Abstract

As a geographer trained in the early 1970s, when academic departments of geography were closing down and the future looked bleak, it gives me pleasure to report that Geography is alive and well, and the human side of the field (geography also includes many physical scientists whose work has little to do with human culture), is especially vibrant. I explore two aspects of human geography long of interest to educators: the concept of regions and how we define them, and the human relationship with nature. The multifaceted field of geography defies comprehensive review, but these two subjects nicely contrast traditional and modern (dare I say post-modern) geographical scholarship, and speak to an audience beyond geography and academia. The regional concept is down for the count in positivist geography because it was not supported by the data. But it now flourishes in cultural geography. Environment and society studies also flourish as people worry about global change, species loss, and the host of other threats posed by industrial society.

Key words: regions, American West, global change, environmental perception.

Re-thinking Regions

It may surprise some to learn that, in many ways, geographers have rejected the notion of "region." Yes, "world regions" classes are still taught, but this is more out of habit and ease than out of scholarly argument. As a geographer who entered the field during the early-1970s, I was trained to expect that "regions" actually existed in a firm foundation of geographical phenomena, that they could be mapped and described, and that their essential attributes separated them from other regions in objective ways, which geographers could discover through "spatial statistics." So in writing this chapter, perhaps I am attempting to exorcise the suppressed memory of this particular alien abduction by regional geographers, abduction from the real world where all things are "constructed" by people's minds, and understanding of things social, from the outside and from the inside, is fluid and self-referencing (so-called "post modernism"). We now argue, under the notion of "regionalism" instead of "regional geography," that people annihilate, re-define, and reconstruct regions and places for many reasons (from federal budget battles to the gender wars). Nevertheless I still would like to address traditional regional geography because some of the emerging uses of regionalism, and recent vigor breathed into things Western in the U.S., seem founded on quite traditional geographic notions of regional exceptionalism and homogeneity.

For decades geographers pursued a form of spatial discriminant analysis, or "areal differentiation," to identify regions from the messy spread of human activity across the globe. We mixed natural and social features, trying to find the exceptional and the sine qua non of a region---the boundary. To define a region a region one had to say, "Ok, this is the edge of it--you're in it, and you, over there, are not." Inside that boundary we postulated a homogeneity of exceptionalism (that is, geographical differences among regions are larger than differences within a region), a pattern that the data routinely violated--something like the patterns that show that the market structures economists postulate simply don't exist.

Some of this attachment to region was founded in academic politics. Geographers were pressed to differentiate their field from cognate areas like anthropology, political science, and history. They had to be able to argue to the dean, in ways that the other disciplines seemed never to be forced to, why the geography department should not be closed down to save money and free-up FTE's. So geographers said that they studied everything in its locational and spatial configuration and used maps as our signature tool of analysis. That got us hung up on regions and other things that could be mapped and quantified and, of course, demanded that we define boundaries; we had to draw lines on maps that separated things, like voting blocks, the Rocky Mountains, Appalachia, or farming areas. Geographers knew the lines were fictionally rigid and precise, but used them anyhow.

Regionalization was also a professional tool for understanding the earth, one to which geographers felt strong attachment. Strabo called a geographer "the person who describes the parts of the earth." Hatshorne, in his classic book, The Nature of Geography (1939) argued that the region was the aperture through which geography could practice its integrative and synthetic analysis of the earth's surface, thus invoking the field's claim as an integrator of other disciplines. In short, regional identification and analysis became geography's equivalent of supply/demand curve in Economics, or "community" as the key analytical unit in Sociology.

This effort to conjure regions from geographical data--and even the notion of a region---lost credence in academic geography in the late-1970s for two reasons: first, it simply was not supported in the data and on the maps or, in order to work, required us to state arbitrary criteria that seemed silly to non-geographers (e.g., the Midwest ends where the corn ends). Geographers got around this in the 1960s and 1970s by trying to define functional regions that transcended distance to incorporate linkages that made, say, commerce in New York more similar to commerce in London than to Hoboken. As Kimble (1951) argued in his critique of the regional concept "it is the links in the landscape…rather than the breaks that impress."

Second, the rise of the geographical conditions of post-modernity, marked especially according to geographer Harvey, by "an intense phase of time-space compression," (1989, 284) provided an explanation for why regions could not be identified as enduring geographical features. This, though, left us wondering whether we had once successfully found regions and they were annihilated by modernization, or whether we had never really found them in the first place. The stage was set for a small revival of regional analysis in the 1980s.

