Spatial Implications of Environmental Change
1: Introduction and the issue of scale
Readings
Chapter 1: Introduction. Book: An Introduction to Human-Environment Geography: Local Dynamics and Global
Processes.
Fundamentals of human-environment interactions
Icebreaker: Human-Environment Connections Across Time and Space
Guano (powerful fertiliser made of bird or bat droppings): First natural resource used and regulated (disturbing nesting birds could
be punishable by death) by the Incas. Alexander von Humboldt first European explorer to recognise its value (1799-1804). Used in
the 1820s by USA farmers then by British farmers in the 1840s. Fury over the guano trade: Guano war of 1865-66 between Spain
and Peru. USA colonised Caribbean islands for guano. After years of peaceful co-existence, seals started attacking the gannets
(birds producing guano) which led to the birds fleeing the islands bc fishermen were taking the seals’ food.
• Ability of some societies to manage their resources sustainably
• The role of science in the use and management of resources
• The seeming inability of the global capitalist system to limit consumption
• The role that non-human actors play in transmitting the impacts of one human interaction to another human group
• The limits of preservation in open ecosystems and economies
Chapter Objectives
To suggest that humans, like other animals, are able to sustainably interact with their environment
To highlight the pressing nature of some contemporary environmental problems
To articulate the relevance of the geographic perspective to environmental questions
To outline broad elements of a human-environment geography approach to environmental questions
To demonstrate what new insights may be gleaned by applying the human-environment geography approach to some
basic natural resource management concepts and an example of this in the USA environmental history
To share the general plan and logic of the book
Introduction
Humans are similar to, and different from other animals which manipulate the environment. Geography has a distinctive human-
environment tradition.
Animals and Their Habitats
Beavers: able to modify the landscape for their own benefit and that of other species. This stimulates willows, cottonwood and
aspen to regrow more thickly the next spring. The wetland they create support other mammals, fish, turtles, frogs, birds and ducks.
They also provided ecological services (catchment of floodwaters, alleviation of droughts, reduction of erosion, local raising of the
water tale and the purification of water.
Humans also modify the landscape: we manipulate the land (burning, cutting, tilling, planting, harvesting, dam building, home
construction) through a process of experimentation, success and failure, observation and the sharing and stealing of ideas). Some
societies took up unsustainable practices which led to environmental decline and their downfall.
Trade became prominent, even garbage was shipped over the world. This trade gradually separated people from the sources of
their food and goods and the by-products of their consumption. Today we live in a world where many consumers in the most
developed areas of the world have little to no idea where their provisions originate from and how they are produced. Increasing
carbon emissions and resulting climate change is one of the most disquieting, global-scale environmental challenges (also
deforestation, ground water depletion, loss of biodiversity). Ecological challenges can also be due to how humans position
themselves vis-à-vis the biophysical world (e.g. hurricanes when living close to coast lines, inundations when cities are built in
floodplains).
What Is Geography and What Does it Have To Do with Studying the Environment?
Geography: Greek etymology→ “earth writing” or “earth describing”. For as long as ppl have been traveling, exploring and
migrating, they have been encountering different environments and other human societies. As such, the survival and success of
,human populations meant that they needed to understand other groups, faraway lands, where these were located spatially, the
processes that connect one human group to others, and ways in which each group is unique (geographic knowledge).
Definition: Geography is a broad discipline that essentially seeks to understand and study the spatial organisation of human activity
and of people’s relationships with their environment, and recognising the interdependence among places and regions, without
losing sight of the individuality and uniqueness of specific places. It is a unique discipline because it straddles the science-social
science-humanities divide, using a broad arsenal of methods and perspectives to tackle questions. Long tradition of field work.
Maps (means to an end): displaying data spatially pushes us to ask why things are distributed the way they are, and may reveal
patterns or correlations which had not previously been seen.
