So why study the relationship of humans to their environment? The first week’s readings offer some not-so-subtle clues. According to Anthropologist Marvin Harris, much of the forms human societies assume comes from the material limitations they face (we need land, resources, a climate conducive to producing subsistence, etc.). Early forms of states arose out of the capacity to produce an agricultural surplus, the ability to coerce people into working to produce that surplus (being surrounded by a vast desert helped in some cases, like the Nile and Tigris-Euphrates Rivers … ), etc. Human settlement follows patterns, as this satellite image shows. What sorts of patterns?

While Harris’ article (not assigned, but FYI) talks mostly about the influence of the environment on humans and how they organize their societies, and the forms their cultures take, it also touches on the impacts humans have on their environment:

Humans have likely been around as a species some 150,000 years, perhaps 200,000 or more, according to recent research from fossil records. The first evidence of settled agriculture dates to about 14,000 years ago, in what is now referred to as the Middle East, and we call this period the Neolithic Revolution (actually animals were domesticated before cereal grains). Although there were some exceptional societies that managed to ‘overshoot’ their immediate environments’ carrying capacities and wend their way into the annals of extinct civilizations (Jared Diamond’s book Collapse details some of these, and Kolbert’s chapter on ‘the curse of Akkad’ as well), for the most part enduring human societies have learned, by necessity, to live in some state of near-harmony with nature. This all began to change radically some 300 years ago–1/500 or .2% of the time humans have been on the earth. The POET model is a useful conceptual way of thinking about dramatic transformations in the relationship of humans to the environment. To some extent, as ecologist Barry Commoner once said, ‘everything is connected to everything else.’

One of the first subdisciplines in sociology included theorists who were attempting to understand and explain what drives social change in human societies. Karl Marx is a good example of this. He essentially said that human societies develop and transform because of conflicts between different social classes, which are defined based on who owns the critical means (i.e., land, labor and capital) of producing a society’s ‘goods’ , and who performs the actual labor. So in tribal societies with little surplus wealth, where most everyone is producing his/her own subsistence, there may have been little difference in living standards and wealth within a society. Wealth distribution was pretty ‘flat.’ As long as resources were abundant, there were plenty for whomever needed them for their family’s or clan’s survival. But if resources are used at a rate faster than they can regenerate . . . . unhappy circumstances usually resulting from unsustainable practices, or population growth. Changes in the natural environment happen regularly, and resilient societies take not and attempt to adapt as needed. Such societies are usually based on principles like reciprocity and minimizing collective risk versus, say, maximizing personal or household income.  

What drives change in a society?

Scarcity or surplus can change the relationship between humans and the environment, and make resources more valuable, especially for exchange, and more likely to be claimed by specific individuals or groups–likely those with the most power (and that doesn’t necessarily mean guns or weapons–it could mean certain family lineages, those best able to organize labor, the chief, etc.). In feudal society we had the peasant class, which cultivated the food. There were the lords or the ruling class, which ‘protected’ the peasants and historically provided them with a fairly meager and hard existence–but protection–in return for growing the food. Then comes capitalism, says Marx, born partly out of what he perceived as the overexploitation of the peasantry, where owners of land, labor and capital employ workers, who are paid a wage that reflects only part of their labor–some remainder goes to the owners in the form of profit, which they reinvest and can use to expand their wealth and enterprise(s). Marx said that within capitalism are the seeds of its destruction–competition may lead to overexploitation of the work force in order to cut costs and maintain profit levels, and left unchecked this could lead to (insert gasp here) . . . socialism. Socialism is a more redistributive form of society, and its logical conclusion is communism, where people govern themselves, and as Marx said, is based on the principle ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his need’. The communist states the world has seen in contemporary history were not as Marx had envisioned–they merely concentrated power in the hands of the party elite, using the rhetoric of popular governance as a clever propaganda instrument. However, people governing themselves in a large, modern state seems wildly impractical.

Energy as a driving force

So anyway, Marx contends that class conflict drives social change. Another theorist, anthropologist Leslie White, says that the predominant source of energy used by a society is the driving force. White said we’ve moved from human power, to animal power, used wood, then charcoal, and then discovered coal. Each of these changes represented a transition to a more concentrated form of energy. Each had an effect on society and the economy. And the environment. Fossil fuels come next–they are ‘fossilized’ and transformed organic matter, transformed from long periods within the Earth’s crush through heat and compression. Coal was the first fossil fuel to be exploited on a large scale (petroleum and natural gas are the other two fossil fuels). Where do these fossil fuels ultimately come from (he asked, innocently)?

Imagine seeing the world 350 years ago, and looking at how it has been transformed since. Forests cut (loss of forest cover), topsoil lost (topsoil can can take centuries to form), air polluted, waterways used as dumping grounds for industrial effluents, parts of the ocean are essentially dead from pollutants, microplastics are literally everywhere–and that includes being shed from the inside of plastic water bottles–an additional 7 billion people inhabit the planet, and the number is growing. Large urban areas with factories, power plants, millions of automobiles, congestion, steel, glass and concrete, ringed by bucolic suburban settings, gated communities, where many of the cars sleep.