While academic geographers contested or abandoned regional analysis, Americans continued to embrace regionalism, gleefully inventing and re-inventing American regions and sub-regions as they saw fit, for multiple reasons--political, economic, cultural--and perhaps as antidote to place homogenization, what John Kunstler (1993) called the "geography of nowhere." Right through their disciplinary disappearance, region and place came to mean more to people (at least to non-geographers). In fact, the new, flexible ways to organize and perceive time and space, linked especially to post-industrial elasticity of production systems, have perhaps rescued region and place from their eradication by modernity. Have I seen this movie before--just as academic geographers declare something unimportant, the public discovers its importance (e.g., "geographic literacy" which we had given up on and had to re-insert into academic geography).

The New Regional Geography

Traditional regional geography consisted of finding and describing spatially homogenous sub-sets of people and their stuff on the earth's surface. The new regional geographies seek non-homogeneity, and stress diversities, tensions, and the messiness of place. Some geographers, heedless of the criticism about "old wine in new bottles," tried consciously to create a "new regional geography." They could not abide the situation in which we said regions do not exist and people ignored us and kept inventing uniqueness of place and region, or, worse, as colleagues in cognate fields pointed out that regions appeared to matter more and more to people and started writing quite successful regionally-based books. We decided we had better re-attend to regions---no easy matter following a decadal exegesis of regional courses from geography curricula.

The new regional geographers pay more attention, of course, to how a region is constructed by the people who live there, and by outsiders' perceptions, giving less attention to whether the region has essential qualities that actually affect how it is construed and how human affairs evolve in it (Murphy 1991). In this way, the new regional geography uses region as a context to human action and less a determinant (see Thrift 1987, 1991, and 1993; Pudup 1988; and Gilbert 1988). The latter is carefully refracted through the strong taboo against determinism, especially regional and environmental determinism. The "regions" problematized by the new regional geographers are still the loosely defined West's, or Southwest's, or South's, but mostly they neglect geographical location and do not feel obliged to bother with questions about whether the regions themselves are geographical entities with identifiable boundaries.

Some of the new regional geographers try to transcend the old regional ideas with what I guess might be called "new wine in old bottles": the notion of "place" as locally-expressed differentiation in space, mostly defined by identity. We talk about gendered places or places that demonstrate power (e.g., gated subdivisions), attempting to apprehend universal processes like the extraction of capital from labor, as they play out in particular places. These new regional geographers add place to identity politics--and do a good job of it (Entrikin 1994). When writing of the West&endash;the American region I know the best---the new regionalists reside comfortably with the (non-academic) New Western writers like William Kittredge, Terry Tempest Williams, etc., who produce the stuff of this new placedness and reassign people to western places and landscapes in a realist fashion. They have re-energized notions of a Western region and culture, and so I use this region to explore the new academic/public regionalism.

The American West as Region

Geography's West is perhaps the most concrete American region one might discern on the U.S. map using the old "areal differentiation" approach. The West is that part of the country marked by a dry climate and mountainous terrain, where mining, logging and grazing dominated the economy, and where extensive public lands produced land tenure patterns sharply different from the East. Yes, we have trouble deciding whether California, or the other coastal states, are part of the West, and some parts of the arid West are actually quite wet--the mountains for example--but the West, at one time or another in its history may just have given geographers much of what they craved in defining honest-to-goodness geographical regions with relatively sharp and defensible boundaries.

Maybe, then, the emergence of a modern, exurban, information and services economy--the "New West"--represents the final dissolution of geographical region. Suburban sprawl and improved transportation and information systems increasingly make the West just like the rest. But, I suspect that the weaknesses of geographic regionalization are more fundamental and prevailed in the past as they do now. Geographers and historians discover the fruitlessness of geographical boundary-setting each time they succumb to the seemingly simple, necessary, logic of defining the West as geographical space. Such efforts seem strained, arbitrary or just wasted energy, though scholars still try, most recently, David Emmons (1994). Maybe Emmons was being ironic when he wrote that "Among the predictable and happy consequences of the so-called New Western History has been a renewed interest in determining western borders." (emphasis mine). I cannot see how geographical borders fit into his argument about the geographically and culturally shifting roots of "a distinctly western culture."(1994, 437).

