If anything expresses
plainly our relation to environment, it is the way people use
and invest environments. The environment soon becomes, an engineered one;
the way it is occupied and used is sensitively registered in the forms that are
created. The composition of an engineered environment, and the relative
location of its several features, are clues to and controls of the occupant's
ecology. These features themselves respond to what may be called "ecological"
conditions; their character and location tell much about the local culture, and
become more comprehensible when studied as the issue of an interplay
between two sorts of influences. These forces are;
We should not expect
to find a Buddhist temple in a Bantu kraal, a steel mill in a
camp of Inuit, a field of pineapples in Saskatchewan, or a decayed log full of
pale white grubs providing a feast to a crowd of Chicagoland suburbanites. In
each of these unlikely cases, we might ask, "How can this be here?" This is a
most useful question. It leads, once the location of certain features is known, to
consideration of what are the necessary conditions for their presence.
Whether it be a grove
of Sequoia sempervirens that demands summer
moisture and high winter temperatures and so grows only near the northern
California coast, or a petrol-station that depends on heavy automotive traffic and
therefore occupies a corner of a busy intersection, the location of any
geographic feature conforms to certain "rules." The very presence of a
redwood tree or of a petrol pump presupposes certain circumstances in the
present or the past that have allowed it to become established, and certain
impulses or processes that have been sufficient actually to accomplish its
establishment. In other words, both necessary and sufficient conditions
exist
for its occurrence. The occurrence of a ghost-town suggests that the
conditions for its establishment no longer obtain. On the other hand, those
conditions identified as necessary to the incidence of a certain feature do not
automatically ensure its appearance. For example, although the climatic and
soil conditions of the Congo Basin are well suited to the establishment of
Amazonian or Indonesian forest trees, such trees do not occur there: the
impulse to theirdiffusion is lacking. But by the same token, the recognition that
, the necessary natural conditions for the growth of the Brazilian rubber tree
(Hevea) were present in Malaysia has led to the creation there of a major
rubber-producing center.
When necessary
environmental circumstances are known, the establishment
of crop plants becomes possible in new areas; and, indeed, once the
requirements of any engineered feature of environment are known, its
development can proceed wherever the appropriate conditions are found. To
dig a mine, a body of ore must be present; the geologic structure must be such
as to support the excavation; facilities must be available to ventilate, drain, and
shore up the interior passageways; means must be at hand to dislodge the ore,
to carry it, to pass it on for processing and use. It is also necessary that the ore
be of some use to a society, that other installations exist to smelt and form it, to
transport it, and to sell the final product, and that it have a potential body of
consumers. Given all these and other necessary conditions, the mine still will not
be sunk until someone takes the initiative to acquire jurisdiction over the land
and rights of exploitation, to assemble a crew of workmen, to install the
necessary equipment, and to arrange for disposal of the product of the mine;
this initiative is the sufficient condition for the presence of a mine. We cannot tell
where or when it will obtain, but only where it might be possible and where it
may not.
By asking "How
can this be here?" of the various and specialized kinds of
artificial features, we equip ourselves to estimate the potential development of
the human ecology of particular territories under various cultural and societal
forms.
Similar questions can
be asked about a bridge—where can it span the stream?
what routes shall it link? by what technique can it be built? what material may be
used for its construction? —and about a cornfield, a watch- factory, a beauty-
parlor, or an apartment house.
In each case, regardless
of great differences among the circumstances that
influence its location, the ecology of any feature involves first both the natural
conditions of the place and the characteristics of the people concerned; and,
second, it involves the composition and layout of the existing engineered
environment. All of these circumstances are effective only as they bear on a
particular feature at a given spot, and cultural ecology defines the integrated
management people and natural resource of production to maintain its economy
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