts)
– 4 chapters of “case studies” focused on different
environmental impacts:
•
•
•
•
Domestication of animals;
Agriculture;
Urbanization; and
Growth in forces of complexity
– Conclusion (summation and final thoughts)
Perceptions: Attitudes toward the
environment
Perceptions: Attitudes toward the
environment
• Redman emphasizes the importance of attitudes in
shaping action in the past as well as the present. He
examines the historical development of attitudes
towards the environment among Western
Civilizations, then considers attitudes prevalent in
non-Western societies and concludes this
background with a discussion of contemporary
attitudes on the environment.
Attitudes toward the environment
• He focuses the discussion on three ideas:
– That the world was created in a “perfect” form
– That the environment has shaped humans and their
cultures
– That humans have modified the environment in order to
develop and that nature are a set of resources to satisfy
human demands
Attitudes toward the environment
• Redman suggests that there are multiple and often
conflicting ideas and attitudes during any period in
both Western and non-Western civilizations.
• He seems to suggest that utilitarianism won out over
conservationism in the West
• He also suggests that despite notions and attitudes
of nature conservation and protection (balancing) in
Non-Western societies (e.g. Asia), they also degraded
their environments significantly
Attitudes toward the environment
• He puts forth the idea that rather than thinking of
the dichotomy of attitudes about the environment as
being Western/non-Western attitudes, it is better to
conceptualize the dichotomy as large-scale versus
small scale societies.
– In small scale societies humans are perceived as part of
nature on a par with animals. The dominant theme is
mutuality; existing under a moral order that binds together
humans, nature and sometimes even the gods into one
family. Yet, even in these societies, there was cases of
environmental impact. Were these impacts serious and
enduring?
Attitudes toward the environment
• During the contemporary period, Redman suggests
the utilitarian attitude (use the environment for
maximum benefit to humankind) wins out.
• He concludes that only recently have scientists and
philosophers began to conceptualize an integration
of humans and nature (starting with George Perkins
Marsh)
• Yet, even today popular attitudes are not congruent
with scientific studies. There are many different
attitudes toward the environment held by different
people
Attitudes toward the environment
Attitudes toward the environment
• Redman ends this chapter with questions about
actions to preserve the environment. He states if
there are different notions of what an ideal
environment is and therefore different notions of
what can be done to improve the environment, how
are we to decide which way to go?
• The answer to what actually constitutes a natural
landscape or a pristine habitat lies at the core of our
environmental future
Concepts that organize our thoughts
Concepts that organize our thoughts
• Redman uses ecological concepts such as, biotic,
abiotic, biosphere, organism, population, community,
niche, system, ecosystem, threshold, feedbacks,
predictability, resistance, resilience, food chain,
trophic levels, ecological succession and ecological
efficiency.
• He also introduces concepts related to the social
sciences, as human dominated ecosystems differ in
fundamental ways from other biological systems:
information, technology, economics, and social
organization play greater roles.
Concepts that organize our thoughts
• Other concepts related to human decision making
include driving and mitigating forces, which give rise
to stress (nutritional, disease, demographic, climatic,
etc.) and human adaptation
Concepts that organize our thoughts
• Stress and responses to stress form a central set of
concepts for Redman. According to him, human
responses can be genetic, physiological or
behavioral.
– Behavioral responses are the most important and include
either population control ( reproductive control or
population migration) or resource management (new
patterns of movement or area integration of settlements,
environmental alteration and altered technologies of
resource production)
Concepts that organize our thoughts
• Stress responses are conditioned by strategies. Two different
strategies include “least-cost” (Zipf 1949) which states that
people try to get jobs done with the least outlay of energy.
Von Thunen theory of land use is a “least-cost” strategy.
• The other is to “optimize” a situation in terms of economic
alternatives (Simon 1957).
• Pre-industrial producers are conservative and typically reduce
the risk for their families survival. Models for preventing
economic disasters are probably more appropriate than those
that assume a maximizing strategy.
Concepts that organize our thoughts
• Key among the alternatives available to producing
individuals to manipulate are 1) to gather or
produce; 2) to raise crops or domestic animals; 3) to
rely on a range of food sources or a single course;
and 4) to extract resources intensively or not.
