Conversely, places far from one another may have similar adaptations to climate or other factors. Different people can have different adaptations to similar places. Because the physical landscape varies across space, and because culture varies across space, then the cultural landscape is variable as well. Architecture, economic activities, clothing and entertainment are all visible to anyone interested in looking at a place. The way that we use the local resources generates the visible landscape. Humans can now survive in very inhospitable environments, most notably, the International Space Station. Physical landscapes set limits on a group of people that may or may not require a large adaptation, or a large modification of the environment itself. Instead of determinism, the more common term to use is now possibilism. Technology is the difference, not behavior. A cold environment doesn’t force people to be aloof.

The problem with the idea is that it’s simplistic and reductionist. Ideas like this were still fashionable into the twentieth century. Remember that Environmental determinism is the idea that a particular landscape necessarily produces a certain kind of people. These ideas would now be considered environmentally deterministic. The ideal place (which coincidentally was his own place) was in the middle of the known world and produced the best kind of people. He believed that cold places produced emotionally distant people, and hot climates produced lazy, lethargic people. In the book On Airs, Waters, and Places, the Greek philosopher Hippocrates wrote that different climates produced different kinds of people. Humans have been thinking about the relationship between people and their environments for a considerable amount of recorded history. Cultural ecology refers to the types of landscapes created by the interaction of people and their physical environment. This relationship is reciprocal culture adapts to a particular place, and that place is changed by people. The relationship between people, their culture, and the physical landscape is known as human-environment interaction. In order to live in places a different as these, humans have needed to adapt their lifestyles. These are landscapes that have been formed over thousands, if not millions of years by forces of nature. The physical landscape consists of places like the Appalachian Mountains that stretch across a large portion of North America, the Mongolian-Manchurian grasslands, the Amazon river basin, or any other environment.

Either way, cultures influence landscapes and in turn landscapes influence cultures.įigure 4.5 | Culture-Landscape Relationship For urban cultures, those resources can either be local, or they can be products brought from great distances. In the case of rural cultures, those resources tend to be local. Cultures’ beings rely on natural resources to survive.

Landscape definition human geography