Historians Cronon, Miles, and Gitlin, in an essay about how the West-as-frontier evolved into the West-as-region (a common theme in western history) simply decided to define neither. They concluded that: "Despite what some scholars seem to believe, it is no easier to define a region than a frontier, and we have no interest in pursuing what long ago became a sterile debate about the relative merits of frontier versus regional history." (Cronan, Miles and Gitlin 1992, 23). The most successful western analysts, I believe, simply forego the boundary problem, leaving it implicit. Lavender, in his classic (though now dated) The Southwest, included two maps but did not define the Southwest explicitly---rather the reader is left to assume that places or events not described in the book must not be Southwestern! (Cronon and his co-authors include no maps, like so many histories). Still, many western historians mix geography and history in a frustrating (for a geographer) re-hash of old style regional geography.

The Region as Identity

Given this intuitive regionalism, the lay notion of the West, as both unique region and cultural well-spring, seems as reluctant to die as the West-as-frontier. Yes, the post-modern world would seem to present "strong forces" for geographical de-regionalization---mostly economic but also political and social. Arrayed against them are cultural prerogatives for regional continuity--forces that might appear at first to be "weak forces," like myths and imagery and sense of place and group identity--weak according to dispassionate geographical analysis and received American wisdom about melting pots, yet holding their own and strengthening in the New West.

Western sense of region and place is (and was) based on exceptionalism: the West as frontier, arid, sparsely populated, with a physical landscape like no other American place. But with many western historians rejecting exceptionalist arguments, especially those rooted in the region's physical geography, frontier conditions, or commodity economy, no well-informed geographer dared revert to the old style regional approach either. Yet, many western observers cannot shake a regional determinism. They expect and/or hope that human affairs (labor movements, race relations, family dynamics, community building, and regional development) will play out differently in the West than elsewhere because of the grand setting--Wallace Stegner's "geography of hope" (1980).

Regions exist, and are even re-born, in a post-structuralist world because enough people want them. Consider the new Western writers, who sit on the cusps of a dilemma---they mostly want to tell us that life in the West is like life anywhere else---husbands hurt wives, community flourishes or de-materializes, children grow up or die tragically. A large part of their project is to de-exceptionalize, and thus de-regionalize, the West. But, at least at this moment in American publishing annals, they need to maintain a western cachet because their stories gain freshness via western place and landscape. The much-told story about an editor rejecting Norman MacLean's (1976) A River Runs Through It and Other Stories because "these stories have trees in them," is now a publishers' landscape mantra: write your mysteries, family tragi-comedies, and even personal memoirs, just make sure they have trees, sandstone deserts, mountains and open range in them!

The New West Sells!

Trade books with mountains and trees in them suggest a less up-lifting reason why regional identity will remain strong and maybe even strengthen in the West: the place sells, and many New Westerners know it. The post-structural geography of capital and production described by Harvey enables the regional creation of place for market purposes. Harvey (1984, 284) argues that as capitalism becomes:

increasingly sensitive to the spatially differentiated qualities of which the world's geography is composed, then it is possible for the peoples and powers that command those spaces to alter them in such a way as to be more rather than less attractive to highly mobile capital.

This from a geographer who played an important role in sinking the regional enterprise in academic geography.

Analysts of the post-modern economy are talking about The End of Organized Capitalism (Lash and Urry 1987) and regional restructuring of epic proportions (Soja 1989). They tend to harp on "de-industrialization" of the now "rust belts" and the industrialization of less developed regions and countries and pay less attention to the post-industrialization of regions, like the Rocky Mountains, that never industrialized in the first place. But in the regional restructuring described by Harvey and Soja, one can find the logic for the jump from the West's primary, commodity economy straight to the post-industrial information and services economy. Western commentators have coined an inappropriate, but effective, term for part of this economic change, referring to the rise of "industrial tourism." We get mega-ski resorts instead of open-pit copper mines, "authentic chuck-wagon dinners" that feed 1200 people/hour, instead of cattle drives; monster homes on view lots instead of sheltered homesteads, and whitewater-raft jams on the rivers instead of log jams.