Decision makers narrow the set of feasible answers
and ranks alternatives
Concepts that organize our thoughts
• As agrarian societies develop into complex social
systems, new forces reshape the decision-making
process, seriously threatening human-land
relationships. That is, many decisions are not made
by those who actually produce food and goods, but
by individuals and groups who may not be under the
same constraints as the producers and may view
risks and rewards differently.
Concepts that organize our thoughts
• That is, the institutions and belief system that
legitimize the elites must be designed to influence
those producing goods to generate a agricultural
surplus (including livestock) that can be used to
maintain those who are not involved with producing
goods.
• As such, in complex societies, there are a number of
interdependent sub-systems and as a whole the
system does not always act in an adaptive manner
when faced with stress.
Concepts that organize our thoughts
• Maldaptation occurs internally, not by creating stress
but when actions reduce survival changes by
inhibiting the effectiveness of its response to stress.
– These include poor detection of deviation of variables
from crucial ranges, breaks in feedback loops, excessive
delay of information transmissions, distortion of
information in transit and failure of higher order regulators
to understand the information they have received
(Rappaport, 1978)
Concepts that organize our thoughts
• If one accepts both conclusions that large scale
civilization are maladaptive and that at the same
time these civilization appear to be the inevitable
product of the evolution of small-scale societies,
then we must ask ourselves whether the evolution of
culture and the entire human experience is in fact
maladaptive.
Concepts that organize our thoughts
• Redman argues, as opposed to the notion that
people, a community or nation are in conscious
control of the environment and thus their destiny,
people and the environment have coevolved,
gradually, with changes in each affecting the other.
Benefits were not always observable, and once
noticed could not always be sought, as events and
dynamics could not be removed from context
Case studies
Animal exploitation
• Animals are important, if not crucial to human
development. They provide meat, hides, bone,
antlers, oil and ligaments. They can also provide milk
and wool, serve as beasts of burden carrying goods,
pulling carts and moving people. Animals are also
mobile, so they can migrate with people, if their
meat and other resources aren’t immediately
needed. Finally, animals and herbivores in general
store food energy, sometimes food that is not
available to people.
Animal exploitation
• Humans have impacted animals in three ways:
– Domestication
– Dispersal/expansion and
– Extinction/contraction
Domestication
• One of the greatest themes in the study of human
influence on nature is domestication.
Domestication
• Domestication has been one of the most profound
ways in which humans have affected animal.
Relatively few animals species have been
domesticated in comparison with plant species, but
for those that have been the consequences are so
substantial that the differences between breeds of
animals of the same species often exceed those
between different species under natural conditions.
– Simply look at the range of shapes and sizes of modern
dog and cat breeds.
Domestication
Holstien
Guernsey
Ayrshire
Or look at the domestication of cattle
Domestication
• Wild ancestors of cattle gave no more than a few
ounces of milk daily
• In 1900, the 17 million USA dairy cows provided over
3,000 lbs per cow of milk a year,
• By 1944, the 25.6 million cows provided 5,314 lbs of
milk per cow annually
• By 2005 there were 9.1 million cows in the US and
they each provided 17,000 lbs of milk annually
• Note: 1 gallon of milk would weigh between 8.5 and
8.8 pounds.
• By 2005, a single cow could produce ~1,800 gallons a
year!
Domestication
• Redman (1978) and Diamond (1997) argue that the
differences in the availability of draft animals had a
major impact on the developmental trajectories of the
Old World and New World civilizations.
– Diamond argues that Eurasia had advantages such as many
potentially productive wild plants and animals (13 species of
draft mammals compared to 0 in the New World), large land
mass to support more people and and east-west orientation
that was environmentally efficient for transportation of
ideas and resources.
Dispersal and invasion
Dispersion
Dispersion
• Humans have been the most successful dispersing
species in Earth’s history. Modern societies, by
moving wildlife from place to place, consciously or
otherwise, are breaking down these classic distinct
faunal realms.
• Human have introduced a new order of magnitude
into distances over which dispersal, invasion and
colonization take places:
– Through designed or accidental transport of seeds or other
propagules
– Through the disturbance of nature plant and animal
communities and of their habitat
– By the creation of new habitats and niches
Dispersion
• Redman notes that the transported landscapes
(Kirch, 1982) have been caused by demand for:
–
–
–
–
–
–
Reliable food sources
Recreation
Comfortable and aesthetically pleasing surroundings
Provision of familiar landscapes in insecure places
Control of pests
Revenue
Dispersion of Brown Trout
(Brown trout, taken in Willow Creek
of Star Valley Wyoming.)
