The man-nature interaction is of curious consequences. Students of society are, necessarily, interested in geographical phenomena and in the manner in which they enter our lives as social beings.

The geographical environment consists of those conditions that nature provides for man. This includes the earth’s surface with all its physical features and natural resources – the distribution of land and water, mountains and plains, minerals, plants and animals, the climate and all the cosmic forces, gravitational, electric, radiational, that play upon the earth and affect the life of man.

We can distinguish this primary environment both from the modifications of it introduced by man’s technology, as when he makes clearings or cultivates the soil or builds roadways and cities and harneses natural forces, and from the inner or social environment of folkways and mores and instructions that every human group provides for its members.

There are some geographical factors which are in part amenable to the direct control of man and which he can modify a lot not merely utilize. These are principally the distribution of animal and plant life and the fertility of soil. He takes those animals and plants that serve his needs, breeds and cultivates them, dispossessing or destroying others to the end.

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The result is that the natural balance of organic life is overthrown by man. Selecting a few species, he breeds varieties of them such as wild nature neither knows nor tolerates. Large areas are characterised by a vegetative life introduced and assiduously maintained by man alone, belts of wheat and cotton and corn and tobacco and rice. These in turn become associated with the culture and the social institutions of the regions where they occur. Thus, in addition to and often crossing the geographical areas demarcated by natural phenomena arise new areas determined by human exploitation of various forms of organic life.

Having destroyed the natural balance, man has to fight incessantly to maintain the artificial balance. He struggles against other exploiters which he has not succeeded in conquering, against weeds, insect and other pests, fungi and microorganisms. The specialised cultivation of the earth by man tends to deplete its fertility, but he has gradually learned the techniques of restoring and even enhancing the properties of soil. The yield from the seed sown in Europe is now about four items what it was five centuries ago; recent advances in crop control in the United States and in Russia are even greater. Modem sciences combine today to give near enormous control over soil fertility and crop productivity. And through modern irrigation methods, whole rivers and lakes are harnessed so as to provide water, power, fertiliser and other necessities of modern agriculture to entire regions.

But this should not compel us to believe that man has completely mastered his physical and biological habitat. The forest buried cities of Maya civilisation. The fall of the early Sumerian civilisation, it has been claimed, was associated with the spread of malaria; the decline of ancient cultures of the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, with the impoverishment and desiccation of the soil. The great epidemics of history, still threatening to recur, like those after World War I, remind us that man’ mastery of biological environment is still insecure. Nor need we elaborate the point that in many countries there are huge areas that, owing to deforestation and soil erosion, are threatened by the invading desert and can be saved only by large-scale methods of scientific conservation; and that several of our “inexhaustible” natural resources, such as oil and high-grade iron ore, are dangerously close to exhaustion.

In brief, it’s not surprising then that the relationship between man’s physical environment and his social life, suggested by these few examples, has led to a geographical school of sociology.