ABSTRACT
Humans cope with their environment and its
constantly changing nature by adaptation and the
diverse strategies outlined in Chapter 5. An im-
portant part of these strategies is the purposeful
alteration of the environment itself. People play
an active role in the creation of their own environ-
ment to the extent that many parts of the world
have been totally transformed by long histories of
human activity. Whereas early impact was once
thought to be mainly in Europe, it is now evident
that before European contact in the Americas there
were destructive environmental practices (Butzer,
1996) and similarly in the Polynesian islands (Kirch
and Hunt, 1997) and parts of the Amazonian rain-
forest once thought to be pristine (Heckenberger
et al., 2003). The concept of people changing the
environment has been challenged by Ingold (1993b)
because it presents people as external agents, in
the words of McGlade (1995) a sort of ‘patho-
logy’ on nature. In reality people live not on or off
the environment but within it (Ingold, 1993b). As
argued in Chapter 1, people are themselves key
ecological factors.