Brook trout , fish on display at an
Iowa DNR exhibit
Dispersion
• In the eighteenth century there were few oceangoing vessels of more than 300 tons
• International seaborne trade in 2007, driven by
emerging and transition economies, surpassed a
record 8 billion tons
• Of the total weight:
– 1866 million tons was crude oil,
– 815 million tons was other oil products and
– 5341 million tons was dry goods
Dispersion
Dispersion
Dispersion
Expansion
Expansion
• There is also a large class of beasts which profit from
the environmental conditions wrought by humans
and therefore have become closely linked to them.
These animals are often referred to as synanthropes.
Pigeons, sparrows, rats and mice, squirrel, etc. The
House Sparrow covers one quarter of Earth’s surface
and over the past 100 years it has doubled the areas
that it inhabits as settlers, immigrants and other have
carried it form one continent to another. It is found
around settlements both in Amazonian and the
Arctic Circle (Doughty, 1978).
Expansion
Expansion
Expansion
• The saline Lake Nakuru in Kenya before 1961 was not a
particularly diverse ecosystem. There were essentially
one or two species of algae, one copepod, one rotifer,
corixids, notonectids, and some 500,000 flamingos
belonging virtually to one species.
• In 1962, however, a fish (Tilapia graham) was introduce
in order to check mosquitoes. As a result, its numbers
increased greatly. Then some 30 species of fish eating
birds (pelicans, anhinga, cormorants, herons, egrets,
grebes, terns and fish eagles) have colonized the area to
make Lake Nakuru a much more diverse system.
Expansion
Extinction
Extinction
• There are several general conclusions about the
nature of extinctions:
– There is an inverse relations between extinction rates
and population size
– Among species with similar population size, the one
showing wider fluctuations in abundance is more
susceptible to extinction
– There is a natural susceptibility of mega fauna for
extinctions due to their lower population densities
and the slower rate or reproduction and population
replacement.
Extinction
Extinction
• There are particularly important environments
conducive to high species diversity and such
biodiversity ‘hot spots’ need to be made priorities for
conservation.
– Myers et al (2000) has argued that as many as 44% of all
species of vascular plants and 35% of all species in four
groups of vertebrate animals are confined to just 25 hot
spots that comprise a mere 1.4% of Earth’s land surface..
Extinction
Extinctions
• Humans are versatile exterminators. Overkill
is the theory that humans have exploited
animals and driven them to extinction.
• Secondary drivers that have lead to human
induced extinctions include habitat
destruction, fragmentation, introduction of
competitors, degradation and trophic
cascades
Extinctions
Extinctions
• Redman offer two case studies of extinctions:
– Avifauna on Pacific Islands
– Megafaunal extinctions
Extinctions
• In Polynesia, an examination of extinction of birds
on Hawaii by Kirch (1982) estimates that no less
than half of the bird species native to the island
were driven to extinction in prehistoric times.
Among these were flightless birds that had
evolved because they had no terrestrial
competitors and large flying birds that had
vulnerable nests
• Steadman (1995) asserts that fully 60 endemic
species of land birds became extinct during that
period compared to only 20-25 during the
historic period
Extinctions
Extinctions
The impact of agrarian systems
The impact of agrarian systems
• The human impact on vegetation is central to
understanding our influence on the planet
• The introduction of agriculture is regarded as the
single most important transformation in human
history
• Redman argues that the invention of agriculture was
not an “aha moment,” but occurred slowly, such that
the inventors did not recognize its introduction as
something new
The impact of agrarian systems
• Agriculture resulted in three important changes to
society:
– 1) sedentary communities;
– 2) changes in family and social values (private property);
and
– 3) changes in the organization of productive tasks and
consequently to changes in the social and political
organization of communities
The impact of agrarian systems
• Redman then examines three case studies of the
impact of human agrarian systems on the
environment including the Early Levant, Ancient
Greece, Italy and Spain and the American Southwest
• While each of these stories is slightly different they
seem to follow a similar pattern
The impact of agrarian systems
The impact of agrarian systems
• Why did people who were able to take into account
so many forces during development, make decisions
that led to environmental degradation, especially
when they recognized that it was occurring?
