This is a model of social change, developed by human ecologist Otis Dudley Duncan, in which societal functions are basically sorted into four broad categories. Population should be easy enough to grasp. Numbers can go up, go down, mortality and fertility rates can change, people can migrate, move to different areas, the age structure can change over time, etc. In industrialized nations, where fertility rates and death rates are low, populations are older, there are less children (which puts a strain on public programs like Social Security).

Organization would include some of the large organizational structures of a society–here in the U.S., the government and political systems would be important, large corporations, industries and business patterns, communities, culture, families, churches/mosques/temples/synagogues, mass media, etc. What people do obviously will vary greatly if they live in an industrial vs a pre-industrial society.

The economic organization of a society is important as well. Ours is mostly a capitalist economy, characterized by private property and ownership, relatively open markets where goods and services are exchanged (versus, say a ‘command economy’ in a socialist state where the government makes many of the decisions about what gets produced and how it gets distributed). The capitalist system is generally organized around the profit motive, which provides incentives for investment, but which may not distinguish between investment in the short- and long-term.

Environment should be fairly self-explanatory. You might think about three general functions of the environment–living space, a place to put our waste, and a repository for resources. In other words, everything around you came from the environment–desks, chairs, computers, your clothes, shoes, pens, etc. They came from a stock of natural resources at some point in their history (although may have undergone considerable processing and transformation). We also have to live somewhere, and we have to dump our waste somewhere. Usually we try to keep these functions spatially separate–that is, we don’t want to live near where we dump our waste, or where we’re doing our mining, or cutting down trees. The environment obviously isn’t randomly organized, there are ecosystems (composed of living organisms and their physical environments, with an emphasis on system, interaction and place), biomes (certain kinds of natural systems, like tundra, tropical forest, desert, ocean, grassland, etc.). ‘Fouling’ one’s nest casts a different shadow at the planetary level . . . 

Technology is the fourth category, and we won’t get into subtle nuances of definition. Technology can include actual physical artifacts, such as a toaster, or a nuclear warhead, or a tractor, or even a short-handled hoe, or a stone axe, an arrowhead–in other words, technology doesn’t have to be sophisticated, and it isn’t the same thing as science. But it’s not exclusively physical, either. If it helps, think of technology as tools and processes that are used to achieve some end, but keep in mind that there are few tools that exist in isolation (e.g., Ford’s assembly line required an entire social and technological system to make work). It could be that making arrowheads requires considerably less in the way of support, but you might need certain kinds of rocks for knapping flint, there might be different techniques, different grades of mineral, division of labor as to who did what, etc. Think of the difference in how societies organized based on whether their main source of transportation is by donkey cart, or automobile, and the consequences for and demands placed on the natural environment (and thus those three functions of living space, resource repository, and waste disposal).

The POET model should help you better grasp some of the ways the earth and humans’ relationship with it have changed over the time our species has been here (maybe 150,000 years, at least).

So in this class, we’re interested in the environment component. But according to this model, it’s all pretty interconnected, isn’t it? What causes the environment to change? How might the natural environment affect technology, population, organization? Anthropologist Marvin Harris  suggested the importance of material constraints in the development of state forms of government. That’s a bold claim–that the environment affects what kinds of political systems govern a society, and that we can look at changes over time and understand them in terms of society’s physical and biological limitations.

Paul Harrison’s article addresses the role of the environment in shaping human societies and activities, and in creating the conditions for life on earth. He’s pretty clear about how humans, up against the wall at different points in our brief history, have changed how they live in revolutionary ways, and that these ‘revolutions’ had their own consequences. For instance, a change in the environment (e.g., deforestation in Europe) led to greater exploration for ‘new’ lands to explore, conquer, colonize, plunder, etc. (organization, population). A discovery of coal as a source of energy much more concentrated than wood or charcoal, and how a steam engine could pump water out of the ground to get to more of it, created conditions for the ‘industrial revolution’ (technology), which transformed how people live, where they live (many left the farms to work in factories), their life chances, how societies were organized, etc., and the double-sided arrows suggest that these changes in turn affected the environment, effects from which we are still experiencing (e.g., the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, of synthetic toxins in human and animal tissue). This is your introduction to the topic, and it would be wise to think about how humans have historically interacted with their environments, how they interact with their environments now, what impacts this interaction has for natural environments and for the human species.

For instance, how might an introduction of technology have affected population (total numbers, birth rates, death rates, migration, etc.)? How might population affect technology (pressure on hunter-gatherer societies and the resource base, for instance)? How might turning to sedentary agriculture (technology), driven by population density increases and resource pressure, affect the environment?

As you can see, this can get quite complicated, and the double-sided arrows are necessary for understanding the complexity. Use the POET model as sort of a guide for understanding how humans can interact with the natural environment. Unless you think that humans are somehow exempt from natural laws, after all, we are part of the environment. At the same time, human ecologists would look at us as just another species on the face of the earth. But it should be pretty clear that Homo sapiens has had an impact on the earth’s landscapes, water, and atmosphere, that is unmatched by any other animal or plant species, over such a relatively short period of time–the last 300 years or so (although humans have had major regional impacts for much longer, as Jared Diamond’s book Collapse documents). So much so that one scholar, William Catton, proposes that we should distinguish those living in industrial, high technology societies by giving them their own species name–Homo colossus.

How did we do it? How did we get from 1 billion over 150,000 years to almost over 8 billion in the last 300 years? How have we managed to alter climate patterns and influence average global temperatures? Who are ‘we’ anyway? Are the changes caused by sheer numbers, the drive for living space and resources, by consumption, by the use of certain forms of energy?

The POET model should help you gain a better picture of how change has happened, why, and how the environment has played a role.