Cultural Ecology

A theoretical perspective common to cultural geography and derived from anthropology that focuses on the relationship between human activity and environmental conditions. Early theory in cultural ecology evolved from anthropological studies that were concerned with how human societies are changed due to alterations of the natural environment. Thus, early on, cultural ecology as a theoretical approach shared some common elements with environmental determinism, although the cultural ecologists as a whole rejected the idea that environmental agents shaped the nature of cultures into some predictable pattern of characteristics.

To some degree, the emergence of cultural ecology in academic geography was an effort to apply systems theory, social Darwinism, and other more “scientific” frameworks to the cultural landscape concept promoted by the so-called Berkeley School, and championed by Carl Sauer, which itself was a reaction to the dominance of deterministic assumptions in the philosophical structure of geography and other social sciences. Although more rooted in the perspective of possibilism rather than the rigid ethnocentrism of the determinists, cultural ecology recognizes that the impact of human activity on the landscape, and the influence of the physical environment on human culture are both factors that dynamically shape the cultural geography of a region. In general, cultural ecologists study how nonindustrialized societies interact with their physical environment, especially through the development of strategies that allow them to exploit their physical surroundings. Cultural ecology therefore falls within the “man-land” tradition of the discipline of geography, which is concerned with the relationship between human activity and the environment.