The post-structuralists tell us that capitalism is now predominantly involved in the production of signs, images, and sign systems---a production that the West is so good at, so experienced with, that the new economy simply falls all over itself trying to invest in the region as a unique, emblematic, and marketable place. Global capitalism may be annihilating space and time, but it is also creating fertile seedbeds for the growth of "new" places with new advantages. Though they avoid post-structuralist phraseology, Montana sociologist Jobes (1993) and economist Power (1996) point out that many recent western immigrants do not follow jobs in the pattern of the old industrial economy. Rather, they move first to the place they want to live, and then go about creating a job, a business, a system of production, often linked firmly to place and the western landscape through recreation and tourism. They then capture capital that flows through the region for old and new reasons: from fighting fires to fly fishing, from retirement to real estate tax shelters. They appreciate the system of images and myths energized by the new western writers and hyped by the news and money magazines: free advertising

Power (1996) situates the new economy in community, and certainly the new economy has proven fertile in the creation of quite prosperous "communities," like Aspen, Vail, Sun Valley and Jackson Hole, but his work is essentially about region, and--though he tries to make it universal--is also particularly about the West and its jump from primary to tertiary economy. The western communities he writes about are practicing what Harvey called "the active production of places with special qualities," and Power and others agree that the old standards of western regional exceptionalism: open space, monumental landscapes, vast public lands, surviving species, ethnicity, strong identity with the land, and a good story to tell (i.e., the old western History), all nicely pre-adapt the region to capitalize on the newly disorganized capitalism.

The New Westerners (and their attitudes tend eventually to rub off onto the Old Westerners) get identity and money by making sure that the economic and demographic transition does not overwhelm western mythology and the existence of a uniquely Western region. That, by any measure, is a hell of a good deal for contemporary regional geographers.

Environment and Society: Who's on First?

The rise of environmental concerns in the 1960s and 1970s helped fuel the resurgence of American geography in K-12 and university. Insight on environment and society relationships was suddenly in demand. But academic geography had a historical problem with the subject that kept it from contributing as much as it could have to environmental discourse. At the turn of the century several geographers--- Ellen Churchill Temple (1911) in particular---tried to explain culture and the development of nation-states in purely environmental terms--mostly using climate to explain everything from settlement form to "industriousness." This environmental determinism was wrapped up with racism and genetic determinism, and the rest is, as they say, history. Modern geographers still want rightly to distance themselves from this tradition, but this trepidation made them fail to step up to contribute as much as they might have when society started asking hard questions about how environment, and environmental change (like global warming), affected society. Geographers like Gilbert White (of natural hazards research fame) and others who started studying how climate change would affect everything from agriculture to cities, were accused of practicing a modern environmental determinism and of neglecting the power of culture and the political economy (which they did, to an extent).

In her recent review of geographical contributions to global change research (especially climate impact assessment), Diana Liverman (1999), a leading practitioner, glossed over this problem, but rightly cited the solid work through which geographers are actively steering the U.S. and international global climate change research and policy agenda. Indeed, despite the first efforts to assess how climate change would affect society, more work is now focused on how people change nature, reflecting the long-standing yin and yang of this subfield, and the tensions between those who look to environment and those who look to society for explanation.

Nature (and) (or) (vs.) Society

Certainly among the most important questions facing humankind is, simply, what ought to be our relationship to non-human nature. Common discourse and lay arguments reveal many alternative views of that relationship. We feel dominated by nature when tornadoes level Midwestern towns, but also show our dominion through/by means of everything from air conditioning to genetic engineering. Most academics chose the middle road: nature and culture interact in complex ways. This shows up in lay discourse encapsulated, for example, in the refrain: Humans are part of ecosystems. Even this notion, however, can mask a simple anthropocentrism when people argue that human actions (e.g., putting cattle on the range) are thus "natural". This argument--in all its simplicity--emerges in many modern debates about land and resource use, especially in the Western United States (It has also been invoked by talk-show host Rush Limbaugh).

Yet, the daily experience of most humans is one of natural exceptionalism: we seem so different and apart from nature that we hardly recognize any naturalistic elements of the human condition. In an essay appropriately titled Part and Apart: Issues in Humankind's Relationship to the Natural World, Kates (1983) suggested that our sense of separateness came early, as humans learned to make tools, and was quickly reinforced by religious dogma. In attempting to lay out the history of human environmental perception, Lowenthal (1990) argues that notions that we were a bad influence on nature did not appear until quite recently.