Of course that’s the worst of it–there is still plenty of beautiful landscape, scenery, and not every area is heavily polluted by industry or human habitation. But how did this transformation take place in such a short period of time? How have humans reacted to these transformations? What did societies in the past do when confronted with the imminent exhaustion of their resources bases, as well as putting their waste products where they live? These are the issues we’ll discuss in this class. In your lives, we will likely see some shortages of essential resources (phosphorous comes to mind). We’ve already had some previews of that with petroleum price spikes in the last two decades, gas rationing back in the 1970s. And when the price is low, consumers consume. Woe to the politician who doesn’t promise to keep gas prices low.

Big processes–how did we get here?

Humans at the time of the neolithic revolution were organized into small hunter-gatherer bands. Archaeologists’ understandings suggest that in many cases, men were largely responsible for the hunting, and women for the gathering. The men’s food supplies were more elusive and less certain, and clans relied on the women’s knowledge of plants and the landscape, and their ability to provide a steady source of food that could be supplemented by the protein of animals caught by the men. This knowledge was passed from one generation to the next. But these people were on the move, which must have been particularly hard on women who were pregnant, nursing, or raising infants and toddlers. These groups had to understand natural cycles, fruiting cycles, animal migrations and behaviors, etc., in order to survive. It was a means of subsistence that required fairly large areas of land. Childbirth and childrearing is a logistical problem, because the clan never stays in one place for very long. Children may have nursed longer, and this would have reduced fertility rates. Also, it’s pretty difficult to carry much stuff around when you’re on the move. Different material conditions, different societies.

But despite these difficulties, studies of contemporary hunting and gathering societies suggest that their practitioners actually enjoyed a fair amount of leisure time.

So there has been lots of speculation as to why, some 14,000 years ago according to the fossil record, we see the first signs of sedentary human settlements. Why did people begin staying in one place, rather than moving around? It could have been because of some natural calamity, such as drought and famine (read: climate change). It could have been because of increasing population and pressure on the resource base. Maybe it was because people began to see the benefits of staying in one place. Or some combination. Clearly the satellite photo suggests that once people became more sedentary, they chose first areas rich in diversity and resources–near rivers, along coastlines, in warmer climates, where soils were fertile, and water less scarce. It could have been a combination of some of these factors. People could have chosen the extensive route–that is, gone out in search of other fertile areas to settle–once they’d overused their own …. But many chose the intensive route–increase the amount of production per unit of land. Agriculture represents organized energy capture, and energy is what keeps organisms and their species alive. One-half square mile of cultivated area can support the same number of people as 150 square miles used by hunter-gatherers (although this likely doesn’t address the other needs of a settled community, such as building materials, water provision, fuel of some sort such as wood, clothing where warranted, etc.). That’s a difference in carrying capacity.

The literature suggests, though, that humans were likely forced into sedentary communities. When faced with choices of migration, starvation, or innovation, most societies will choose options one or three, and three if option one is limited by adjacent settlements. Perhaps clans knew about the possibilities of agriculture or animal husbandry, but only began to exploit these when it was absolutely necessary. Both require large amounts of energy, and both can transform the landscape. Kolbert’s chapter (‘Curse of Akkad’) also brings up perhaps a more alarming point: what happens if changes in the environment, specifically climate, happen more quickly than humans’ abilities to adapt? We are, it should be noted, lucky enough to be currently living during a period of glacial recession–there isn’t a mile of ice over the northern part of the continent, after all. In the overall scheme of the earth’s history, there hasn’t been a very long period where it would have supported human habitation, much less at the numbers we currently have, especially at the seven-fold increase over just over two centuries. Scary maybe, it should give us pause to think about the possible consequences of ignoring feedback loops (that is, the consequences of our use of the environment).

In the fossil record and through history we have evidence of societies that overexploited the resource base and disappeared, or whose numbers were drastically reduced. Mesopotamia (lighter area below) was once considered the fertile crescent of civilization, but now it is a desert partly because irrigation and evaporation brought salts to the surface, rendering the soil unfit for agriculture.

And any slight change in climate in such a sensitive environment is going to have long-term effects that could take millennia to recover from. As for Mesopotamia, overirrigation and evaporation brought salts to the surface, which isn’t great for most plants.

Fortunately (sort of), contemporary inhabitants discovered the land had oil reserves underneath. The cedars of Lebanon (below) were decimated for use in shipbuilding and construction by various civilizations. The Mayan civilization in MesoAmerica was reduced to a shell of its former self, speculation suggesting this was largely the result of tropical deforestation, soil erosion, exacerbated by climate change, leading to mass migration if not famine.

There are authors who suggest that Europe was nearing carrying capacity, and many areas had undergone massive deforestation (wood being the main fuel source), wildlife driven out, about the time that explorers ‘discovered’ the New World (this was essentially an extensive strategy of finding new resource bases to exploit).