• Farmers basically have three domains of decisions: 1)
land use allocation, 2) what crops to grow and 3)
how intensively to pursue agriculture
The impact of agrarian systems
• Despite the growing complexity influences on farmer
decision making, he seems to suggest that a limited
number of factors basic to human organization have
guided the way agrarian societies developed and that
these factors are responsible for the decisions to
degrade environmental conditions
The growth of world urbanism
The growth of world urbanism
• With an increasing reliance on an expanding food base
provided by agrarian innovations and improvements in
the transport of foodstuffs, it became possible for larger
and larger numbers of people to exist and to live in
nucleated locations
• The emergence of urban society introduced a whole new
set of human-environmental interactions. New impacts
include: 1) a larger number of people and their
consumption needs; 2) Increased demand for building
materials; 3) Land use for settlements; 4) New behaviors
including industry, trade and hierarchical administration
The growth of world urbanism
• The resultant changes in the landscape include
increased land under production, irrigation (with
salinization) and amplified soil erosion (and
checkdams/retaining walls/terracing).
The growth of world urbanism
• In Mesopotamia, salinization is often pointed to a
major problem leading to the region’s reduced
political importance
• Four thousand years ago, the Ur III Dynasty was
situated in the southern half of Mesopotamia and
consisted of numerous cities, each of several tens of
thousands of people, supported by an associated
hinterland of farms and villages. The economic
system relied on irrigated fields of winter-cultivated
cereals, secondary crops and herding sheep
The growth of world urbanism
• Centralization of control facilitated the expansion of
agricultural production and greater irrigation projects
• Studies suggest that wheat farming declined from
2000 to 1700 BC, when villages were abandoned.
Uplands areas were deforested, forcing people to use
dung for fuel and that regionally, there was a loss of
the deciduous Oak and Juniper forest.
The growth of world urbanism
• In Mexico and Central America, Mayans grew corn, slowing
increasing the size of the kernal and the number of kernel
rows. From 2000 to 1000 BC corn foodstuff and gourds,
squash and beans allowed for establishment of year-round
villages
• Mayans used slash and burn agriculture across vast territories
supporting 8 to 10 million people prior to 1000 AD.
• Mayan civilization was well known for its carefully ornamental
temples, the focus of religious activities, trade relations and
whatever political integration existed
• By 1000 AD, however, there is evidence of drop in population,
political and social breakdown and environmental degradation
The growth of world urbanism
• The picture that emerges suggests a vast anthropogenic
ecosystem through much of the Holocene. High forest
was replaced by farming and settlement. The drain on
the land of dense population, intensive agricultural
manipulation and construction of massive settlements
increased to the point were the system was no longer
sustainable.
• By the end of the tenth century AD, most of the large
settlements of the Maya uplands and southern lowland
had been abandoned or seriously depopulated
• Deterioration coincided with a relatively dry period
The growth of world urbanism
• The Hohokam of Southern Arizona, developed a
distinctively enduring settlement system that
outlasted most of their southwestern and North
American neighbors. Renewal of fields through
waterborne additives permitted a sustainable
agriculture. The yield of domestic crops was
supplemented by tended and weedy indigenous
species.
The growth of world urbanism
• Because settlements were localized along
watercourses, the large surrounding expanses were
left uninhabited, allowed for the continued growth of
wild vegetation for fuel, craft materials and edible
wild resources. An overarching social organization
that acted to spread agricultural risks over a
sufficient number of environmental zones and
allowed for shortfalls that would be buffered through
social connections. Nevertheless Hohokam society
came to an end in the fourteenth century
Chapter 6 – The growth of world
urbanism
• Despite conservation methods, the longer the
Hohokam existed in the same location, the more
pressure they put on floodplain dynamics and on the
fertility of the soil. There society was maintained,
however through an exchange system. When the
climate changed, entering into a long period of
greater variability, including disastrous flooding, it
put an additional pressure on the Hohokam system
that could not be easily sustained.
Chapter 6 – The growth of world
urbanism
• After two centuries (800-1000 AD) of consistency,
the river water (flood) levels started to fluctuate,
signaling a changing climate
• During years of stability, the population expanded
• During the years of variability, starting around 1075
AD) the Hohokam system weakened
• Following 1250 AD climatic patterns become even
more erratic
The growth of world urbanism
• Around 1350 AD, the highest flood levels were
followed by the driest years. The weakened system
could not recover and that ended this civilization
The growth of world urbanism
• The main point of the examples is that in preindustrialized societies, short term political stability
economic maximization were only achieved by
weakening the capacity of the productive system to
react to internal and external challenges (weakened
resilience) and hence, undermined its long-term
survival.