Modern environmentalism is based on a merger of these two views: we are exceptional, and we are damaging. Furthermore, human-induced degradation is different from other types of environmental changes (e.g., asteroids causing extinction) because we are conscious of our impacts and can choose not to degrade nature. The prescription: we must re-submit to the dictates (i.e., the limits) of nature in everything we do, from agriculture to flood control.

But scholars of nature and society relationships have something else to say. The most searching assessment of these debates through history unfortunately stops at 1800. Nevertheless, Glacken's (1967) classic book, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century, brings a huge body of scholarship to bear on how people and nature have interacted, mostly through implication from what people thought (and wrote) about nature over time. Glacken poses three great questions in western thought about our relationship to the habitable earth: 1) Was the Earth purposefully made for human inhabitation? 2) have Earth's physical qualities influenced and molded human culture and character? and 3) How have people, in their long tenure on Earth, "changed it from its hypothetical pristine condition?" All three questions are still necessary in any discussions about the nature/society nexus, but the last bears most attention here. About a third of his 763-page, benchmark book shows how the question of the human impact has been posed and answered. The most striking character of this millennial inquiry has been the tendency through history for people to see practically all human transformation of ecosystems as positive (or, at least, to explain the most odious changes as temporary or caused by annoyed deities or nature's own perversities).

Lowenthal's (1990) equally sweeping (but considerably shorter) treatise extends a Glacken-like analysis to the present; he agrees that our exceptionalist self-image is long-standing, even fundamental to humanness, but concludes, surprisingly (to me at least), that across the thousands of years that we modified the natural world to our uses (clearing forests, domesticating plants and animals, and creating new materials), it only dawned on us in the late-1800s that these transformations might not all be good. Lowenthal attributes this to Marsh's (1864) book, Man and Nature, and to Marsh's scathing critique of late-19^th-century-Vermont landscape degradation. Stewart Udall labels Man and Nature, simply, "the beginning of wisdom" in a thus-titled chapter devoted to Marsh's work in Udall’s own 1963 classic, The Quiet Crisis.

This chink in the armor of self-satisfaction widened with the turn of the century as the progressive conservationists pounced on wasteful land and water uses and called for scientific and rational principles of resource management. The conservation movement gained popular support in large measure through images of squandered resources in the West (bison carcasses to the horizon, and the wounds of placer mining in California) brought to the eastern intelligentsia via magazines like Harpers. Beginning in the 1890s, congress considered hundreds of bills to protect forests, reduce floods and soil erosion, and protect wildlife. To some observers, this is the epochal change that laid the groundwork for modern American environmentalism. Others point out that it took the terrible waste of the 1934-36 Dust Bowl debacle to truly establish environmental conservation as a going concern in America, and my own work suggests that the specter of the Dust Bowl still affects our thinking about American agricultural sustainability (Riebsame 1986, 1991, 1994).

Yet, even the most vaunted cases of human-induced degradation did not convince everyone, and are not immune to anti-environmental revisionism. The 1930s Dust Bowl droughts appeared to be the first, obvious, human-induced, ecological disaster in the New World (Worster 1992). But, the Dust Bowl, and long-term sustainability of the Great Plains, is a wonderful case of confusion and sloppy thinking about the human role in ecosystems: creation on the Plains of the world's most productive grain region is seen either as a triumph of technological adaptation and innovation, or an obvious case of unsuitable development just waiting to be pushed over the edge into another, perhaps this time permanent, ecological disaster (this view most outrageously made by Deborah and Frank Popper (1987), a geographer and a planner from Rutgers University, in their so-called "buffalo commons" prescription).

My own take on this has been (Riebsame 1991 a and b):

(1) to marvel that we could use a region for over a century in a particular way and still be divided over the sustainability of that use;

(2) that the system is sustainable only with large outside subsidies of finance, risk capital, pork, and energy--and that these subsidies are likely to run out before the ecological draw-down causes crisis; and

(3) that its apparent sustainability is conditional and temporary in some longer time frame.

Perhaps my first response is the most important for our current debates about sustainability and continuing uncertainty about the basic nature of the human/nature relationship. It suggests that we may not be able, as often assumed, even to identify unambiguous cases of unsustainability! Furthermore, I can attest first-hand that Great Plains folks take great umbrage at any criticism of their noble efforts to create a great agricultural region out of a semi-arid grassland. How on earth, they argue, can anyone think that Plains farming is unsustainable? Look at the blood, sweat, tears, and money they have poured into their farms, look at their good wheat crop this year (never mind last year's drought), and do not forget the hardships overcome to make this place productive! Why do you refuse to see that they have succeeded in what Rene Dubos called "the wooing of earth." Faith in technology and an abiding belief that humans can and must make ecosystems more productive simply oozes out of Plains folk, Rocky Mountain ranchers, and a host of others who extract resources.

