1. Worldviews & Cognized Environment (pp 37-38)

First, I returned briefly to the theme of the "Cognized Environment": the human interpretation of biophysical environment, to examine how our "paradigm" of how the environment works can affect how we perceive nature of natural processes. I mentioned processes like predation (e.g., wolves eating elk), but then discussed wildfire in more detail because it nicely illustrates how we define some things in nature as GOOD and some as BAD. And even how we can come to an ambivalent view of something like fire that seems to be both GOOD and BAD. Intelligent, well-informed people know that wildfire is a natural part of forest ecosystems, may even be vital to forest health and can be a useful tool, but we also still see fires as "destroying" forests.

Given this ambivalence, groups with a particular paradigm or goal (like increased logging, or more wilderness protection) will make arguments about wildfire that seem diametrically opposed. They will also sometimes change the debate to something else, like protecting communities from wildfires. I also mentioned that the wildfire example is even more intriguing because the argument goes that past human behavior (suppression) has made the problem worse, so the forest thinning/logging advocates can argue that the forests are not in a natural state, but rather in an unnatural state of over-growth. This would be a good issue to discuss in the recitation about whether humans are Part-of or Apart-from Nature.

2. Types of Societies (pp 39-49)

This lecture completed the discussion started on 9/09 of the types of societies brought up in the reading about Socio-cultural Evolution’ here are the key points:

Hunter-gatherer: small pop; little surplus resource/production; few in existence now. Many of their characteristics were limited by natural endowments and variation, which they coped with thru rich cultural knowledge. They were also able to affect their environment, sometimes by over-hunting. You could argue that these societies are "in balance with" and "part of" nature.

Agricultural: Be sure to read about the rise of horticultural (crops) and pastoral (animals) agricultural societies. These innovations, the domestication of plants and animals and the organization of human labor into mass production of agricultural goods, is a turning point in human history. (In many ways the industrial revolution is like the agricultural revolution—they involved technical innovation, changes in human organization, and a shift ton production vs. consumption, on a large scale). The key here is the provision of surplus production that allows pop growth, increased consumption, and more complex organization of society, including the shift to urbanization.

In class we also discussed how some ag societies apparently degraded the environment and the underpinnings of their production systems: The Tigris-Euprates valley irrigation systems suffered form salt build up and declined in 2100 BCE; and the Mayan of Central America deforested their region for agriculture and resulting soil erosion in a climate of heavy rains then hurt their productivity (I mentioned lake euthrophication, too, though it was not mentioned in the text). The dominant social paradigm here begins to shift to "people-controlling-nature" or "people-against-nature" as societies fight to, say, control water flows, get rid of crop pests, increase soil fertility, etc.

Industrial: 300 years ago in Europe, based on the rise of rationalist philosophy and science a new paradigm of even more control over nature emerged in the industrial revolution, which harnessed innovaiton and technology along with natural resources like iron and energy (from water and fossil fuels) to put human production system onto a whole new plane of scale and the human organization that accompanied a quantum jump in productivity. control new scale & kind of production; further urbanization, and other aspects of the current DSP (edited by me from his list on p. 48):

• Nature valued as a resource, not for its own sake
• Assume that maximizing wealth is important goal
• Assume that technology can overcome natural limits to growth

And, although Harper raises questions about how good these developments (both ag and indus) were for most people, we’re taking the broad view here that they did result in a larger human population, overall longer life-spans, larger production, more control and transformation of nature, and greater consumption of natural resources.

The material gets thick again here, as Harper first suggests that we might understand social systems as parallel to ecosystems (both composed of complex of interacting elements) but he and I end up arguing that social evolution & behavior is fundamentally different, and not controlled by bio-phy factors as much as many might assume. Instead of this "Environmental Determinism" of social; structure, he suggests "Environmental Possibilism" where ecosystems) offer possibilities that human systems then either take advantage of or simply work around.

We now move to describing the current state of the industrial world, which has come to be seen as a complex interaction of economic and political factors that has now moved to the global scale. Modern economic systems are fully integrated into political systems, through, say, a nation-state’s economic policy, so we speak of the "political economy" and, in this case, of a global political economy that emerged as industrialization went global. Here we shouldn’t be too attached to the notion of "industrialization" as all about mass production of cars or other physical things, but also recognize what some people call the "post-industrial" economy of the information technologies, telecom, services, etc.