The growth of world urbanism
• Cooperative activities in many contexts may help
survival of small-scale systems in the short run, but
as those cooperative ventures become larger and
more formalized, their adaptive potential does not
always operate.
The growth of world urbanism
• Moreover, state ideologies asserted at that time, as
do many today, that everyone’s interest were served
when the interests of the central rulers were served,
was not true.
• The underlying cause of mismanagement seems to
emanate at least in part from the hierarchical nature
of complex societies.
Forces that grew society
Forces that grew society
• While many forces that are part of the development
of complex societies are negative in terms of the long
term relationship with the environment, they
provide improvements in human society
• So, are they positive or negative attributes? Depends
on your viewpoint…
Forces that grew society
• Expanding food production is a fundamental aspect
of human development
• With these decisions, ancient societies decided to
divert produce and personnel from the food
production system and allocate them to the support
of activities, items and individuals not directly
related to producing food. This factor is key to
sedentary lifestyles
• Anthropologists have identified four strategies of
intensified production
Forces that grew society
• Redman believes that all these strategies demand a
structure of decision making in complex societies
that exacerbates the tendency to overexploit both
laborers and the landscape by building a system that
benefits from increasing quantities of goods
• However successful these strategies are at most
times and in most places, they do introduce several
weaknesses into the system – mal-adaptations that
make them more vulnerable to crisis
Forces that grew society
• Population is a factor in creating an imbalance between
society and the environment.
• Redman presents the concept of carrying capacity, or the
biomass and other resources within an area that can
support a population.
• This concept, however, conceptualizes population as a
dependent variable. That is, population will change once
levels reach capacity (Malthus, 1878)
• Other suggest, however, that population can be an
independent variable. Population determines, for
example, agricultural developments
Forces that grew society
• Boserup (1965) for example, see post-war population
growth not caused only by technological innovation.
Rather she suggests that the key decisions farmers made
about land use were not separate choices. It wasn’t 1)
extending cultivation into new lands, yes or no; and then
2) intensifying cultivation on current fields, yes or no; but
in which way do we use any piece of land.
• Some lands were fallow, but they still provided food
(from hunting). Other lands were cultivated. Therefore
the value of land was not constant, but depended on
human use
Forces that grew society
• In this way Boserup hypothesized five types of
agricultural land use in order to increase intensity of
exploitation
Forces that grew society
• Boserup’s essential element was that food output
per labor hour input decreases as one shortens the
fallow and increases the intensity of cultivation.
• Communities only intensify when they have too.
That is, technological fixes are found when the
population grows.
Forces that grew society
• How does population expand (what are the long
term trends)?
Forces that grew society
• Others see population changes in waves, in nonsynchronic fashion, associated with environmental
degradation with significant declines
Forces that grew society
• Disease and community health are equally important
to soil erosion, deforestation, or species extinction
• The origins, spread and evolution of the most
dangerous infectious diseases are closely tied to
decision humans made to domesticate animals,
intensify agricultural production and pursue an urban
way of life.
Forces that grew society
• Probably the single most significant human decision
to impact the nature of disease was the widespread
adoption of a sedentary urban life.
– Diseases are transmitted through contact (eaten, vector,
water borne, etc), which keep it alive
– Zoonosis – smallpox and tuberculosis (cattle), measles
(dogs) influenza (pigs and chickens), common cold
(horses), etc.
– Large number of hosts close together
– Context that facilitates disease growth and transmission
(life cycles of disease compatible with human condition –
water, waste, etc)
– Trade and contact with individuals from far away
Forces that grew society
• Community nutrition is assumed to have improved
with agriculture, but some argue whether this was
true. There is evidence supporting both sides of this
question.
• It is likely that during the early stages of agriculture,
when domestic plants were primarily a supplement
to the gathered array of foods, community nutrition
may have improved. Once it became dominant,
however, dietary balance would have diminished.
Some argue that hunters and gatherers were in
better health than early agriculturalists
Forces that grew society
• At the same time, agriculture allowed for larger
populations. Population growth occurred in spite of
a general diminution of both child and adult life
expectancies, a questionable advance in human diet
and a quantum increase in contagious diseases
• This suggests that forces, social and otherwise, that
encouraged the adoption of agriculture and
eventually of urbanisms were extremely powerful,
being able to override the negative impacts of early
farming on those that attempted it.
