2-1 Cultural Changes and the Environment
What Major Human Cultural Changes Have Taken Place? Agriculture, Industrialization, and Globalization
Until about 12 000 years ago, we were mostly hunter-gatherers. Since then, three major cultural changes have occurred:
The agricultural revolution (which began 10 000–12 000 years ago)
The industrial-medical revolution (which began about 275 years ago)
The information and globalization revolution (which began about 50 years ago)
These have given us more energy and technologies, and have increased our resource use.
How Did Ancient Hunting-and-Gathering Societies Affect the Environment? Living Lightly on the Earth
Early and advanced hunter-gatherers both exploited their environment to survive. But their environmental impact usually was limited and local because of their small populations, low resource use per person, migration that allowed natural processes to repair most of the damage they caused, and lack of technology that could have expanded their impact.
What Was the Agricultural Revolution? More Food, More People, Longer Lives, and an Increasing Ecological Footprint
The agricultural revolution involved a gradual move from usually nomadic hunting-and-gathering groups to settled agricultural communities in which people domesticated wild animals and cultivated wild plants.
Slash-and-burn cultivation involved burning a plot of land, cultivating it for about 2-5 years, and then letting the soil revegetate for 10-30 years while they used a different plot of land to grow. This cycle of using different plots and letting them rest was called shifting cultivation.
These early farmers had fairly little impact on the environment. Their dependence mostly on human muscle power and crude stone or stick tools meant they could cultivate only small plots, and their population size and density were low.
What Is the Industrial-Medical Revolution? More People, Longer Lives, More Production, and an Even Larger Ecological Footprint
The industrial-medical revolution involved a shift from dependence on renewable wood and flowing water to dependence on machines running on nonrenewable fossil fuels (first coal and later oil and natural gas). With a larger and more reliable food supply and longer life spans, the human population began the sharp increase that continues today.
How Might the Information and Globalization Revolution Affect the Environment? Information Blessing or Information Overload
Since 1950, and especially since 1970, we have begun making a new cultural shift called the information and globalization revolution. It is based on using new technologies for gaining rapid access to much more information on a global scale.