Current Nature and Society Work

Today no academics see culture as determined mostly by nature, so two main thrusts appear in nature and society analysis: 1) the human transformation of earth and its ecosystems (the early leader in this work, Carl Sauer, called this the creation of the "cultural landscape"), and 2) a constellation of ecologically informed social science sub-disciplines often labeled either "human ecology" or "cultural ecology," the practitioners of which try to study the interaction of people and nature rather than getting stuck in one-way models of people affecting nature or nature affecting people.

The Transformation of Earth

Humans have perturbed ecosystems since they learned to manipulate their surroundings, but most contemporary efforts to examine the scale and quality of human-induced environmental change focus on the past 300 years or so, as human population and technology burgeoned and the net human effect became global in scope (Turner, et al. 1991). Transformation studies have the pleasure of completely side-stepping the old environmental determinism because they are almost all pure cultural or social determinism.

Analysts try to unravel the human signal in everything from range vegetation to global climate--an implicit posture that humans are an exceptional and external element apart from nature and are degrading or, at least, changing ecosystems from their natural state. Results of this work indicate that humans have altered the structures and processes of natural systems at all scales, from local wetlands to the oceans and even global climate. The tacit message is that human perturbation is bad, and that non-human nature (if one can find it) provides a model or benchmark of what is right or proper--for everything from the acidity of rainfall to average global surface temperature (Glacken's "hypothetical pristine earth"). This notion is strong within ecological research, which tends to focus on undisturbed sites and where the human signal is considered as a confounding factor laid over the natural processes to be studied.

The human transformation of ecosystems, according to social scientists, is driven by a set of universal factors: human population growth, the growth of affluence and consumption, technological innovation, intensifying and expanding agricultural, urban, and industrial land use, and attitudes and values in which natural systems are seen as the equivalent of factories producing commodities for human consumption. These processes are at the heart of an effort to study the human dimensions (HD) of global change (Liverman 1999). The logic for HD studies is simple: most contemporary environmental problems derive from human behavior, and natural science analysis is thus insufficient to understand, or to predict, environmental change. The HD research community, with a large cohort of geographers, has identified two broad areas for analysis: industrial metabolism and land use change (Stern, Young, and Druckman 1992). Industrial metabolism focuses on production/consumption systems that result in environmental changes like increased atmospheric CO₂ or toxic chemicals in the biosphere. Land use studies seek better understanding of driving forces, patterns, and ecological and social effects of land use and land cover changes like deforestation and the spread of human settlement.

Because it was evoked chiefly by concerns over global warming, ozone depletion, and species extinction (the big three global changes), human dimensions research reifies global-scale thinking. But, many geographers and other social analysts argue that resource, land use, and ecosystem management are better understood as local and regional social processes. They argue that analysis must be appropriately scaled to social features: environmental perception and decision-making by individuals and institutions, land tenure and land use customs and laws of regions, cultures, and the insinuation of capitalist forms of production and trade into local economies and politics. So, there is still a scale unconformity in our explanations.

The Interaction of People and Environment

Practitioners of the academic "social ecology" disciplines claim to recognize, and to analyze, the interaction of people and ecosystems (Porter 1980). The central question becomes: "Why do people do what they do to the environment? The answers tend to fall into two broad causal classes: culture and behavior, and institutions and policy.

Culture and Behavior Researchers studying the social traditions people bring to their interactions with ecosystems, their patterned behavior and institutions, their values, and how they perceive the environment call themselves human ecologists or cultural ecologists, sometimes assuming a differentiation between focus on the individual (the former) and the collective (the latter). Most cultural/human ecologists apply an adaptation model: people adapt socially to nature in ways similar to how organisms adapt physically. The adaptations are cultural and behavioral, and affected by attitudes about and perceptions of environment. Because perceptions can be flawed, much mal-adaption seems to persist (Whyte 1987). While the notion of environmental perception is often treated simply as attitudes about environment by policy makers wanting to know how people might respond to an environmental issue, human ecologists operate on a more complex model. They see perception as a social and cognitive process of information filtering and interpretation that eventually yields "images in people's heads" of the environment, images that guide their actions (Aitken, Cutter, and Sell 1989).