Forces that grew society
• Ancient industry and trade facilitated specialization
of labor within communities and specialization of
production between communities and regions
• Early industry facilitated mining and smelting.
Industrial production was substantial enough to
produce significant hemisphere-wide air pollution.
Lead concentration levels were 400% high than
natural during the Greek and Roman times
• Trade began, at the latest by 7000 BC, during early
farming village development. Obsidian was traded in
the Near East. As village life developed other goods
such as turquoise and copper were traded
Forces that grew society
• Hierarchical government run by a minority of elites is one
of the fundamental aspects of a complex society. The
other is that it is comprised of many people.
• Elites were in a favorable position for a number of
reasons: 1) they could redistribute goods back to the
commoners in popular ways; 2) they could arm
themselves and disarm others; 3) the could use their
monopoly of force to maintain order, improving personal
security; and 4) they could formulate an ideology or
religion to justify their position and the advantages it
confers
• Elites act in self-interest
Forces that grew society
• Population growth, community health, industrial
production, trade and hierarchical government (I
would also add technology) are the cornerstones of
modern civilization, each of them an essential
element of social change and each of them with
dramatic environmental implications
The past as prologue
Redman’s viewpoints about the human impact on
ancient environments
The summary of the argument
The past as prologue
Redman’s viewpoints about the human impact on
ancient environments
1. For a very long time and in every part of the globe, humans
have demonstrated that they are extraordinarily talented,
able to understand the intricacies of their environment and
willing to take action to promote their continued survival
2. Humans have developed cultural traditions and technological
innovations that have allowed them to successfully exist in
virtually every locality on Earth, in ever-increasing numbers
and in more densely packed settlements
3. Whether the problems confronting them were a changing
climate, deteriorating soil fertility, or too many people to
feed, human groups have reorganized themselves to meet
these challenges, and in most circumstances and by most
measures they have succeeded
The past as prologue
Redman’s viewpoints about the human impact on
ancient environments
4. Response to environmentally related stresses have included
new techniques of subsistence, new modes of transport and
exchange, new social organizational forms, changes in
residential mobility, downsizing of communities and outright
abandonment of regions
5. Local environments, in virtually all cases, have been
significantly altered by human presence. Pre-human
ecosystemic balances have been replaced by new sets of
relationships, with their own balances and trajectories that
include human impacts. Many of these local situations have
demonstrated a degree of sustainability, at least on the time
scale of human generations
The past as prologue
Redman’s viewpoints about the human impact on
ancient environments
6. Human impacts on the environment vary with each situation,
but in general they transform biota so that their net yield for
human consumption is increased and natural plant and
animal conditions often are degraded
7. Human decisions about resource use and the environment
are usually predicated on maximizing short-term returns, and
only secondarily take into account long-term consequences
of these actions
The past as prologue
Redman’s viewpoints about the human impact on
ancient environments
8. The trajectory of the human career appears to be
irreversible. The factors that give rise to the social condition
at any point in time are so complex that attempting to
reconstruct former conditions in the present is almost
impossible. Social change, like biological evolution, will not
allow the recreation of extinct conditions, although it may be
possible to duplicate some of their characteristics in a new
form
The past as prologue
Redman’s viewpoints about the human impact on
ancient environments
• “Seeing the world through the eyes of a human, it is
a good world, because we have acted to make it so…I
do hold a fundamentally optimistic view that despite
the maladapations we have created in developing
the urban society of today, we also have built in
balances that continue to bring the system back in
line.”
The past as prologue
Redman’s viewpoints about the human impact on
ancient environments
• There are two questions that remain, those that
haven’t been addressed by ancient conditions:
– 1) The scale of the problem has changed and it remains a
question of whether in the past the problems have been
too small to be globally threatening
– 2) The nature of human impacts themselves have changes
so that we are now far more threatening to nature
The past as prologue
Redman’s viewpoints about the human impact on
ancient environments
“With the continued pressure on the decision-makers of
our society by those who are concerned with
environmental preservation, I predict that there is a
substantially better chance than ever for use to survive
each threat…The stakes are very high when we are taking
chances with the world’s environment. I do not think we
can treat these decisions as we would evaluate risk in a
normal game of chance”