• Geographic approach: attention to spatial patterns, human-environment dynamics, the uniqueness of space and
connections between regions and across scales
o Physical geography: biophysical phenomena
▪ Climatology: long-term climate patterns and change
▪ Biogeography: patterns of plan and animal distribution
▪ Geomorphology: origin and evolution of landforms
o Human geography: human or social phenomena
▪ Patterns and dynamics of human activity on the landscape
• Settlement
• Urbanisation
• Economic activity
• Culture
• Population
• Development
• Disease
o Human-environment geography: investigation of nature-society relationships (between physical & human
geography)
▪ Interact with other academics or professionals (e.g. political ecologists with anthropologists and
development practitioners, hazards geographers with geologists and disaster relief specialists, or water
resource geographers with hydrologists and watershed managers)
▪ Bridge to greater understanding:
• Cartography or mapping
• Dot maps to present and understand population distributions
• Geographic information systems (GIS) to analyse the potential relationship btw population
density and soil fertility
• Remote sensing (aerial photography and satellite imagery) to monitor change in surface
biomass over time
A Geographic Perspective on Environmental Questions
Four approaches to human-environment questions:
Scale-sensitive analysis: modifiable areal unit problem
o Scales as a framing device can be a powerful political strategy
o Broader scales reveal geographical issues:
▪ Patterns of land-use
▪ Economic and ecological connections between different areal units
▪ Synergistic human-environment interactions
Attention to spatial patterns of resource use
Conception of the human-environment system as a single unit (rather than two separate parts)
Cognizance of the connections btw places and regions
Three basic approaches to environmental management:
, Exploitation: the use of a resource without regard to its long-term productivity, usually by over-harvesting in the short-
term
Conservation: the use of a resource within certain biological limits, or within the annual growth increment of it (i.e.
sustainable yield)
Preservation: non-use or non-consumptive use of resources in an area (e.g. hiking or camping) for compelling aesthetic
or biodiversity reasons: Yellowstone model
The global economic system, with its increasingly global set of commodity chains, is sufficiently opaque to prohibit people from
seeing the impact of resources they may be drawing on from overseas.
A second connection between preserves and other points on the landscape may be the dislocation of peoples. For example, the
ongoing controversy in Nagarhole National Park in Karnataka Province, India, where the Forest Department has been trying to
relocate 6,000 local people. Relocated peoples, while (arguably) lessening impact within the preserve, often augment impact
elsewhere (another dimension of outside area subsidising preserves).
A third connection is preserves being supported by the fees of eco-tourists. These fees represent real financial transfers that may
offset the resources forgone when an era is set aside for a preserve. However, those bearing the costs of the park, often local ppl
in terms of compromised livelihoods, and those benefiting from user fees and tourist revenues (e.g. national governments, tour
companies) are often different. Globetrotting ecotourists also generate significant environmental externalities when they
consume large amounts of resources to travel across the world to visit wildlife preserves and parks in Africa, Latin America and
Asia.
This suggests that preservation is only preservation at the scale of the preserve. When such a preserve is viewed at broader scale
frames, we see that this is not really preservation because non-use/non-consumptive use in one area is almost always subsidised
by use in surrounding areas. We suggest that the distinctions between exploitation, conservation and preservation begins to
become blurred when they are analysed at multiple scales.
Problematic to see humans as operating outside of these systems. Humans are part of nature just like any other animals.
Gifford Pinchot: German-trained forester who established the Yale School of Forestry (first school of forestry in the US)
and founding head of the US Forest Service
o Did not see conservation and development as incompatible
o Wanted to maximise human benefit from the resource base over time (not just on the short term)
John Muir: key role in establishment of some of the first national parks in the USA and wrote about the aesthetic beauty
of the American wilderness in the late 19th century
o Often described the USA wilderness in quasi-religious terms
o Nature is a place without humans: its preservation not only entailed limits on the consumptive use of the
resources, but a prohibition on ppl living in these spaces
o Nature = a place “where man himself is a visitor who doesn’t remain”
Controversy over the Hetch Hetchy Valley: Muir favoured preserving the valley for aesthetic beauty (preservation)
whereas Pinchot advocated damming the valley to provide water and hydroelectric power for the city of San Francisco
(conservation)
The preservationists lost and the valley was flooded to build the dam: conservation can be highly problematic and result
in the destruction of beautiful sites
Controversy split conservations into two schools of thought as they disagreed on how the valley should be used:
preservationists vs scientific conversationists
Not true conservation on the bigger scale as a whole valley was flooded and destroyed (no limits)
John Muir thought the Indians living in the valley were unclean and distasteful, and in his view of “pristine” wilderness
argued that nothing truly is unclean
By presenting this complex story on the small scale of the valley, writers
o Obscure the complicated social history and economic linkages involved in creating and sustaining Yosemite
National Park and the O’Shaugnessy Dam and;
o Discursively equate conservation with the complete destruction of an area
Chapter Summary
This chapter began by giving students a sense of how humans, like other animals, have manipulated the environment in order to
encourage the production of certain types of resources. Sometimes people have been successful at doing this over time and on
other occasions we have exhausted the resource base with unwelcome consequences. We then introduced the field of geography
and its relevance to environmental questions. We outlined some generalized perspectives that human-environment geographers
often take when examining resource questions. These perspectives included attention to: scale, spatial patterns of environmental
use, a conception of the human-environment system as a single unit (rather than two separate parts), and the connections
between places and regions. In order to illustrate such perspectives, the second half of the chapter applied these to develop a
revised understanding of three resource management approaches as well as to a famous case in US environmental history, the
Hetch Hetchy Valley controversy. The last part of the chapter simply described the plan for the rest of the book.