Perception researchers tend to stress how people mis-perceive nature: research has shown that people have difficulty defining what is natural and tend to perceive many natural processes, like fire, pest outbreaks, wildlife winter-kill, and predation as bad. This perception produces pressure for controlling ecosystem processes---control that often gets us in trouble (e.g., wildlife winter/emergency feeding programs, or fire supression). People also have difficulty perceiving slow, cumulative change, and tend uncritically to accept the current landscape as the basis for natural, correct, or desired landscape. According to an extensive body of psychological research, people cannot readily understand the behavior of complex systems, and cannot intuitively grasp multiple-scale interactions (the classic paper on this is by Tversky and Kahneman 1974). One despairs that we can ever communicate ecological complexity to people!

Institutions and Policy Social scientists think of institutions in two main ways: as formal organizations and bureaucracies like the U.S. Forest Service or National Park Service, and as cultural features like land-ownership structures and types of economy. Countless histories of natural resource institutions of the first kind reveal the shifting ideas and historical contexts that shaped their modern structure but tend to gloss over their purposeful social and political construction, neglecting, for example, the use of control over land to dominate or exclude social groups or to validate scientific theories of the day.

In a sense, institutions have "perceptions" too, especially when they institutionalize scientific concepts----creating an internal inertia while external science may move on to new ways of looking at the world. The debate over range condition in the American West illustrates this institutional lag. Traditional notions of vegetation succession are replaced with more complex ideas of multiple-steady-states, with some analysts arguing that the old system of rating range condition (good, poor, fair, etc.) not only poorly reflects range ecosystem dynamics, but also causes unnecessary conflict among range interests (Committee on Rangeland Classification 1994).

The second type of institution--less formal social features that guide individual behavior--increasingly figures in what has come to be called political ecology, the study of how the political economy affects the natural ecology (Blaikie and Brookfield 1987; Emel and Peet 1989). The political ecologists allow that different perceptions, attitudes, and values affect human interaction with ecosystem but argue that structural factors, such as differential access to resources, control of capital, land ownership and division practices, and other aspects of "social order," are more important determinants than individual preference and behavior. The first strains of political ecology were Marxist, or had strong Marxian overtones (e.g., Worster's critique of agricultural development of the U.S. Great Plains previously mentioned), and these threads are still part of the sub-discipline, but the focus was enlarged as themes not linked to Marxist political theory surfaced (e.g. feminism, consumerism, ethnic pluralism, and others). Still, the traditional Marxist themes endure for good reason: land tenure, access to the means of producing resources, and relationships among land owners, tenants, and capital play a critical role in all land based societies--no less so in the western United States than, say, Latin America or sub-Saharan Africa. In such places, political ecologists have been able to demonstrate quite convincingly that colonial and post-colonial changes in agriculture and access to land made many people especially vulnerable to disruption. According to Watts (1983), the Sahelian drought did not cause famine; rather, weakened social structures caused famine. In the Amazon, political ecologists have traced the complex relationships among peasant behavior, class, state politics, land tenure, and international aid and capital and have shown how they conspire to cause tropical deforestation and cultural degradation. The evidence seems to prove rather easily the point that political and economic structures--conceived in purely social terms and metaphors, not in organic analogies--must be considered in explaining any environmental problem (Hecht and Cockburn 1989).

Looking at Nature and Seeing Ourselves

This brief literature review hardly scratched the surface of relevant material but does suggest what we have learned from human and cultural ecologists in geography and other fields. First, we have better defined the net human transformation of nature, though its good and bad qualities remain debatable. Indeed, this remains the big question: are humans so tough on nature that they need to change their ways profoundly, and, if so, what model do we have for proper environment/society relationships? The notion of sustainable development has emerged to suggest that we can have human development and nature too. Others point to traditional societies, most famously the American Indian, as having the correct relationship to nature. Both ideas are problematic. Sustainable development appeals to interests who support quo: more development. The primitive myth does not stand up to scrutiny. Denevan (1992) argued that Native Americans not only degraded natural ecosystems but also were poised to have an even larger impact through population growth on the eve of European arrival. His argument was covered in national news and earned him a lot of criticism from those who revere North American pre-industrial societies. As usual, the debate tells us more about us than about nature and our relationship to it.

References

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