So let’s skip forward to the second ‘revolution,’ the Industrial Revolution (the first being the Neolithic). How has it changed the Earth, and humans’ relationship with it? We can think of the Industrial Revolution as a technological revolution. Fossil fuels–coal, oil and natural gas–represented increasingly concentrated forms of energy, whose exploitation merely awaited the development of technologies to take full advantage of them. We’ve done that and more in the industrialized world.

Population growth

So did the population increase result from technological change? Or did the population growth necessitate different forms of more intensified production? In other words, did resource pressures force people to try to grow more food on less land (remember the POET model … )? As for processes such as the Agricultural Revolution, we are indeed in the industrial world growing more food on less land. However:

1. As Barry Commoner said, ‘everything is connected to everything else.’
2. He also said, ‘there are no free lunches.’
3. The first law of thermodynamics states that ‘energy can neither be created, nor destroyed.’
4. The second law addresses what happens when energy is transformed from one for to another as it is used by humans, plants or other organisms. The order we create is matched and exceeded by disorder or waste somewhere else. This is called ‘entropy.’ Essentially, using energy often means losses at different levels of transformation–we eat food, and our bodies use it and give off lots of heat–energy tends to eventually be converted into less usable forms, and heat is usually dissipated into the atmosphere. Our body heat may help keep us warm under a well-insulating down comforter or in a sleeping bag. Imagine one million cars in a large city and how much heat and carbon they can produce just over rush hour.

What does this have to do with agriculture? The gains in productivity were not free. They required intensive mechanization, a great deal of social organization and commercial investment, and even more fossil fuels to run tractors and machinery, produce seeds (via research), inorganic chemicals and pesticides, etc. Most of the petroleum in the earth was produced by processes begun between 60 and 150 million years ago. These fossil fuels are finite in nature, and their use in mass production for mass consumption is not sustainable. They basically add a great deal of carbon into the air from organisms that had accumulated over millennia.

One of the driving forces behind industrialization was capitalism. If we think of industrialization as a technology revolution, capitalism was an economic revolution. Capitalist societies efficiently organize production factors–land, labor and capital–in much different ways. Private property is important, so that people know if they make an investment, they can reap the benefits. Also important are markets. Decisions have to be made about purchasing land, investing in capital, equipment, a labor force, etc., and markets help investors determine how to allocate money. The bottom line is the profit motive in a capitalist system. Combine capitalism with a population that has increased seven fold in 300 years, and with an industrial system that allows for mass production of goods, in fact necessitates the mass production of goods since no longer are we all living on the farm and growing our own food–we have very specialized divisions of labor and depend on markets and income to get the things we need–and it is easier to imagine how the scale of transformation of the natural environment has expanded dramatically in the last 3 centuries.

Big Processes. Amazing that the environmental dimensions, even if they’re inextricably tied to human social activity, are often ignored by Sociologists (and most others). 

Human exemptionalism?

I think we would agree that because these changes are often slow and large-scale, like the advance of glaciers, humans don’t necessarily notice them. Even if only 14,000 years ago our ancestors were using stone tools, and 40,000 years ago Chicago was under a mile of ice. The planet is dynamic, with or without humans. But most people, at least those not confronted with the environmental consequences of their actions, and encouraged by an advertising industry, and commercial mass media that derives much of its income from advertising, in an economy dependent on consumption, manage to make it through a very busy day without realizing what filling up the gas tank, or getting a new cell phone or computer, or trading in the SUV, means to the overall capacity of the planet to seek some state of equilibrium or dynamic balance.

It never achieves equilibrium, as a brief look at periods of glaciation and recession would quickly convince most of us. The planet has its own cycles, and they operate on time frames that don’t require or incorporate human needs. But one would think humans would be especially sensitive to this issue–we just haven’t been around all that long in the overall scheme of things. Human exemptionalism thus refers to the belief many people hold that humans as a species are somehow different, somehow exempt from the natural laws that seem to govern everything else. As anthropologist Marvin Harris (1979:54) once wrote:

Nature is indifferent to whether God is a loving father or a blood­thirsty cannibal. But nature is not indifferent to whether the fallow period in a swidden field is one year or ten.   

But there’s something to keep in mind . . . humans are a species, and if we can agree that they are not exempt from natural laws, such as the first two laws of thermodynamics mentioned above, then there is no reason why we as a species need to persist on the earth. In fact, if the history of the earth were a clock face and represented by a 24-hour period, humans showed up about 15 seconds before midnight.

If we are using our resources unsustainably as a set of societies, what’s in store for us? Are we going to be forced into an ‘extensive’ strategy? We’re running out of planetary resources for that. An ‘intensive’ strategy of increasing production? We do that, yes, but as I’ve mentioned, it takes energy and resources to intensify and get more production out of a given amount of resource.

Another informal rule of ecology: Mother Nature bats last.

Sources:

Harris, M. 1979. Cultural Materialism: The Struggle for a Science of Culture. New York: Random House.

Kolbert, E. 2006. Field Notes from a Catastrophe. NY: Bloomsbury..