, Key Vocabulary
− cartography
− conservation
− exploitation
− geographic information systems (GIS)
− Gifford Pinchot
− Hetch Hetchy Valley
− human geography
− human-environment geography
− John Muir
− modifiable areal unit problem
− net primary productivity
− non-consumptive use
− physical geography
− politics of scale
− preservation
− remote sensing
− scale
− sustainable yield
Cronon, W. (1991). Chapter 5 Annihilating Space: Meat. In Nature’s metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (pp. 207–
262). W. W. Norton.
Summary of the article (from the tutorial’s slides)
Core message
Being the largest meatpacker in the world, Chicago was seen as "....] an icon of nineteenth century progress" (p. 207), symbolizing
the "profoundly transformed relationship to the natural world" (p. 255). In the course of time, human ingenuity - following the
logic of capital - had managed to disconnect (alienate; to put it in Marxist terms) people from the natural systems they depended
upon.
1) The chapter is a chronological description of the rise (and fall) of Chicago's meat industry. It describes how the destruction and
commodification of the bison marks the onset of our morally reprehensible, growth-oriented, international, capitalist society,
which is based on the destruction of nature and tries to externalize its negative effects.
2) Illustrating 19th century 'modern thinking', the chapter describes how humans use technological advancements to get rid of
natural barriers as much as possible (e.g. refrigeration).
3) The chapter clearly takes a systemic approach, explaining the entanglement and consequences of the meat industry even
beyond the (geographical and temporal) scales at which the operations took place.
4) In more general terms, the chapter describes how major societal transformations come about, being a combination of
ecological, cultural, economic and political factors that reinforce each other.
Argumentation
The book chapter describes how - in the 19th century US - the natural environment was seen as a commodity to achieve progress,
the bison on the Great Plains being the start and prime example of changes that followed. While previously abundant, the bison
became an object of trade, resulting in a collapse of the bison population. The cowboy folklore (narrative) contributed to a
romanticized picture of the cattle trade, which in turn boosted the livestock economy in Chicago. The great plains' natural
ecosystem consequently changed and gave way to (the most efficient form of) ranchland farming. The chapter also describes more
subtle changes that came about, illustrating the precariousness of ecosystems and the interaction with human (i.e. economic and
political) systems.
The chapter goes on with explaining how all choices were driven by (short term) economic rationality, using all the capital and
technological means available. The livestock industry that developed – with Chicago being the central hub – could be seen as a
forerunner and driving force of capitalist economies of scale, mechanisation, mass production and specialisation. Storage,
marketing, price and physical infrastructure; the industry steadily grew and the city developed in accordance with the newly
emerging insights regarding the problems at stake.
Nothing seemed important enough to stop the profit-drive meat industry, whatever the (non-economic) cost. Even though
industrial waste - which was discharged into the Chicago River had become an ever growing problem, truly solving it would simply
cost too much. Illustratively, a by-product industry (a new economic activity) was seen as the economically rational solution from
a corporate managerial perspective. The other solution was to divert the pollution to another river leading to problems elsewhere.
A hierarchically steered, capital-led, industrial organization determined the development path: 'The tyranny of monopoly'. In the
