Humans and geography

HUMANS AND GEOGRAPHY


Done by: Abdurahmonov J.
Checked by: ______________


Tashkent 2017
The Environment’ is an expression which can cover many things – from food chains in a forest to damp and condensation in a council flat. Across the whole of the planet, it is a very complex system of relations between physical geography (mountains, air, rivers etc.), plant, animal and human life.

Constant Change
The environment is not fixed for all time. It is constantly changing. Earthquakes, volcanoes, the movement of the tectonic plates (the base of the land continents) and other natural processes all have a huge effect both on each other and on different life forms. The climate is always changing. Even within the last 20,000 years much of the Northern hemisphere was covered in ice, which had a major effect on life.
The forms of life that have evolved on the planet don’t just react to rocks and water they find around them. They also alter their physical environment by their very presence. The present oxygen-rich atmosphere, necessary for animal life, is the product of the action of bacteria billions of years ago. This new atmosphere spurred the evolution of a host of new species and life-forms.
The environment of each species includes other life-forms as well as the physical world. It is the interaction between organisms and their environment, living and non-living, that drives evolution. As well as evolving in response to their environment, individuals of some species dramatically alter their life form in different circumstances. The environment can even effect the sex and reproductive form of species, for example as a result of temperature changes.
Life forms are constantly changing and evolving, with or without the existence of humans. There cannot be any kind of static harmony, a frozen Constable-type painting, where humans, animals and physical geography exist together in a state of never-changing bliss.

Humans have been on the planet for a comparatively short time. We only evolved from apes a few million years ago. People have always lived with natural forces, not outside nature, but as part and parcel of it. Our ancestors couldn’t eat more than they found nearby. They could only grow crops if the right nutrients were in the local soil or in suitable climates.
The activity of people has always involved shaping the natural forces that they found around them. They altered the environment for example, by cutting clearings in forests to grow crops, domesticating wild animals for foods, and by building shelters. Areas of the world often regarded as wild, natural landscapes are actually the product of human activity over centuries.
It is highly debatable whether there are any areas of the planet which are ‘natural’, that is, unaffected by human activity. The so-called ‘wild’ moorlands of the National Parks in Yorkshire, Derbyshire and elsewhere, may seem completely natural and original, but they weren’t always like that. They were created by humans in the Bronze Age as woods were felled for agriculture. They were further changed by sheep grazing and in some areas by industrial pollution, e.g. from textile industry in Lancashire and Yorkshire. The geography of much of north America is now believed to have been created by the actions of native American plain-dwellers before colonization, who used fire to encourage grassland species to grow.
What’s So Special About People?
Humans, like all life, both alter their environment and are altered by it. But the evolution of humans also marked a departure from all other forms of life to date. Labor, the ability to use tools, to think abstractly and therefore to envisage more wide-scale changes and plans, paved the way for humans to have much greater impact on the environment than other forms of animal life. In particular, the development of culture, (knowledge, technology, tradition and ideas that are socially held and passed from generation to generation) has meant a speeding up of development of human society, compared with the slower pace of change in biological evolution.
Of course, animals such as chimpanzees use twigs like tools to extract termites from the nests. But the stick is usually discarded when is has served its purpose. They don’t go on to refine this ‘tool or to develop tools which produce other objects. Spiders create webs to trap food and bees construct cells and have quite a complex social system. But what distinguishes the worst architects from the best of bees is that they are able to raise the building in their imagination before they construct it. They will use the skill, tools and materials developed by previous generations of humans, conveyed through language, learning and culture.

Animals only react to their surroundings and live within strict boundaries but humans start to understand it, then use that understanding to make it more amenable to humans. We produce: they collect or use what is available.
Humans inhabited a specific ecological niche which encouraged them to develop techniques to survive. They also had the biological potential to develop this way. As humans spread across the continents, some environments accelerated this process. For example, areas with climates that had short growing seasons for food, forced early humans to develop methods off preserving and storing food. Necessity, as they say, is the mother of invention. The need to show when was the best time to plant crops forced early humans to study the seasons, weather and soil types. Necessity was the creator of science.